I feel like the devs have learned absolutely nothing from Legends of the Dead

[Azgabeth]

I don’t want this to sound like a soliloquy, and I unfortunately I have to preface this by saying that I like CK3 and want this game to succeed.

But currently I do not see this happening.

CK3 is entering its 5th year of life and it’s had 4 core expansions and 3 minor expansions. Only 2 out of 7 of these had positive reviews the rest were mixed or negative.

The game according to many of the hardcore fanbase, who are the ones that actually spend money on this game to fuel it’s development is to put it plainly a broken mess.

Not only is it in many aspects ahistorical, un immersive and un challenging, but it lacks key features we would’ve expected at the release of the game and whatever features were added afterwards are disconnected to each other making the game not a cohesive whole but a tangled mess.

But this is not the problem with the game. All of this can be fixed.

The problem is that we are now in the second month of the year and the last dev diary to reveal a gameplay mechanic was 3 months ago. And the next dev diary to reveal the chapter, will maybe potentially be revealed 2 weeks from now making it a 4 months long silence.

Rewind the clock back to last year, it was the same issue, silence from the devs, then announcing the Chapter. Then 3 dev diaries to culminate in a complete mess of a dlc who had MOSTLY NEGATIVE reviews for most of its existence.

Now maybe the mentality changed, maybe (hopefully) we’re going to have 3 months of dev diaries starting this February, for the next minor expansion.

But from the looks of it i doubt it, which means we’ll have 3 dev diaries to discuss a dlc. Which means thousands of pages of feedback will not be taken into account because there will be no time. Rinse and repeat.

The issue is that 2025 is not 2020. There are pther games being developed to fill the niche of CK3.

Project Caesar itself has a lot of features that base CK3 should have had, and it’s release date is not too far away.

With an extended timeline mod i expect PC to take take a lot of the hardcore GSG audience of CK3, and with it the audience that pays to maintain the development of the game.

I don’t think asking for timely dev diaries, so that extrnsive feedback can be given and properly implemented is too much.

This game already has a lot of catching up to do and I don’t see how that can be achieved without proper communication.

 

[peteoj]

I don’t want this to sound like a soliloquy, and I unfortunately I have to preface this by saying that I like CK3 and want this game to succeed.

But currently I do not see this happening.

CK3 is entering its 5th year of life and it’s had 4 core expansions and 3 minor expansions. Only 2 out of 7 of these had positive reviews the rest were mixed or negative.

The game according to many of the hardcore fanbase, who are the ones that actually spend money on this game to fuel it’s development is to put it plainly a broken mess.

Not only is it in many aspects ahistorical, un immersive and un challenging, but it lacks key features we would’ve expected at the release of the game and whatever features were added afterwards are disconnected to each other making the game not a cohesive whole but a tangled mess.

But this is not the problem with the game. All of this can be fixed.

The problem is that we are now in the second month of the year and the last dev diary to reveal a gameplay mechanic was 3 months ago. And the next dev diary to reveal the chapter, will maybe potentially be revealed 2 weeks from now making it a 4 months long silence.

Rewind the clock back to last year, it was the same issue, silence from the devs, then announcing the Chapter. Then 3 dev diaries to culminate in a complete mess of a dlc who had MOSTLY NEGATIVE reviews for most of its existence.

Now maybe the mentality changed, maybe (hopefully) we’re going to have 3 months of dev diaries starting this February, for the next minor expansion.

But from the looks of it i doubt it, which means we’ll have 3 dev diaries to discuss a dlc. Which means thousands of pages of feedback will not be taken into account because there will be no time. Rinse and repeat.

The issue is that 2025 is not 2020. There are pther games being developed to fill the niche of CK3.

Project Caesar itself has a lot of features that base CK3 should have had, and it’s release date is not too far away.

With an extended timeline mod i expect PC to take take a lot of the hardcore GSG audience of CK3, and with it the audience that pays to maintain the development of the game.

I don’t think asking for timely dev diaries, so that extrnsive feedback can be given and properly implemented is too much.

This game already has a lot of catching up to do and I don’t see how that can be achieved without proper communication.

