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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #82 - Voice of the People

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Good afternoon Victorians! It is with great pleasure that I can finally reveal to you our first Immersion Pack: Voice of the People. Voice of the People is the Immersion Pack promised by and included in the Grand Edition of Victoria 3, and will be released alongside the free 1.3 Update on May 22nd. Today’s dev diary will give you a feature overview for Voice of the People, as well as some words on our design philosophy for Immersion Packs and an update on our team structure.


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Proudhon is one of many historical Agitators in Voice of the People, alongside other noteworthies such as Leon Trotsky, Sun Yat Sen, and Susan B Anthony.
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Without giving too much away - we’ll be going more in depth on this next week - Voice of the People is named for its headliner feature: Agitators. Agitators are a new kind of character that rally your pops to support Political Movements that align with their Ideology. Agitators will shake up your internal politics, acting independently of their Interest Groups. Amplifying power from below, Agitators serve an opposite function to Interest Group Petitions which reflect the demands of the political elite. Depending on how your goals align with theirs, Agitators might be a painful thorn in your side or a valuable ally to your political agenda.

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Mr Marx, having been unceremoniously booted out of his home country, is looking for a loving home.
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Are you sick and tired of that one Agrarian Party leader with inexplicably high Popularity stealing votes from your cherished Liberals? Is there a Radical Agitator spreading dangerous ideas in your bastion of political reaction? Well I’ve got a solution for you: Exile. Inconvenient characters can now be expelled from your nation and driven into political exile, up for grabs for whatever nation wants to harbor your unpatriotic dissidents. On the other side of things, perhaps you feel like your nation needs a shakeup, and that Danish Anarchist Exile would be just the man for the job - you can peruse the list of available Exiles and invite them to your country as an Agitator.

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Napoleon III went on to restore the French Empire in our timeline, but what would France look like under the House of Orleans or the Legitimists?
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Vive la révolution! Vive la France! Voice of the People’s content and visual focus is themed around France, one of the greatest powers of the era and one of the most, in my humble opinion, in need of a healthy dose of content. In an upcoming dev diary we’ll be going into detail about what we have planned for France, but right now I can tell you that we’ll be tackling such weighty topics as the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, and the dynastic struggle for the French throne - including of course the return of the Bonapartes. We’ll also be covering the nation’s quest for territorial expansion both within Europe and beyond. With ample new Journal Entries and Events, playing as France will offer a much more immersive experience.

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The map of the world has become some sort of Carte du Monde.
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I think by now you’ve probably noticed that something is different in these screenshots. Voice of the People will add not only a beautiful baroque blue UI skin, but also a totally new French-themed paper map of the world - featuring my personal favorite art in the game, the Pacific Bread Centaur. On the character art side, we’ve added many new historical Agitators who will have their own unique appearance including outfits and props. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s even more to come in the dev diary on visual features in a few weeks' time.

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This is the Bread Centaur. I will not elaborate.
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I think I can state with confidence that devs and players alike share a love of staring at maps. We also really enjoy nitpicking and complaining about maps. While our content designers were busy making French content they noticed that there was room for improvement for the state region and city hub setup in the country. These aren’t the only changes to the map coming in 1.3 - most notably we’ve made major changes to Algeria which we’ll also talk about in a future dev diary.

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Can you spot what else is different about France besides the borders?
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I’d like to talk a bit about what an Immersion Pack entails for Victoria 3 and how we’ve decided which parts of the 1.3 Update will be free to all players and which will be exclusive to the Immersion Pack.

So far, everything we’ve talked about in the previous 1.3 Dev Diaries is part of the free update - the Revolution Clock, the changes to Law Enactment, and the new Laws for instance. These are reworks of existing systems and additions to them, exactly the kinds of changes that Paradox veterans might expect in a free update.

Immersion Packs are envisioned as content-driven and art-heavy, with mechanical features that support this content and make the world come to life. As the title implies, Immersion Packs are about immersion. You can expect them to contain plenty of narrative content like Events and Journal Entries, major visual updates, and light but impactful new mechanical features and systems reworks. Immersion Packs will be themed around one country or region of the world, and this is where the bulk of narrative content and art will be focused and take inspiration from. These new mechanical features and systems reworks will be mostly contained in the free update that will be released alongside the Immersion Pack - everyone gets the feature, but Immersion Pack owners will also get all the bells and whistles. In the case of Voice of the People, Agitators will be a free feature while certain interactions (such as Exiling characters) will be included in the Immersion Pack.

