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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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Agitators sound like a lot of fun. With increased complexity of law enactment and first (and not last I think) new laws, they should provide help with reforming traditionalist countries and, possibly, shake up min-max player to try other law combinations.
 
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It's nice that we will have three pretenders repesented for France. But it would be even better if this update would also include slight rework of pretenders for monarchies in general.

Now when monarch gets overthrown him and his dynasty disappears. Even when interest group which supported him do a counterrevolution later on they crown some other random dude. I think that game should remember who was a pretender for which interest group and if possible restore him or his heir to power. Foreign intervention for regime change should also restore a valid pretender rather than crowning random guy. This would be nice for immersion.
 
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Lazy Sorcerer said:
Once RNGesus determines that Abraham Lincoln should be the PB leader every member of PB starts supporting abolitionism. Have them roll again, this time landing on a Slaver leader and they immediately do 180. It's mind control, only way to explain it.

And it's not like there is no precedent for doing this in a different way. Check out V2 game files, there are numbers of factors for ideology which will nudge POPs one way or the other. This could have been even better in V3, since now you have POPs actually attached to specific building so we could have had things like Industrialists who own a steel factory which faces fierce competition from imports backing protectionism, while those that own an motor industries that depend on imports of oil support free-trade.
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As I said in my previous post, I am totally in favor of expanding how IGs work, and I am sure this will be done in the future. Regarding your example, the split within the German industrialists was hugely important historically, and you are right that this is not modeled in the game.

But the truth is: this is also how interest aggregation actually works. Even if you have factions within IGs (or separate IGs for industrialists), you just kick the problem can down the road. Will two factions within an IG be enough to represent all the POPs that support the IG? No, and neither will 10 factions. At some point you have to aggregate the interests. And in this way, you also have the "mind-control" problem in real life.
 
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Feels a bit premature to be releasing DLC like this when the vanilla game doesn't even do justice to the 1848 Springtime of the Peoples that should define the status of Europe for most of the game.

If they do improve the revolutions, I hope its part of the patch and not locked behind a paywall.

I am glad we are getting more uses for characters however. I'd like to see Cabinets, sub-IG's, and maybe even full Parliaments represented some day.
 
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CivMasters said:
This should've been in the main game.
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For every single DLC feature, there is someone who says this. (And frequently, someone else who is grateful it won't be.)
 
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In regards to the map. Do we finally have the Puget Sound? I know some fans of Emerald City are still sour about that part of the map.
 
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anbeck said:
As I said in my previous post, I am totally in favor of expanding how IGs work, and I am sure this will be done in the future. Regarding your example, the split within the German industrialists was hugely important historically, and you are right that this is not modeled in the game.
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It's telling you immediately connected this with Germany - your idea of modeling this probably involves slapping a unique ideology on German Industrialists to railroad them to be this way.

And I don't want there to be "factions" at all, POPs should just have stances on issues.
 
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Lazy Sorcerer said:
It's telling you immediately connected this with Germany - your idea of modeling this probably involves slapping a unique ideology on German Industrialists to railroad them to be this way.
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Sorry, I cannot follow. What is that telling you? And how do you jump from that to the complete non sequitur of me wanting to railroad this?

Lazy Sorcerer said:
And I don't want there to be "factions" at all, POPs should just have stances on issues.
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But interest aggregation is a thing, that's what politics is ultimately about.
 
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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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why?
 
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Ooooh, this is actually really neat! I'm actually kind of excited for this. I like how it anchors the game more closely to the real 19th and early 20th century.

Want some Marxism? Gotta catch yourself a Marx!
 
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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.
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I'm definitely glad to see some mechanics that apply to all countries here, but it's not just France that needs flavour, just about every country and region does. I appreciate this particular addition is coming as part of the Grand Edition package, but is it really going to be £13+ to add some flavour to each country one at a time thereafter? I'm sorry, but that's a lot to pay to add a single dose of replay value each time.

Will some base flavour for different countries and regions at least be added without charge as well? I'm fine with immersion packs doing deep delves to add more advanced country-specific stuff, but it'd be nice if countries felt just a bit different to each other in the base game too.
 
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Lazy Sorcerer said:
Paradox is just spitting in the face of Victoria 2 fans and doubling down everything we hate about the game.
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Not everyone who loved Vicky 2 hates Vicky 3, mate.
 
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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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Big fan of vic2. What in this spits in the face of vic2 fans? Besides, if the military wasn't a big enough spit in the face, how does this break any straws? I think this is'll be an alright DLC.
 
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