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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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So focus groups will have more than one person each, now? Does this mean Andrew Jackson will stop going to prison for beating up a preacher in public?
 
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Will Agitators be used to represent figures of minority group liberation, protest and resistence?

aka. for whoever owns the North Island of NZ, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, Hone Heke, Rua Kenana could all be agitators for the independence of Aotearoa/United Tribes from you, and Te Maiharoa for the South Island.

Agitators could be the perfect system for national resistance leaders, rebel leaders, prophets and independence leaders?
 
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This new pack seems extremely cool and fun to play with but I have a few questions and some minor concerns for the future,

1. Let's say Lenin comes to my country and starts a revolution and gets council republic inacted, will he become the new leader or will some randomly generated dude become the leader? Also if Louis Napoleon starts a revolution will he become the new monarch?

2. This pack is France centered but will future updates bring more agitators to other countries? If you do an immersion pack for Germany will they get agitators in that update or the agitators we get this update are all the agitators we are going to get?

3. Lastly, if I'm understanding correctly this is just an "Immersion" pack and the big game changing expansions are a totally separate thing called "Expansion" packs or are "Immersion" packs the biggest DLC we are going to be getting?
 
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neondt said:
You'll be able to send Agitators back to their home countries, but more on that next week
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When Germany sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people who have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing atheism. They're bringing communism. They're revolutionaries. And some, I assume, are good people.
 
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neondt said:
There are both historical and randomly generated agitators. The historical agitators will spawn under historically appropriate conditions, and they're not guaranteed every game.
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This is good, I am glad I saw it while browsing, because my main concern is that just adding historical people in will prevent the player from getting generated characters who fulfill their roles in the divergent world of their campaign save.

This feels like a good balance to strike!
 
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QuinnMallory said:
When Germany sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people who have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing atheism. They're bringing communism. They're revolutionaries. And some, I assume, are good people.
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Hitler as Fascist agitator when?
 
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gela1212 said:
i think folks are perhaps using rose-tinted glasses to remember the amount of flavor for specific countries that was in vanilla in paradox's other games.

eu4 release had a slightly tweaked version of the old mission system from eu3 and most of the missions you got were generic with a handful of specific ones for significant countries, which is not particularly different from what we have here in v3
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I agree, but on the other hand, surely Paradox know how popular HPM and similar mods are, right? There's a reason most people's memories about Victoria 2 default to HPM or any similar rework, and not vanilla. People like it when nations have cool stuff unique to them. Vanilla Victoria 3 is better than vanilla Victoria 2, no doubt in my mind, but imo modded Victoria 2 tops Victoria 3 pretty much every time(It also runs better...). I'm glad we have modders who will do so much for the game in a shorter time while we wait for Paradox to do their thing. Stuff like VFM, OPB's Victorian Tweaks mod, Divergences, the Ultrahistorical reworks, etc are carrying the game hard for me.
 
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neondt said:
Mr Marx, having been unceremoniously booted out of his home country, is looking for a loving home.​
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Will non-European countries also be able to have Marx as IG leader?
 
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HotDoggerson said:
I agree, but on the other hand, surely Paradox know how popular HPM and similar mods are, right? There's a reason most people's memories about Victoria 2 default to HPM or any similar rework, and not vanilla. People like it when nations have cool stuff unique to them. Vanilla Victoria 3 is better than vanilla Victoria 2, no doubt in my mind, but imo modded Victoria 2 tops Victoria 3 pretty much every time(It also runs better...). I'm glad we have modders who will do so much for the game in a shorter time while we wait for Paradox to do their thing. Stuff like VFM, OPB's Victorian Tweaks mod, Divergences, the Ultrahistorical reworks, etc are carrying the game hard for me.
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in base mechanics 100%, but in terms of lore/immersion/historical content, V3 is not better than V2 on release. V3 has the least event/immersion content of any release, V2 didn't compare to V1 or PDM/HPM but it was still alot of content that V3 doesn't even attempt.
 
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Since this has certain similarities to the "Activists" idea I pitched in a thread a few weeks back, I'm gonna go ahead and say "Called it!"

Glad to see more historical content and an expanded role for characters.

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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Sir, this is a video game. If the game is making you so agitated, maybe it's best to log off? Maybe touching grass would be a better use of time.

riadach said:
Better get working on that secession rework so because I want to see wall to wall Fenians (and of course Daniel O'Connell and CSP).
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Based and poblacht-pilled. I'm eagerly awaiting some Sinn Féin content.

Orinsul said:
Will Agitators be used to represent figures of minority group liberation, protest and resistence?

aka. for whoever owns the North Island of NZ, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, Hone Heke, Rua Kenana could all be agitators for the independence of Aotearoa/United Tribes from you, and Te Maiharoa for the South Island.

Agitators could be the perfect system for national resistance leaders, rebel leaders, prophets and independence leaders?
Click to expand...

Hopefully this is where they're going with it- since, as of right now, discriminated groups don't have any way to advocate for themselves other than the occasional faceless secession attempt.
 
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Seems very weird to seperate out the Exile/Invite mechanics and make them DLC while leaving Agitators part of the base game. They seem really deeply tied and I'm not sure how well a new gameplay system can really be balanced well enough when its split down the middle like this?
 
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neondt said:
Good guess! Protected Speech prevents you from exiling characters, and other laws in that category affect how many Radicals are created when you exile someone
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Is there any chance it could be possible to discredit a character, if we can't exile them, via propaganda or the like? Something along the lines of suppressing an IG, but aimed at a character instead of a group? It seems like there should be a middle ground between being fine with someone, and kicking them out of the country, you know?
 
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MrRazza said:
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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i hope what they do is by cultural sphere, as that would not only make sense from a research perspective but also as a good way to market. so you'd have Russia as one then Germany and Austria as another, anglosphere, ext but yeah I agree, I think we need more than one country of content at a time
 
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Orinsul said:
in base mechanics 100%, but in terms of lore/immersion/historical content, V3 is not better than V2 on release. V3 has the least event/immersion content of any release, V2 didn't compare to V1 or PDM/HPM but it was still alot of content that V3 doesn't even attempt.
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without heart of darkness? no way
 
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neondt said:
There are both historical and randomly generated agitators. The historical agitators will spawn under historically appropriate conditions, and they're not guaranteed every game.
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Can historical characters get an icon that labels them as historical?
 
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Finally I can assassinate Mr. Trotsky.
 
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This looks pretty damn amazing! I'm eagerly awaiting the flavor content, since this will be the first Immersion DLC it will set standards for the future and we don't want those to fall too low, right?

Also good to see that you don't try to cram too much into one DLC - but I hope that this will be even meatier then for France! I'd rather have a very rich DLC focussed on one country (and relevant other) rather than a DLC that tries to handle a dozen countries at once but all very bland and bleak.
And it seems like you fulfill my wish with that! :)

A question for the future: Will the future Immersion DLCs all also have a thematically fitting mechanic accompanying it? Or will you decide that "on the go"?
 
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