Hot take: The fact that Paradox is likely sticking to the same content cycle; one major expansion, a "core" expansion/flavor pack, and an event DLC, says a lot about their lack of interest in fixing CK3's fundamental flaws.

We don’t need new government systems, flavor packs, or cosmetic DLCs. What we need is for the devs to take an entire year to reassess the game’s core mechanics, the broken, bloated, and underdeveloped ones and rebuild them from the ground up. Schemes, diplomacy, warfare, religion, technology and eras, buildings, peace deals, events, the economy, and character interaction all need major overhauls to make them feel less shallow.

There’s no point in expanding the map or adding more flavor when the foundation is weak. If these core issues aren’t addressed, I don’t see CK3 lasting another two years especially with the release of Project Caesar, which, as you pointed out, already looks like a more compelling medieval simulator than Crusader Kings itself.

 

[DeanTheDull]

Oh, hey, it's that time of year again- the annual 'it's already February, why haven't we heard anything?' weekend post.


With just one exception, the communication spinup has always been in February or later. That was not a Legends of the Dead thing, or a 'the bad first DLC of the year thing.' The dominant trend of every single year for the CK dev team is that mechanic-focused dev diaries resume in February.

2021? Feb 16, Diary 48, Team Status.

2022? This would be the exception that proves the rule... since Royal Court released Feb 8, and the pre-release dev diary cycle began the previous October/November. It may have been mixed, but it wasn't for a lack of time to consider feedback. Also- next major DLC plans were in April.

2023? Feb 7... oh wait, Feb was just art-related posts. First major post was 6 March, announcing tours and tournaments, the highest-rated DLC of CK3. Clearly, if emulation is indication, they should follow hold off another month.

2024? Feb 7, introducing the Chapter for the year. Which, yes, was Legends of the Dead, which no, has not been the normal time between first-diary of the year and DLC release, and it's silly to pretend it was given they explicitly acknowledged that error and did not repeat it in the next major DLC that year.



Now, looking at the better part of half a decade, when should an informed, reasonable person expect to start hearing about the next year's DLC plans?

My bet is not on the weekend that it starts being February.

 

[PDX-Trinexx]

I don’t think asking for timely dev diaries, so that extrnsive feedback can be given and properly implemented is too much.

Not at all. In fact, we're planning to do exactly that for this year's content.

Last year there was a clear difference in the reception between DLC where we we played things close to the chest and didn't publish dev diaries until late in the dev cycle, and DLC where we dumped out as much info as we could as early as we could in order to maximize the amount of time we had to act on player feedback. So this year we're pushing dev diaries earlier in the iteration phase of development so that we can see exactly what does and doesn't work from the players' perspective, while there's still time to course-correct if necessary.

As an aside, there's usually a period of relative radio silence after the holidays (both winter and summer holiday) due to development sprints taking place; developer time is in short supply right now, and almost all of that time is going to, well, development of the game. Once the sprints are over we'll have an easier time justifying pulling someone away from their job to talk about what they've been working on.

 

[Garbageolopogos]

Last year there was a clear difference in the reception between DLC where we we played things close to the chest and didn't publish dev diaries until late in the dev cycle, and DLC where we dumped out as much info as we could as early as we could in order to maximize the amount of time we had to act on player feedback.

So just to be the devil's advocate here it is possible that the negative feedback may have been a product of the actual content of the DLC rather than a reaction to the DDs.

On a personal level though I definitely prefer the info dump method, and unlike a lot of other people on this forum I really don't mind the longer periods of silence if it means better products.

 

[GodspeedYou]

I think Paradox very visibly improved their communications during the lead up to Roads to Power, but I still think there's much room to improve, specially considering Paradox should be in a rush to make up for lost time if they want to restore player confidence. As RtP got closer to release, it started accumulating more and more feedback that Paradox did not address at all, before or after release (for the record, yes, I'm still mad about the way the Hellenist restoration stuff was implemented in RtP. Compared to how similar content was approached in Fate of Iberia, it represents a very bad shift in dev philosophy to me). It's obvious that they can't address any complex criticism one week ahead of release, but when a certain choice has multiple threads in multiple forum criticizing it, at least one post-release dev message explaining why they made the choice and why they intend to keep it is necessary.