Time for a team update! Since around the game’s release, the Victoria 3 team has transitioned from being a project aimed at delivering a single product - Victoria 3 1.0 - to a team that can work on multiple updates simultaneously. We’ve divided ourselves into three sub-teams with different focuses, sizes, and fields of expertise. For instance the “Machinists” team was responsible for bringing you the 1.2 Update, and is defined by a focus on systems design and code-heavy tasks. Voice of the People and 1.3 is primarily the work of the “Academics” and “Artisans” teams, which focus on narrative design/scripted content and art respectively.

The teams tie in to our major post-release goals that we’ve talked about before: 1.3 and Voice of the People are focused on Internal Politics and Historical Immersion, which (very deliberately) lines up perfectly with the expertise of the Academics and Artisans teams. While the Academics and Artisans work on 1.3, the Machinists team is cooking up the next systems-focused update, which will include some long-awaited free updates related to our other post-release pillars. We’re far from ready to start talking about this now, but I can assure you it is exciting stuff.

I’m sure you’re excited to read more about Voice of the People, but that will have to be all for this week. Join me for next week’s dev diary, where I’ll be going into depth on the mechanical features: Agitators and Exiles - as well as unveiling a new (super moddable) way to interact with characters.

Voice of the People will release on May 22nd alongside Patch 1.3. Pre-orders available now with limited-time bonus content, also included in the Grand Edition!

Pre-order now!
Steam
 
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Not really the content I hoped for and 15 EUR is quite expensive for what the DLC offers - but I just pre-ordered it anyways.
Victoria 3 is a niche game within a niche genre. If Paradox were not working on a project like this, then no one would. I see it more as a donation to support the work on this game, than an actual purchase.
 
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Soranya said:
Too soon, base game is not solid enough to spare man power on expansions.
And i am not sure if the Bread Cenatur is a late Aprils Fool joke?
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That's based on a caricature of Général Boulanger

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Marx merely being "direct" and "persistent" seems a bit tepid.
 
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Lazy Sorcerer said:
This insulting DLC might just be last straw for this game for me. Paradox is just spitting in the face of Victoria 2 fans and doubling down everything we hate about the game.
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Speaking as a Victoria 2 fan, I've really liked the direction Vic3 has gone in. So don't pretend you speak for other fans please.
 
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$ilent_$trider said:
Oh, I see what you mean there. I mean, that sort of happens already in politics right? There’s a long discussion in political science about how much the “elites” of a party influence the supporters and how much the grassroots affect what becomes the leadership.
You should certainly have the option to assign a leader to a cabinet position that currently doesn’t have a full support of its IG, or you should try to convince the IG on changing their support to your chosen leader.
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This still isn't really a solution to the fundamental problem though. Yes there is that discussion on whether elite or grassroots movements had more control, but I'm looking at it from a gameplay perspective. If you want a game playing with the elites, then that's already every other historical Paradox game. The Victoria franchise is unique among Paradox games and really among most strategy games in that it actually tries to portray the grassroots part of movements in a way that is not just present but front and center. Adding any gameplay with characters, as cabinet positions that are occupied or influenced by characters in any capacity inherently would, takes some attention away from the grassroots focused gameplay. Because no matter how you dress it, the players are people and are naturally going to identify with and focus more on people than with more abstract representations of groups in a game.

The addition of things like military commanders, interest group leaders, and agitators is fine because they aren't serving so much as characters in and of themselves but rather are functioning more as personifications of the grassroots elements. A character who is an interest group leader isn't really acting as anything more than just that interest group in game terms. An agitator isn't really acting as anything more than a political movement. They aren't taking prominence over the more population-driven abstraction that they are personifying. However, using additional characters for cabinet positions or in a parliamentary interface by definition would do that.

