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CK3 - Dev Diary #0 - The Vision

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Greetings friends!

It’s my pleasure to finally be able to talk about what I’ve been working on ever since Stellaris came out (and before) - Crusader Kings III, of course! CK3 draws on the wisdom gained over CK2’s seven long years of expansions and patches - all the things we simply could not do in that game - and represents the natural evolution of Crusader Kings. Yes, CK3 is an evolution, not a revolution; it’s better across the board and does not alter the core CK experience. That said, we did not carry over everything from every expansion and update to CK2. Rather than trying to do full justice to the less appreciated systems, we decided to go deep rather than wide.

The main design goals with Crusader Kings III were:
  • Character Focus: Crusader Kings is clearly and unequivocally about individual characters, unlike our other games. This makes CK most suited for memorable emergent stories, and we wanted to bring characters into all important gameplay mechanics (where possible.)
  • Player Freedom and Progression: We want to cater to all player fantasies we can reasonably accommodate, allowing players to shape their ruler, heirs, dynasty and even religion to their liking - though there should of course be appropriate challenges to overcome.
  • Player Stories: All events and scripted content should feel relevant, impactful and immersive in relation to the underlying simulation. That way, players will perceive and remember stories - their own stories, not the developers’ stories.
  • Approachability: Crusader Kings III should be user friendly without compromising its general level of complexity and historical flavor. It’s nice if it’s easier to get into, but more than that, it should be clear what everything in the game is, what you might want to be doing, and how to go about it.
Now, you might say: “Cool, but I took the time to master CK2, bought all the expansions, and now it provides me an enormous breadth of options. Why should I buy CK3?”

That’s a fair question! As I mentioned earlier, we decided not to carry over all features from CK2, so if you play CK2 primarily for, say, the nomads or the merchant republics (the only faction types that were playable in CK2 but not in CK3), you might be disappointed. There are likely other features and content that will be missed by some players, but, in return, we believe that everyone will find the core gameplay far more fun and rewarding! To be clear, CK3 is a vastly bigger game than CK2 was on release.

I know this dev diary was short on details, but don’t despair - they will be revealed over the coming months!
 
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DreadLindwyrm said:
They did mention that some areas may be uninhabited, and open to colonisation, so this kind of replaces the "build new barony slots" thing. It's also possible you may be able to create new baronies on the map in a given province - we'll have to wait for that diary.
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I believe those will just work like empty holding slots that exist, but have no building. Seeing as how each holding slot is on the map, I don't think adding new holding slots will be possible, just filling out existing ones.
 
You sly bastard ;)

I'm very happy to see these were the core values for CK3 from the get-go.

Even though I am confident of my CK skills (no, not sure what I'm talking about either) I'm very interested in hearing what you've come up with to improve approachability. I'm sad to say I've never managed to get any of my friends to get into this game even though I'm sure they would have loved it if they had been able to figure out what's what before getting bored or frustrated.

Godspeed, Paradox. This one sounds like a doozy. :)
 
Irley said:
full map pleeeeeeease! I want to be a samurai for once and sacrifice some mesoamerican kids :rolleyes:
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This comment, jokey as it is, got me thinking way too much.

What if there was an on-map Japan, I wondered. What say sea zones enough to keep Japan from just conquering East Asia, or maybe an isolationist cultural trait that disincentivizes the AI from conquering across the sea. One still wants piracy and raids, after all, and the aborted Mongol invasions to be a possibility.

But then you'd also want the Kiril Islands and Karafuto, and the indigenous peoples represented therein. But if we're going that far we might as well include what will become eastern Russia - wasteland? Feels a bit pointless if it's just wasteland. But there are people there. To be left as blank until EU era where suddenly colonial ambition makes one want to conquer the natives? Naw, man, why not scatter it with various tribals and/or nomads? But ofc with attrition being as harsh as it is, nobody but them could safely exist. Too small to conquer China, too harsh to be colonized several centuries early. But then wouldn't the AI try anyway? They're the AI: they see smaller target, they'll try for smaller target, even if the attrition will make it completely impossible for them to succeed at conquest, given this rambling scenario.

So then it hit me: why not include economic weights and severity of expected attrition into AI conquest decisions? I recall from CK2 that there were eventual "OK let's just make x cultures less likely to do y because ahistorical", but that's specific and unreliable. "The AI determined that the cost of campaigning against the reindeer herders is too self-destructive for barely any benefit, so they opted to invade France instead" sounds much more exciting.

So basically,

a one-off "lol can't wait for samurais" comment makes me now long for sophisticated AI decisionmaking when it comes to military expansion.
 
DreadLindwyrm said:
Apparently they're ditching at least "FROM". Or at least they're not using it going forwards, and trying to remove it from the codebase - presumably replacing it with something a little more consistent.
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Ok, fair enough. But certainly they should have replaced it with something that means the same... and even if not, we can always save the FROM as an event target and achieve the same result.
 
darryllavigne said:
I'm sad to say I've never managed to get any of my friends to get into this game even though I'm sure they would have loved it if they had been able to figure out what's what before getting bored or frustrated.
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I feel that. One of my failures of my previous relationship was never getting my previous girlfriend into CK2. I had a free copy and gave it to her, but she tried to muscle through the 2013-era tutorial step by step, got scared, and never touched it again. There were vague promises of trying again, but those faded.