As I mentioned in another post, while Paradox can't simply announce everything they plan to do for the next five years at once, they have erred on the other direction too much and kept us excessively in the dark about what their priorities and design philosophy are, so we really have no basis to be optimistic about the game's future at all. After years of several, accumulating unaddressed complaints and having absolutely no clue of what they are developing for next year, cynicism and pessimism start to spread quickly. Today, gaming company marketing has to announce as much as possible right ahead of release to build as much hype as possible at once to take advantage of social media algorithms; but when the more vocal segments of the community spent the months before that period actively building anti-hype because they just don't trust the development process anymore, things don't really work well for anyone involved.

I am not yet convinced that Paradox has truly learned their lesson with Legends of the Dead because they haven't discussed what game design lessons they learned. I did not approve of the message that they thought the DLC was poorly received mainly because they explained their idea incorrectly and built the wrong expectations because no, the problem was not just bad communication, the problem is that the Legends mechanic was poorly thought-out: It does not build on any of the game's signature strengths, it doubles down on many design flaws that people have repeatedly complained about since release, it is not at all immersive for roleplaying purposes, it's rewards are far-fetched in a way that completely clashes with the historically-grounded experience that the core fanbase expects from the game, the "Legends" text was visibly incoherent most of the time and I'm surprised it got past QA; it was simply not a good DLC at all. I don't like the climate of hostility and pessimism this forum often develops and I try to be as generous to Paradox as possible (I am well-aware the devs are all talented and passionate people working under constraints that are completely unknown to me), but I have to be frank about my views on this DLC, and I genuinely don't understand what the thought process behind any of this DLC's mechanics was.

I still have no way of knowing if they really get what went wrong with that update and what will change in the future besides communication. If Paradox went ahead and said "We know you didn't like how this DLC did X, Y and Z. We promise we won't make mechanics that work that way anymore and intend to prioritize aspects like A, B and C instead", I could be confident that future updates will be better. As it stands I have absolutely no idea what to expect for 2025.

I really liked all releases from 2023 because they fit nicely with the game philosophy I expected. Say, one of my biggest pet peeves with the game was how characters un-immersively spawned in random places (such as my Haesteinn stumbling into his rival, Charles the Bald, in some random tavern in... Southern Italy?), and then they made a DLC that fixed characters to a position on the map and created an immersive travel system. Nice work! After enjoying everything 2023 had to offer, I told myself that if a Byzzie DLC were announced for Chapter III, I would pre-order it without hesitation, and that I did. Legends of the Dead clashed so hard with all of my expectations that, as it stands, I don't think I'll buy Chapter IV at all.

 

[Unknown Sage]

So just to be the devil's advocate here it is possible that the negative feedback may have been a product of the actual content of the DLC rather than a reaction to the DDs.

On a personal level though I definitely prefer the info dump method, and unlike a lot of other people on this forum I really don't mind the longer periods of silence if it means better products.

I mean this most likely is also part of the issue. But without early feedback, the content also cannot be adjusted to better fit the expectations of the player base. The reason the DD's are the topic of this particular conversation is I assume because they are the only method of feedback/input we have on the development of the game. And as such without them, or if they are too late into the development cycle, we are much more likely to end up with a dlc that has content that nobody asked for or wants.

 

[DeanTheDull]

So just to be the devil's advocate here it is possible that the negative feedback may have been a product of the actual content of the DLC rather than a reaction to the DDs.

PDX has elaborated his position more in the past, but the broader dev team position is that while there are elements that were the 'actual content' (as in the bugs, event frequency, etc.), other parts of the actual content were received negatively due to a lack of clarity inviting people to have their own expectations, which were then dashed.

Put another way- people thought Legends would be A, the ideas they wanted them to be, rather than B, what they were intended to be from the start. If people had known it would be B from the start, then expectations would not have been dashed since there wouldn't have been false expectations in the first place.

The post-Legends post mortem explicitly identified both parts of this 'actual content' issue (both gameplay concerns and mechanic-premise) as things that could be identified with more and earlier communication. More so that people would know what was coming, and earlier so that specific questions could be raised early enough that there would be enough time to address, particularly either potential issues or unthought opportunities.

