We’re counting down the days until the release of Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back. We got a brief glimpse last week after the developers ran a feature stream that looked at the expansion in action, but there are also the dev diaries, which will continue all the way up to release and beyond as the team moves on to talk about what’s coming next.
This week’s dev diary spends some time looking at the tech improvements coming as part of the expansion, but it also showcases how the programmers also like to get involved in the content design as well. The tech lead for Hearts of Iron IV is the author of today’s update, and apparently they’ve always had a pet peeve regarding some of the French focus tree options introduced in the previous major Hearts of Iron 4 DLC, La Resistance.
In what we can only assume was a great revolutionary movement that rivaled the Russian Civil War, the teach lead decided to go into the game and make some of the communist paths slightly more accurate. They even going as far as to buy and ship a rare portrait from France to Sweden so the art team could create a better image for the game.
In other news, Ubuntu 18.04 and MacOS 10.11 will become the new minimum requirement when No Step Back releases. Windows 7 support will remain for now.
Perhaps more excitingly, (as exciting as tech news can be) Hearts of Iron IV will finally join other modern grand strategy games in supporting DirectX 11. DX9 will still be the default, but you’ll have the choice in the launcher.
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This should make the game load quicker, especially if you have mods that add a lot more unit models. The techies have also been doing various performance tests and benchmarking so they can update the recommended specs, which haven’t been changed since the game launched in 2016.
Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back will release via Steam and the Paradox Store on November 23.
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