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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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Ethereld said:
Just like there was not anything ever confirming that Deus Vult was actually gone, just a SJW journalist of RPS stating that Deus Vult will not be in the game and celebrating it because he thinks of it as a victory in his personal crusade against the Alt-Right. There is neither a reason for celebration or condemnation and honestly there are more important matters like how Byzantium or the HRE will work, how long they will take to introduce naval combat, which DLC mechanics will be in the game from launch, among other things.
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Oy finally someone who is actually angry at the right people and not at Paradox.
 
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elvain said:
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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If there is a better alternative then I expect to see it at launch. What's more likely is that we'll see features either return as they were, or slightly improved via DLC.
 
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PenitusVox said:
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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Artifacts being missing is weird to me, but I'm willing to wait and see what the dev diaries reveal. It's possible they're in the game, but not in an inventory anymore.

I speculated elsewhere that the changes to how provinces work might be why Great Works were excluded for the moment — they were so popular and the devs were so happy with the way they came out that I can't imagine they're gone forever.
 
Doomdark said:
  • 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.
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One of my favorite games was also one of my firsts, in which an Irish mercenary company managed to conquer most of France. I hope that CK3 will still allow the AI to get up to these sorts of shenanigans.
 
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Doomdark said:
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
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It means: will be not playable at all or will be not playable unitl release dedicated DLC ?
We need to beg you ?o_O
It's quite primitive, because will be a DLC's and players will buy it;)
 
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Jorlem said:
One of my favorite games was also one of my firsts, in which an Irish mercenary company managed to conquer most of France. I hope that CK3 will still allow the AI to get up to these sorts of shenanigans.
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In my current game where I'm playing in the Low Countries, Aquitaine is independent from France and their largest vassal right now is a merc company. Fun stuff.
 
Metz77 said:
"Give people continual game updates for nearly a decade but they have to pay for them" looks bad?
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Thats one way of looking at it, could they have put 2 or 3 together into one update, probably, and disguising updates as DLC and charging for it looks bad, I do love CK II and apart from Holy Fury, Jade dragon,and Sunset Invasion I have purchased every DLC, when I dip my toe back in I will get those to 2 recent ones but that said overall I've paid a lot of money for this game and it tempers my enjoyment, I played the hell out of Ck and Deus Vult and recommended it and other titles to a lot of friends who enjoyed strategy titles, these days I don't bother because I always find myself saying yeah it's a great game, but, and that but is the amount of DLC, and it's not cheap either.

I appreciate they're a business but seriously the amount and cost of the DLC is high.
 
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dray said:
Thats one way of looking at it, could they have put 2 or 3 together into one update, probably, and disguising updates as DLC and charging for it looks bad, I do love CK II and apart from Holy Fury, Jade dragon,and Sunset Invasion I have purchased every DLC, when I dip my toe back in I will get those to 2 recent ones but that said overall I've paid a lot of money for this game and it tempers my enjoyment, I played the hell out of Ck and Deus Vult and recommended it and other titles to a lot of friends who enjoyed strategy titles, these days I don't bother because I always find myself saying yeah it's a great game, but, and that but is the amount of DLC, and it's not cheap either.

I appreciate they're a business but seriously the amount and cost of the DLC is high.
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I mean, you're not wrong. But it's less painful in the wallet if you wait for sales, the DLC mostly has enough content to justify the cost (*looks askance at the Content Packs*), and I've definitely gotten a higher playtime-to-cost ratio out of CK2 than any other game I've played, even with the cost of the expansions.
 
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Metz77 said:
I mean, you're not wrong. But it's less painful in the wallet if you wait for sales, the DLC mostly has enough content to justify the cost (*looks askance at the Content Packs*), and I've definitely gotten a higher playtime-to-cost ratio out of CK2 than any other game I've played, even with the cost of the expansions.
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I always felt I got value over time but recently I've questioned it, like I said in an earlier post I don't bother EU or HOi anymore, I still play Stellaris though no where near as much as I'd like, that's a time issue to be fair but I also play Gary Grigsby's War in the East, that cost me £60, that's CK II plus a few expansions but value wise that's way ahead of CK II, it may be a greater intial cost but patches are free and replay ability is just as high as CK II, if that's your thing.

I just keep coming back to the amount and cost of the DLC, it's all subjective I guess and they do make great games.... but. :)
 
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I have a contradictory feeling about CK3 -- although a new edition and renewal of the game (Crusader Kings) is great and necessary, 8 years of improvements and polishes will be hard to match and forget. I hope that the game at its start is at the level of the saga.
 
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dray said:
I always felt I got value over time but recently I've questioned it, like I said in an earlier post I don't bother EU or HOi anymore, I still play Stellaris though no where near as much as I'd like, that's a time issue to be fair but I also play Gary Grigsby's War in the East, that cost me £60, that's CK II plus a few expansions but value wise that's way ahead of CK II, it may be a greater intial cost but patches are free and replay ability is just as high as CK II, if that's your thing.

I just keep coming back to the amount and cost of the DLC, it's all subjective I guess and they do make great games.... but. :)
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Yeah, I feel you. Still, I think for me at least it will be less painful this time around — by the time I started playing CK2 there were already like six DLCs out. Keeping pace with releases will feel more like having a season pass.
 
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No Vic 3 in sight I might as well add my 2 cents here. Do we get to be a Baron or an Abbot this time? Use holdings as a basic unit but not a county?
 
Metz77 said:
Yeah, I feel you. Still, I think for me at least it will be less painful this time around — by the time I started playing CK2 there were already like six DLCs out. Keeping pace with releases will feel more like having a season pass.
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A season pass would be a better way to do it I think, and as hesitant as I am I know I will fold and buy it. So weak......
 
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BurnBird said:
Sure, I don't want Ck3 to be a boring, empty husk, like Imperator on launch,
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This isn't likely to happen. The reason why Imperator was a an "empty husk" at launch was because the stated goal of Imperator's development was merely to create a refined version of EU: Rome and EU: Rome was quite frankly an incomplete empty husk of a game.

It's not really all that surprising that Imperator got the reception it got.

Whereas CKIII is based on a title that is Paradox's most successful game to date. In theory making CKIII into a good game should be really damned easy. Just remove the few features that didn't work out (or fix them somehow I guess), add in some new mechanics that take advantage of the updated engine to give the game its own identity, and upgrade the graphics. Boom. CKIII done.

Now, of course actually doing those things is a lot harder than just saying it, but it's a damn sight easier than creating a whole new game whole cloth. Paradox already has a winning model of a Crusader Kings game, they'd have to utterly mad to throw it away.
 
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