And example of the later was the Doge's palace in Venice. Pre-roads to power, only a Republican government could hold the building and get the unique building benefits. After Roads to Power, it is (supposed to) enable an Administrative government to hold it as well, since Administrative lords can hold cities. But this was not the plan! It came up as a question in a dev diary, where a Dev went 'That's a good idea,' and had time to look into it. That wouldn't have been as possible in Legends, where the content was in the final consolidation period as it was being written on.

 

[Azgabeth]

I think Paradox very visibly improved their communications during the lead up to Roads to Power, but I still think there's much room to improve, specially considering Paradox should be in a rush to make up for lost time if they want to restore player confidence. As RtP got closer to release, it started accumulating more and more feedback that Paradox did not address at all, before or after release (for the record, yes, I'm still mad about the way the Hellenist restoration stuff was implemented in RtP. Compared to how similar content was approached in Fate of Iberia, it represents a very bad shift in dev philosophy to me). It's obvious that they can't address any complex criticism one week ahead of release, but when a certain choice has multiple threads in multiple forum criticizing it, at least one post-release dev message explaining why they made the choice and why they intend to keep it is necessary.

As I mentioned in another post, while Paradox can't simply announce everything they plan to do for the next five years at once, they have erred on the other direction too much and kept us excessively in the dark about what their priorities and design philosophy are, so we really have no basis to be optimistic about the game's future at all. After years of several, accumulating unaddressed complaints and having absolutely no clue of what they are developing for next year, cynicism and pessimism start to spread quickly. Today, gaming company marketing has to announce as much as possible right ahead of release to build as much hype as possible at once to take advantage of social media algorithms; but when the more vocal segments of the community spent the months before that period actively building anti-hype because they just don't trust the development process anymore, things don't really work well for anyone involved.

I am not yet convinced that Paradox has truly learned their lesson with Legends of the Dead because they haven't discussed what game design lessons they learned. I did not approve of the message that they thought the DLC was poorly received mainly because they explained their idea incorrectly and built the wrong expectations because no, the problem was not just bad communication, the problem is that the Legends mechanic was poorly thought-out: It does not build on any of the game's signature strengths, it doubles down on many design flaws that people have repeatedly complained about since release, it is not at all immersive for roleplaying purposes, it's rewards are far-fetched in a way that completely clashes with the historically-grounded experience that the core fanbase expects from the game, the "Legends" text was visibly incoherent most of the time and I'm surprised it got past QA; it was simply not a good DLC at all. I don't like the climate of hostility and pessimism this forum often develops and I try to be as generous to Paradox as possible (I am well-aware the devs are all talented and passionate people working under constraints that are completely unknown to me), but I have to be frank about my views on this DLC, and I genuinely don't understand what the thought process behind any of this DLC's mechanics was.

I still have no way of knowing if they really get what went wrong with that update and what will change in the future besides communication. If Paradox went ahead and said "We know you didn't like how this DLC did X, Y and Z. We promise we won't make mechanics that work that way anymore and intend to prioritize aspects like A, B and C instead", I could be confident that future updates will be better. As it stands I have absolutely no idea what to expect for 2025.

I really liked all releases from 2023 because they fit nicely with the game philosophy I expected. Say, one of my biggest pet peeves with the game was how characters un-immersively spawned in random places (such as my Haesteinn stumbling into his rival, Charles the Bald, in some random tavern in... Southern Italy?), and then they made a DLC that fixed characters to a position on the map and created an immersive travel system. Nice work! After enjoying everything 2023 had to offer, I told myself that if a Byzzie DLC were announced for Chapter III, I would pre-order it without hesitation, and that I did. Legends of the Dead clashed so hard with all of my expectations that, as it stands, I don't think I'll buy Chapter IV at all.

Yep this pretty much adds to my thoughts too and I agree.

I wasn’t entirely happy with Chapter 2 but I still bought it because I recognized it added an entirely fresh and day I say revolutionary mechanic to the game, I was willing to hive the devs more leeway.

But for Legends of the Dead I waited to see how it would turn out, thankfully I didn’t buy it and haven’t bought a CK3 dlc since.

