Victoria 2 is an executive summary of the past seven years of grand strategy development at Paradox, and it incorporates nearly every significant innovation developed for the new installments to the Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron franchises, which have been developed in the meantime. It isn’t perfect (we’re on the cusp of the second patch already, and we’ll need more) but it provides a better experience already than Europa Universalis III and Hearts of Iron III did at release. Part of the success of Victoria 2 is the winning formula it had to build on from the first game. But the additions to that formula have been skillfully integrated and enrich the experience tremendously. There are some people who claim to enjoy the second Europa Universalis game better than the third, but I can hardly imagine someone preferring the original Victoria to its sequel. It isn’t just the quality of the code that has improved (more on that later, though).
"… Victoria 2 is an executive summary of the past seven years of grand strategy development at Paradox…" Someone (not the typical Paradox fan) coming to Victoria’s sequel a full seven years after the original and not having played any of the intervening games would have good reason to think that the credits screen was a prank – this can’t be the same dev team, and this can’t be the same company, can it? Victoria was in dire need of serious patching on release, and the necessary expansion pack didn’t come until a full three years later. It’s difficult to imagine how players put up with such a long wait my guess is that they didn’t and simply shelved the game until it was fixed.