Dev Diary #112 - Year in Review

[rageair]

Greetings!

The wintery season is upon us, and soon most of us will be joining our friends & family (or friends & foes?) for the holidays - this is an excellent time to reflect on the year that has gone by, and look at all that we’ve done. I also wish to leave you with a small teaser of things to come (nothing major though, as mentioned before that communication will begin sometime in Q1 next year!)

Early in the year, we released Royal Court, the first major expansion for CK3. With kings squabbling over who has the grandest court, impressive artifacts being crafted and displayed, court position holders scheming, and cultures diverging, hybridizing, and shifting - to name only a few things that were in the update - it’s safe to say that the game got a shakeup with lots of new things to do. We also drew a lot of good learnings from it, both from the process (which was undoubtedly troubled, seeing the state of the world at the time) and the reception. Good lessons that we’ll bring with us in the future.

The Fate of Iberia followed and breathed new life into the Iberian peninsula. With content such as bonds of friendship stronger than iron, titles changing hands over a game of chess, and the revival of lost faiths (if you’re observant enough…) The Struggle, a central mechanical core surrounded by flavor, struck a balance that was enjoyed by many - a winning formula that we’re more than likely to follow in the future.

Friends & Foes was an experiment that played to the strengths of the game - by adding dramatic content, and proved how it’s always a nice thing to have more of it! Not only did it seem to be an appreciated format, but it was very motivating for us to make. For more news on this, stay tuned early next year…

And to round the year off we released the Robe update, which focused on adding graphical variety and fixing issues. It revamped the bookmark screen, added a full set of art for tenets, and made custom rulers saveable, in addition to balance and AI fixes. We will always strive to make sure the game is in a good, healthy state.

---

Now, some of you know the above already, and want to see something new! As we won’t be back with Dev Diaries for a while (they’ll start back up sometime in January) I want to leave you with something that can be discussed for a while. We’ve seen a lot of discussions regarding Nicknames, or rather the lack of them, and have taken your feedback to heart!

In an upcoming update, we’ll be adding in a new system for gaining nicknames passively, not too unlike the system in CK2, but vastly improved (in CK2, it was just a highly obfuscated system with little-to-no fanfare at all). These nicknames can be earned at any point during the game, and will reflect your character’s status as well as they can. They can be bad or good, with most (if not all) being overwritable by more prestigious nicknames should you do something extraordinary (such as uniting the Spanish Thrones, or Uniting Africa, etc). Gaining a nickname comes with a small boon or penalty to prestige and opinion, just enough to make it matter.

A positive nickname, celebrated by a good friend.

A negative nickname, gained while in prison, with the news delivered by someone who’s not exactly a fan of yours.

This system focuses on nicknames that aren’t particularly active, it won’t give you ‘the Conqueror’ for example. It will, however, pick one of 200+ appropriate passive nicknames. These are in part existing nicknames in the database that didn’t exist outside of historical characters (‘the Fat’, ‘the Poet’, ‘the Brave’, ‘the Tyrant’, etc.), nicknames adopted from CK2 (‘the Zealot’, ‘the Lucky’, ‘the Resilient’, ‘the Strange’, etc.), historical nicknames that were never used before (‘the Desired’, ‘the Idle’, ‘the Wrathful’, ‘Longsword’, etc.), and community suggestions (‘the Navigator’, ‘the Berserker’, etc.). All of these nicknames have triggers so that they only appear where logical, for example; you can only gain ‘the Tyrant’ if you have a certain amount of tyranny opinion, and you can only gain ‘the Fat’ if your character is of the heavier persuasion. A lot of these also take your prestige or piety levels into account, so having a high prestige level can ‘protect’ you from gaining poor nicknames. There’s also a game rule that controls the frequency.

Some examples of nicknames you can get through this system.

We aspire to keep most nicknames in line with history, or what would be plausible. That said, feel free to suggest more nicknames! Who knows, perhaps you’ll suggest something that’ll make it in… just remember that they shouldn’t be too ‘active’, so no ‘the Conqueror’ or ‘the Destroyer’.

To make nicknames a bit more… spicy than they are, we’ve also added a small new feature that allows you to see what a nickname actually means! Charles the Bald, for example, wasn’t without hair but rather without a suitable crown for most of his life. By hovering over nicknames, you can now see an explanation.

Charles wasn’t so bald after all, and now you know why.

Quite self-explanatory, but still informative.