Also note that my objections here are specific to Victoria 3 and what type of game it is. I would love another game to exist about managing a cabinet and parliament throughout a historical period. But that game at least IMO would be very different from the Victoria franchise in vision and scope since it would need to have the core focus and gameplay loop be on political management, not something tacked on to Victoria whose core focus and gameplay loop is on economic and societal management.
 
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wilcoxchar said:
Please no. A few new characters that are still effectively just there to add a little flavor to mass movements is fine, but stuff like cabinets and parliaments would really tilt the balance away from POPs and toward individuals and characters in a way that would get rid of what really makes Victoria unique among Paradox games, the influence of the POP system.
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What POPs? there no POPs in this game. There is worker mana with 3D models
What mass movements? There are only IGs that depend on how much of their type of worker mana is in the country and RNG Great Man Leaders. I am willing to bet this is how these agitators will work too. Some simplistic modifiers on top of RNG. And btw your claim they are just avatars for mass movements is inconsistent with the fact you can exile them.
 
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$ilent_$trider said:
I love French surnames.
The original artist definitely lost the opportunity of using an actual baguette instead of a club there.
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I'm not sure if that modern baguette existed or was widespread at the time
 
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wilcoxchar said:
...Adding any gameplay with characters, as cabinet positions that are occupied or influenced by characters in any capacity inherently would, takes some attention away from the grassroots focused gameplay. Because no matter how you dress it, the players are people and are naturally going to identify with and focus more on people than with more abstract representations of groups in a game.
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Is the argument against having cabinet posts or legislatures (or presumably any sort of decent political mechanism) that it risks being too engaging for the player?

Abstraction can be great and is always going to be necessary in a GSG to some degree or another, but there's also a point where abstraction stops you caring, or makes things harder to understand. It seems you've picked up that applies a bit as it stands with Vic 3, or you wouldn't be worried about people getting distracted from it, but I really don't see why the abstraction can't sit alongside a good politics mechanism. Having a legislative body would really help me feel connected to these amorphous blobs of pops that I otherwise just shuffle in and out of government as other abstract numbers demand.

I'd like to see the game become more engaging myself. Agitators are actually a nice start to that, here's hoping for more.
 
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I'm disappointed that we are not seeing a patch until end of May. Unless I misread we will need to wait that long for additional updates. I already bought the Grand Edition so this is all included but I had hoped you would have completed the initial development according to your roadmap before any DLC dropped.
 
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Will there be ways of influencing IG leader traits other than exile. It's super annoying to have progress die on a key law due to an in government IG leader getting a bad trait and refusing to die/retire,
 
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Less2 said:
Will the most well known political agitator of the 20th century make an appearance? I'm speaking of course about our good friend Adolf Hitler.
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I strongly agree with this, however I don't know which interest group he would fit in the most. He was just a normal member of the working class in poverty prior to world war I. After World War I was when he started to take over Drexler's party and formed the NSDAP. Normally member of the working class are part of trade unions, but that would be illogical in Hitler's case as he banned them and formed a National Labor Union in its place. The Armed Forces wouldn't really make sense either as Hitler often had disputes with the upper hierarchy of his military, despite the fact that some members of the military supported Hitler initially (Ludendorff). The PB (which is the interest group that supports fascism in the game) wouldn't make sense either as Hitler wasn't really a member of the middle class (wasn't a shopkeeper or anything like that). Maybe Paradox could create a new interest group filled with workers that are staunchly anti-communist? Any thoughts or comments?
 
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Lazy Sorcerer said:
What POPs? there no POPs in this game. There is worker mana with 3D models
What mass movements? There are only IGs that depend on how much of their type of worker mana is in the country and RNG Great Man Leaders. I am willing to bet this is how these agitators will work too. Some simplistic modifiers on top of RNG. And btw your claim they are just avatars for mass movements is inconsistent with the fact you can exile them.
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Kinda a weird take. Yeah, people are ressources. Sure. And ressources are shown as numbers and are kinda abstracted.

But the Issue with "mana", at least I thougth, was that it is way to abstracted to make no sense anymore. Like Bird mana in EU4 can be stored ans used for way to many different things.

But people in Vic3 are not that abstracted tough. They work, they consume, they reproduce, they migrate, they have opinions on political issues. Sure, the game works with modifiers, but how else would you want to do it?
 
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