And I know at least amongst my friend group I am not alone in that decision.

To add on to this, CK3 has pretty much enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the “Medieval Ruler RPG/GSG” genre.

But that just simply won’t last, there’s games from other studios in development takling the same time period and to reiterate PC will cannibalise a lot of the hardcore audience.

The next few chapters will quite literally make or break this game in terms of it’s long term sustainability and I genuinely wish for this game to last and achieve its full potential not go down the likes of IR.

 

[Trarco]

I don’t want this to sound like a soliloquy, and I unfortunately I have to preface this by saying that I like CK3 and want this game to succeed.

But currently I do not see this happening.

CK3 is entering its 5th year of life and it’s had 4 core expansions and 3 minor expansions. Only 2 out of 7 of these had positive reviews the rest were mixed or negative.

The game according to many of the hardcore fanbase, who are the ones that actually spend money on this game to fuel it’s development is to put it plainly a broken mess.

Not only is it in many aspects ahistorical, un immersive and un challenging, but it lacks key features we would’ve expected at the release of the game and whatever features were added afterwards are disconnected to each other making the game not a cohesive whole but a tangled mess.

But this is not the problem with the game. All of this can be fixed.

The problem is that we are now in the second month of the year and the last dev diary to reveal a gameplay mechanic was 3 months ago. And the next dev diary to reveal the chapter, will maybe potentially be revealed 2 weeks from now making it a 4 months long silence.

Rewind the clock back to last year, it was the same issue, silence from the devs, then announcing the Chapter. Then 3 dev diaries to culminate in a complete mess of a dlc who had MOSTLY NEGATIVE reviews for most of its existence.

Now maybe the mentality changed, maybe (hopefully) we’re going to have 3 months of dev diaries starting this February, for the next minor expansion.

But from the looks of it i doubt it, which means we’ll have 3 dev diaries to discuss a dlc. Which means thousands of pages of feedback will not be taken into account because there will be no time. Rinse and repeat.

The issue is that 2025 is not 2020. There are pther games being developed to fill the niche of CK3.

Project Caesar itself has a lot of features that base CK3 should have had, and it’s release date is not too far away.

With an extended timeline mod i expect PC to take take a lot of the hardcore GSG audience of CK3, and with it the audience that pays to maintain the development of the game.

I don’t think asking for timely dev diaries, so that extrnsive feedback can be given and properly implemented is too much.

This game already has a lot of catching up to do and I don’t see how that can be achieved without proper communication.

Out of curiosity, what are those other games that will fill the niche of CK3?

 

[klopkr]

We're hitting Stellaris 4.0, CK3 isn't even CK2 2.0.

I do have the feeling that paradox has been dumping on CK3 since nearly release.

 

[Knight of Lemonwood]

We have lost confidence with this series and are not hopeful of what the future has in store for CK3. What's even worse is that I'm starting to experience buyer's remorse, having dumped £100s in to this game.

 

[Knight of Lemonwood]

The next few chapters will quite literally make or break this game in terms of it’s long term sustainability

TBF Roads to Power was the proverbial Senzu bean for CK3, however its still standing on one leg and will need more than one good chapter to fix some of the underlying problems that has been plaguing the game since 2020.

 

[Knight of Lemonwood]

reasonable person expect to start hearing about the next year's DLC plans?

This guy read one sentence from OP's post and decided to draft an essay response to it

 

[Voidian]

Maybe the DLC and everything post released was so poorly received that they have given up on caring about any of it

I've seen the exact same thing happen with TW Three Kingdoms, stellar launch, horrible DLCs, they canned the game early and never mentioned it again, we didn't even get to have a DLC with the actual three kingdoms scenario.

 

[Knight of Lemonwood]

Maybe the DLC and everything post released was so poorly received that they have given up on caring about any of it

I've seen the exact same thing happen with TW Three Kingdoms, stellar launch, horrible DLCs, they canned the game early and never mentioned it again, we didn't even get to have a DLC with the actual three kingdoms scenario.

Imperator is an example close to home, but even without a single DLC (cosmetics dont count) it remains, mechanically speaking a better strategy game than CK3.

