Podcat already got the Panther joke in, so I'll go with a fully serious reply.



For a long time Paradox was a fairly small company where we had to stick to our original plans come hell or high water because missing a date meant going bust. That's been changing over the past few years, and we've tried to focus more on quality for recent releases, but it takes a while for new realities to filter down into everyone's attitudes, thinking, and planning. Originally we had a plan to have HoI4 ready by X date, and because the old rule was "ship it or die" it was thought safe enough to announce this well in advance. However as the date approached and we started having to think "Well, this part works, but it's not ideal" or "We might need to cut Y to be on time" it got us to consider: We wouldn't go bust if we delayed the game, so why not take the time to make the game we really wanted instead of the game we could have ready by our planned date? Actually being able to work on a game until it's at the standard we want instead of having to ship it at a date guesstimated in the planning phase is a wonderful thing, although I know it can be frustrating when you're waiting on the end result. In an ideal world we would have foreseen this and not announced the game until it was well past alpha and we knew exactly how much work was left to do instead of so early in the project - you live and learn.





Dev diary is coming out tomorrow and will cover neutrality/world tension and such. After this we are doing one more in a month and after that it should be on a weekly schedule until release.