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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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Doomdark said:
To be clear, CK3 is a vastly bigger game than CK2 was on release.
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Can you elaborate how CK3 on release will compare to CK2 now? Like some quantitative estimates, if you feel like it maybe broken down to some sub-categories? Because honestly, I feel this statement alone does not carry much information one wouldn't expect anyhow.

Theat being asked: I'm thrilled.
 
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I'll be blunt: As long as the french monarchy, the holy roman empire, the polish crown and the byzantine empire play different, since their feudalisms all were vastly different, Im happy.
 
HUNDmiau said:
I'll be blunt: As long as the french monarchy, the holy roman empire, the polish crown and the byzantine empire play different, since their feudalisms all were vastly different, Im happy.
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Poland cannot into unique feudal mechanics. :(
 
I'd just like to quickly say that there is a 95% chance the UI isn't final. The UI is usually one of the last things they get done with in games, due its relative low priority.
 
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Since CK3 is going to be using the updated engine... is it going to be using the same awful launcher that imperator has? The one that ignores my documents folder on my other hard drive, that literally every single application I ever used has no issue with (including every paradox game), and instead creates a new one for no good reason? Then is incapable of using it?

And to fix it you have to edit a file in notepad to point to the path of your actual documents folder.

Something still not fixed in Imperator. Which makes me wonder if this is just an issue with the new launcher that they can't fix or something. And it make me think this will be an issue in CK3 as well.
 
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Aspi said:
I'd just like to quickly say that there is a 95% chance the UI isn't final. The UI is usually one of the last things they get done with in games, due its relative low priority.
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Humm? Relative low priority? How about the games' previews and the eye candy necessary to sell the game? How can it not be developed concurrently with the rest of the game? Its not that the coders are going to be the ones that will do the 2D art... there are different teams that work concurrently.

Anyway, I *do* agree the UI feels (very) unfinished.
 
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Take my money and sign me up!

There are not many developers that I trust this much. Bioware used to be on the list, but these days it is mostly Paradox. Crusader Kings 3, Empire of Sin, just let me preorder already.
 
That's true, but one appeal of CK is the medieval simulation COMBINED with the RPG aspects. One way to improve even more on the RPG aspects is to build up government types and their interaction with the characters and the world.

I adore the focus on characters, but it makes me wonder if they scaled back government stuff. Which is integral to the RPG aspects of the game in my opinion.
 
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I'm gonna be honest and say I really feel like not including certain features from CK2 is a huge mistake. You claim the game is going to feel like and evolution of CK, but that's hard to imagine when you are admitting to not carrying over everything from the last game. I can understand getting rid of the useless or unused features but I'm sure most of us have plenty of hours on CK2 and I'm sure that we'll be missing something vital immediately upon playing CK3. I love Paradox games but I really, really do not want to keep paying for DLC after DLC, especially when they consist of features that may have already been in a previous entry.
 
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When I heard the news I was like....really.

I was not expecting Crusader Kings to be announced, I was thinking wait longer until the technology improves to make a big impact on probably your biggest series.

It just sounded like a decision from the top... make the next iteration of our most successful game so we can rake in the cash.

I am comforted with the statement that this is an “evolution” and not the revolution of the Crusader Kings brand. I’ve seen the vids from ParadoxCon talking about the messy code and this also leads well from the “evolution” statement.

Feels like a stepping stone to Crusader Kings 4 in which the Crusader Kings 3 codebase could be expanded from.

Not blown away by the models in the screenshots as of yet but my hype is definitely in check and not expecting someone truly groundbreaking in the next version.
 
I really agree with the new casus belli mechanics, a progress bar that grows and at the final you have the chance to have the claim or not. Now we don't have to wait forever to know. ;)
 
Colesy_ said:
I'm gonna be honest and say I really feel like not including certain features from CK2 is a huge mistake. You claim the game is going to feel like and evolution of CK, but that's hard to imagine when you are admitting to not carrying over everything from the last game. I can understand getting rid of the useless or unused features but I'm sure most of us have plenty of hours on CK2 and I'm sure that we'll be missing something vital immediately upon playing CK3. I love Paradox games but I really, really do not want to keep paying for DLC after DLC, especially when they consist of features that may have already been in a previous entry.
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if something doesn't really work (as intended) and blocks or vastly complicates further development of gameplay around it, is it really a mistake to remove it (and hopefully replace it later with something working?
I mean, look at Decadence. People have been complaining about how it malfunctioned since ever. Should it be kept in, just to be kept in, and thus disable making Muslim gameplay interesting?
 
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Aspi said:
I'd just like to quickly say that there is a 95% chance the UI isn't final. The UI is usually one of the last things they get done with in games, due its relative low priority.
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To add on to this, there's a video interview another forum member posted that has the devs saying that the UI will be fully modable, so I think that's a good sign as well that if a lot of people aren't happy with it, they will be able to make changes to it. More modablity is always a good thing! Though hopefully the base UI will be good as well of course because a good base UI is much better than a bad one. It's just nice that there will be flexibility.
 
Lerronin said:
Probably my only concern is that I read more accessible, think about hoi4 and can't help but be skeptical as to what that really means for the game.
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They've been pretty clear what they mean by more accessible — CK2 is incredibly opaque, and CK3 is going to include more indications of what sort of things are important to pay attention to.
 
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I feel pretty happy with the look and sound of things so far, personally, though I am curious to see what the focus on characters means going forward. Bloodlines, great works, and artifacts have been some of the biggest character-focused elements that have been added to CK2 of late and it sounds like Bloodlines or something similar is the only one of the three getting any love, from what I've gathered. Artifacts are the most important one to me.

It's still early days, though, so I hope those worries are explained away with the upcoming dev diaries.
 
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