CK3 follows the same design philosophy as Victoria 3 by appealing to people outside the GSG segment by streamlining ingame functions, and focusing more on aesthetic features. The only difference is that CK3 managed to make a lot of money, partly thanks to inherited trust from the previous CK team and partly due to the popularity of a certain pop culture mod (you know which one).

 

[ourg]

CK3 is entering its 5th year of life and it’s had 4 core expansions and 3 minor expansions. Only 2 out of 7 of these had positive reviews the rest were mixed or negative.

like all paradox GS games

And CK3 is the one with the most positive review

Project Caesar itself has a lot of features that base CK3 should have had, and it’s release date is not too far away.

It's Johan on the project, you can expect the worst with him

 

[BaliorPal]

I don’t want this to sound like a soliloquy, and I unfortunately I have to preface this by saying that I like CK3 and want this game to succeed.

But currently I do not see this happening.

CK3 is entering its 5th year of life and it’s had 4 core expansions and 3 minor expansions. Only 2 out of 7 of these had positive reviews the rest were mixed or negative.

The game according to many of the hardcore fanbase, who are the ones that actually spend money on this game to fuel it’s development is to put it plainly a broken mess.

Not only is it in many aspects ahistorical, un immersive and un challenging, but it lacks key features we would’ve expected at the release of the game and whatever features were added afterwards are disconnected to each other making the game not a cohesive whole but a tangled mess.

But this is not the problem with the game. All of this can be fixed.

The problem is that we are now in the second month of the year and the last dev diary to reveal a gameplay mechanic was 3 months ago. And the next dev diary to reveal the chapter, will maybe potentially be revealed 2 weeks from now making it a 4 months long silence.

Rewind the clock back to last year, it was the same issue, silence from the devs, then announcing the Chapter. Then 3 dev diaries to culminate in a complete mess of a dlc who had MOSTLY NEGATIVE reviews for most of its existence.

Now maybe the mentality changed, maybe (hopefully) we’re going to have 3 months of dev diaries starting this February, for the next minor expansion.

But from the looks of it i doubt it, which means we’ll have 3 dev diaries to discuss a dlc. Which means thousands of pages of feedback will not be taken into account because there will be no time. Rinse and repeat.

The issue is that 2025 is not 2020. There are pther games being developed to fill the niche of CK3.

Project Caesar itself has a lot of features that base CK3 should have had, and it’s release date is not too far away.

With an extended timeline mod i expect PC to take take a lot of the hardcore GSG audience of CK3, and with it the audience that pays to maintain the development of the game.

I don’t think asking for timely dev diaries, so that extrnsive feedback can be given and properly implemented is too much.

This game already has a lot of catching up to do and I don’t see how that can be achieved without proper communication.

Developer diaries are neither the root of the problem nor its solution. You can't just implement everything players ask for and expect to get a good game — unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Most feedback lacks constructive criticism and is, at best, just an idea, but almost never a way to implement it. Creating a good product primarily depends on internal management and the skills of developers and game designers.

 

[naq29]

It's very weird to me that for a popular game such as Crusader kings, the pace of feature updates for CK3 has been very slow from the start, still most DLCs are not well-received. Right now we still don't have republic, conclave features, cardinal mechanics,... , internal politics and warfare are still lackluster. Is developing ck3 much harder than ck2?

 

[Knight of Lemonwood]

Developer diaries are neither the root of the problem nor its solution. You can't just implement everything players ask for and expect to get a good game — unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Most feedback lacks constructive criticism and is, at best, just an idea, but almost never a way to implement it. Creating a good product primarily depends on internal management and the skills of developers and game designers.

The argument that the player-base does not provide nuanced criticism is entirely untrue. I can link atleast 5 video-essays that are publicly available on YT that provide “constructive criticism” as well as solutions for the problems CK3 is facing. The problem was never with the playerbase but more to do with the vision of the game director not aligning with what we want which is unacceptable.

Besides, we are not asking for anything new or different, we’re literally begging for features that are already designed for CK2 to be ported over into CK3. This is exactly what the initial game director promised during the early development stage, to include every piece of content present in CK2 in to the new game. 5 years later we don’t even have conclave one of the most trivial DLCs to re-implement.