Had she only accepted my offer to guide her through it organically, she may have been conquering the world with me to this day :oops:

Though it does sound like they do want a better tutorial system and are aiming for easier accessibility. So that's something.
 
guinea prince said:
I feel that. One of my failures of my previous relationship was never getting my previous girlfriend into CK2. I had a free copy and gave it to her, but she tried to muscle through the 2013-era tutorial step by step, got scared, and never touched it again. There were vague promises of trying again, but those faded.

Had she only accepted my offer to guide her through it organically, she may have been conquering the world with me to this day :oops:

Though it does sound like they do want a better tutorial system and are aiming for easier accessibility. So that's something.
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I think every Paradox title needs the investment of watching two hours of you tube tutorials for someone to learn the basics. That's a rule that I follow with all complex games, not just Paradox's.
 
Cardolam said:
I think every Paradox title needs the investment of watching two hours of you tube tutorials for someone to learn the basics.
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Funny enough, I never did like the idea of YouTube tutorials. There's my latent dislike of video tutorials in the first place (a 30 minute vid versus 3 minutes reading - no contest), but there's also my belief that CK2 and others, but CK2 especially, are best learned by floundering for a bit, getting a few failures under your belt, and then picking up on some mastery here or there. By following someone else's video examples, you'd be learning under their scripts and paradigms, and missing out on personal serendipity and innovation.

But then, different people have different learning styles, so I cannot fault anyone for going with YouTutorials. CK2's a complex game, and anything that gets them playing is good. I just have my own personal hangups.
 
Cardolam said:
I think every Paradox title needs the investment of watching two hours of you tube tutorials for someone to learn the basics. That's a rule that I follow with all complex games, not just Paradox's.
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Whenever I get a new complacated board game my friends and i spend a hour or two just reading through the rule book, in a much more complex game that has a lot of background processing thanks to the power of computers, I feel like only spending the same amount of time is actually asking very litte.

guinea prince said:
Funny enough, I never did like the idea of YouTube tutorials. There's my latent dislike of video tutorials in the first place (a 30 minute vid versus 3 minutes reading - no contest), but there's also my belief that CK2 and others, but CK2 especially, are best learned by floundering for a bit, getting a few failures under your belt, and then picking up on some mastery here or there. By following someone else's video examples, you'd be learning under their scripts and paradigms, and missing out on personal serendipity and innovation.

But then, different people have different learning styles, so I cannot fault anyone for going with YouTutorials. CK2's a complex game, and anything that gets them playing is good. I just have my own personal hangups.
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I learned how to play paradox games by just watching through let's plays and observing the buttons people pushed.
 
Nocx said:
I learned how to play paradox games by just watching through let's plays and observing the buttons people pushed.
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Same with me.
 
Are numbers going to be more accurate this time for the size of armies and garrisons?
Will there be playable theocracies?
How big map is going to be, of the size of Imperator map or disappointing?
Where is Vicky3?
 
Cardolam said:
I think every Paradox title needs the investment of watching two hours of you tube tutorials for someone to learn the basics. That's a rule that I follow with all complex games, not just Paradox's.
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I have never watched such tutorials. In my opinion, they are just a waste of time. It’s much faster to figure it out yourself. For example, to understand the basic things in all paradox games, it took me no more than an hour and a half in the worst case (Europe 4). I really can’t realize what is difficult in understanding these games.
 
Come on, we know it's a joke. What fool would remake a game they only just stopped working on that is as much complete as a game can be? What fool would buy a barebones sketch of a game when they can play a more or less complete one for free?
 
JoanK said:
What fool would buy a barebones sketch of a game when they can play a more or less complete one for free?
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You're right! Buying a barebones game would be a silly idea!

This very DD said:
Now, you might say: “Cool, but I took the time to master CK2, bought all the expansions, and now it provides me an enormous breadth of options. Why should I buy CK3?”

That’s a fair question! As I mentioned earlier, we decided not to carry over all features from CK2, so if you play CK2 primarily for, say, the nomads or the merchant republics (the only faction types that were playable in CK2 but not in CK3), you might be disappointed. There are likely other features and content that will be missed by some players, but, in return, we believe that everyone will find the core gameplay far more fun and rewarding! To be clear, CK3 is a vastly bigger game than CK2 was on release.

I know this dev diary was short on details, but don’t despair - they will be revealed over the coming months!
Click to expand...
 
Might be a little late, but, will certain religions be locked behind DLC like they were in CKII, or will they be fully developed enough with their own mechanics on release?

I mean, sure, Hordes are unfortunate to be DLC for later, but Merchant Republics need to be redone. I think the entire community agrees with that.
 
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