Paradox Tinto is led by Johan Andersson, who’s been with Paradox over 25 years. In his time, he’s been been a designer on the Europa Universalis and Hearts Of Iron series since the start, and in more recent years was the creative director of Imperator: Rome and Hearts Of Iron IV. “I am excited and grateful for this opportunity to build up a new studio in a new location, putting the knowledge accumulated through the decades of building games and development studios into good use,” studio manager Andersson said in today’s announcement. “My goal is to assemble a team and create a fully functional studio to keep on developing the Europa Universalis brand, and later design and develop new grand strategy games.” EU4 is 7 years old now but still getting new DLC and patches. The next expansion, Emperor, is out next Tuesday and will power up the Pope. Paradox are a bit cheeky when they declare themselves “a publisher and developer of games that age well” in today’s announcement but they’re not wrong. “The success of our studios over the last few years has allowed us to continually add more capabilities and new ideas, with more games going into active development and more ambitious plans every day,” added Charlotta Nilsson, Paradox Interactive’s chief operations officer. “We currently have around 70 open positions across our seven studios, with plans to recruit roughly 200 people in 2020 alone.” 200 is a lot of people. Tell me, gang: which setting would you like a new grand strategy game to probe? I’d quite like some supernatural shenanigans. I wouldn’t be too surprised to one day see something set in the World Of Darkness, if Bloodlines 2 does well for Paradox. They do own White Wolf, after all. But I’d like a setting weirder than vampire machinations, something a bit more abstract or metaphysical. Though human history certainly has plenty more wars Paradox could explore.