Finally, a word from our community manager Pariah about a QnA session we will be having with some of the devs on our Discord server:

"As the holiday season approaches, we will also be holding a QnA session where you can feel free to ask any burning questions or just anything on your mind about the game. While we can’t give away any company secrets or tell you exactly what we are working on next, it will be a chance to sit down and discuss things with members from most if not all disciplines of the game!

The QnA session will be taking place on our Discord server on Tuesday December 13 from 16:00 - 18:00 CET, which is a terrific place to help supplement these Forums. The Discord is filled with tons of your fellow Crusader Kings community and always a good place to find knowledge and conversation. If you are not already part of our terrific Discord family and would like to get in ahead of the QnA, you can find a link HERE!"

That’s it for this year - we’ll see you in 2023! Have a God Jul and a Gott Nytt År as we say here in the frigid north!

 

[rageair]

I like the explanations. It would be neat if this could also show the in-game reason, similar to relationships. Like, "Gained the Accursed nickname after being imprisoned by Lahiltoul"

Another thing I always wished for is the ability to stack nicknames. You know, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Eater of Breadsticks.
Perhaps you could choose one primary nickname and have the rest in a tooltip? And occasionally use the whole list in events. That would be fun.

Oh, same! This will not be in now, but multi nicknames/nickname selections are on the ever-growing improvement pile.

Love the idea of having nicknames back, will it come in a small update early in the year or as part of the free patch of a dlc later down the line ?

Undecided, but most likely part of a free update alongside a release.

 

[Wokeg]

To everyone posting nicknames: thanks so much and we've definitely taken down quite a few of these! This is a neat little system that just gets better the more variables it has to work with, so the extra input is very much appreciated.

Also I'd like to point out that character nicknames being repetitive or too random has actually been a fairly consistent player complaint, so this is actually addressing something that a lot of people find annoying/immersion-breaking.

Thank you! ^^' That's part of the reason we're doing it.

Who said a preview had to be a “pressing” issue? It’s a little tasty appetizer. Notice the number of posts of people excitedly offering up nicknames and suggestions. This is a fun little thing for us.

Theyve told us previously how they were going to release info. You may think it’s better that they drop an important, serious bit of info as a preview then disappear until next year, but boy, I’d hate to see the way 10 or so forumites work themselves up in a five week frenzy over how this Big Important Feature Preview is the sign that PDX is doomed and their devs are dumb dumbs and how CK3 is a giant flop.

This exactly. It's a tiny preview of a small thing that one or two people have worked on when they've found themselves with a gap in their schedule over the last few months. It's a teaser we're showing because we're not quite ready to talk about larger stuff, and this is a fun lil side-thing we can show off in a WIP state.

I'm going to be very candid here, and say that the December-January dev diaries tend, IME, to be the absolute worst, with January more so because every year so far us not working over the holidays of late December or having much to show whilst work is restarting in early January has been treated by a (loud) few as a content drought/communication shut-down. It's more or less exactly how Kawamuratc says, which is actually quite demoralising and just... not fun. Frankly, it's not what people want to be doing in the run-up to/mid-holidays for something that isn't actually part of their job description and especially during what's supposed to be time off, which means devs tend to just tune out over these months, and then fail to tune back in again because of the resulting atmosphere in the forums.

In my opinion it was a major & direct contributor in the slow drying up of dev activity here over the last year and a half or so. It's also a large part of the reason we're more hesitant to show off smaller things we're working on, or WIP things we're working on, or just... things that are mostly complete but which we won't be releasing for a while, all of which I see people pining for us to do. Because when we do, we start taking (often fairly harsh) flak for not focusing on particular mechanics instead, or for something being unfinished according to a particular set of standards, or not addressing specific bugs or issues that bother someone personally. :/ If the response to open communication & teasers is hostility and conspiritorialising, even by a comparatively small group of people, then it doesn't actually take that much to make said-openness just not worth the risk or effort.

As a disclaimer, I will say that overall, this thread has been generally fairly positive and I'm grateful for the content suggestions, the hopes expressed for the future, the support from many of you for the team, and the critique that's been phrased politely and helpfully. I'm definitely not going to say all the critique, but a good deal of it, and critical feedback is useful and necessary. I've written this reply mostly because I feel like the forums have been much more pleasant to interact with lately (I've had some great conversations and suggestions in here the last couple of months) and, tbh, I'd like that to continue and progress. I'd like to see to see more dev activity, more forumite activity, more teasers and WIP work being released earlier, more discussions, more community pain points getting brought up, more of everything. I don't really want to see it torn down again by vitriol and hyperbole, and though there's not a huge amount of that in this thread as yet, like I say, January is usually the worst month for that and we're 25% of the way there.