The joke is that it’ll take 1444 hours to get through EU4’s tutorial. And it isn’t a bad joke. Stellaris is a little different in that the replayability depends more on randomness than the other Paradox titles. But that randomness suffers from the “bowl of oatmeal” problem.
Particularly in the application of procedural generation with video games, which are intended to be highly replayable, there are concerns that procedural systems can generate infinite numbers of worlds to explore, but without sufficient human guidance and rules to guide these. The result has been called “procedural oatmeal”, a term coined by writer Kate Compton, in that while it is possible to mathematically generate thousands of bowls of oatmeal with procedural generation, they will be perceived to be the same by the user, and lack the notion of perceived uniqueness that a procedural system should aim for.
I’ve encountered that in Angband, one of the earliest (and still-developed!) roguelikes. It’s got 100 required dungeon levels, plus 20 beyond the final boss’s level (basically just for getting cooler loot), and so many of them are procedural oatmeal. Newer versions are better about that, introducing more variety so it’s not identical levels. Amusingly, the developers even lampshade this themselves: you get level feelings every level that tell you what the level has in terms of loot and dangerous enemies; if you go through the levels too quickly, the level feeling you’ll get is something like “looks like any other level”.
The joke is that it’ll take 1444 hours to get through EU4’s tutorial. And it isn’t a bad joke. Stellaris is a little different in that the replayability depends more on randomness than the other Paradox titles. But that randomness suffers from the “bowl of oatmeal” problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
I’ve encountered that in Angband, one of the earliest (and still-developed!) roguelikes. It’s got 100 required dungeon levels, plus 20 beyond the final boss’s level (basically just for getting cooler loot), and so many of them are procedural oatmeal. Newer versions are better about that, introducing more variety so it’s not identical levels. Amusingly, the developers even lampshade this themselves: you get level feelings every level that tell you what the level has in terms of loot and dangerous enemies; if you go through the levels too quickly, the level feeling you’ll get is something like “looks like any other level”.