Looks like this was announced at this mornings PDXCON19 conference and I suspect it won’t be a huge surprise to many. It has been long rumored, for one thing, but also they recently let Crusader Kings 2 go for free to anyone that wants a copy and just a few months ago Humble had the entire catalog available for fifteen bucks. Which I bit on and still haven’t hardly touched, but I love Crusader Kings 2 in theory because of what it is and what it does.
So supposedly this is out in 2020, and according to the RPS article it’s designed to be more approachable than CK2. The visuals/art style look (to me) very interesting. Fantastic - a bit more of a tilted view brings to mind games I love such as Age of Wonders or Civilization, the 3D models look really clean and zoomed out the map and interface retains what I loved about it from CK2 while bringing it into focus easier. I like it, at least from what I’ve seen.
There is a full genetics system, as they move into a full-on actual dynastic system. A bigger focus on the player as a character even than CK2 was doing, from what Eurogamer wrote.
Take a look at some previews and come back here - what are the thoughts of the CK2 veterans? This looks cool to me, at any rate!
I hope they dumb down all the fiddly strategical stuff. I don’t want to deal with managing armies and forts or whatever, I just want to make deformed incest babies with close family and then take over Europe… assuming we can’t play somewhere more interesting this time around, like a burgeoning colony settled around Barnard’s Star.
From the screenshots it looks like they aren’t fundamentally changing the way the game works. Everything looks pretty familiar with a new pretty shell. I like that you see the body of your character now, it will better convey the change in fortunes as you get more land and grow in rank.
This means they’ll need to achieve two things :
a better combat system
carry over most of the old content
If they don’t carry over much of the old features and also don’t radically change the foundation, I think they’ll be in trouble with the fan base. The last thing you want is for lots of reviews saying they’d rather play CK2. One sign they intend to do this is the announcement that the game map includes India from the get go. Central Africa sounds good!
The map looks good, but it’s a little too cartoony in my view. The imperator map looks better but I’ll reserve judgements until closer to release.
Mechanics wise, it seems most of it is in. But Henrik mentioned that events will be redone, with a focus on making them more realistic and removing the supernatural effects.
as to enticements of different options, religions will be constantly evolving and heresies should be organic, cadet branches exist (in some way).
sounds good, but I still have a lot to explore in ck2 before pdx decides to fix the problems with the release version.
While the whole apocalyptic shit was overdone and kicked me out of CK2, removing how superstition, let alone religion, was a vivid and real force that dictated probably a lot of actions beyond the occasional cynical genius (like it is still nowadays in parts of the world remote to what we might think is our ubiquitous way of seeing things), sounds like a poor orientation to me.
You shouldn’t rely on me, at least on quickly written summaries. Henrik mentioned that the idea was to remove the supernatural results, and definitely not the superstitions around them, especially with regards to religion. I’m even inclined to believe he intends to increase them.
My thought on this is that it will be nice to play CK2 with all of the expansions, while I wait six or seven years to buy CK3 with all of the inevitable DLC at a decent price.
Dwarf Fortress retains top position in my “if I could only play one game for the rest of time” list, but CKII is the closest anything has ever come to challenging it. Please don’t cock this up, Paradox.
Sweet. Interesting to see that they think alot of CK2 content is being maintained in transition, though I suppose having very similar event scripts might be a part of it?
Also: skilltrees & penalties for not roleplaying your skills/traits sounds very interesting.
I’m on the other side of type of player, for me Hearts of Iron stopped with 2 and 3 (both doing well different things), and I wouldn’t even get close to the 4th. And it looks like it will be the same with CK3.
I really dislike the cleaner, emptier look. I wish Paradox would move toward embracing the boardgame visual style rather this faux, ugly 3D. I really like the way CK2 actually looks and side by side it’s a huge downgrade. Like games generations apart.
The only wish I’d have for CK2, and all strategy games: remove these ass ugly and unintelligible 3d models for units. Give me icons. That’s all. At least HoI3 has NATO symbols. No saving grace for CK2.
And for strategy games my preference is digging down in the complexity instead of streamlining. So an old title with years of development is always more appealing than a brand new one that even in the best scenario is years away from covering the same breadth (and depth).
With CK1 -> CK2 the depth and breadth of complexity was increased, same with HoI2 -> HoI3 (besides some shitty design decisions). With HoI4 and what CK3 looks like, it seems the inverse happens.
So yes, ideally this is the perfect time to play CK2 with all its content. If it wasn’t for the fact that Paradox games don’t really seem to ever come “clean”, and there are always some lingering issues. And then you play 100+ hours to only then realize, “yep, I don’t really like how this is handled”.
I wanted to add that if there’s one area that could use a lot of work is the tutorial/teaching.
Games don’t necessarily need to be streamlined and watered down to be more approachable. They can also use a better presentation to deal with the same amount of things in a better way. There are always margin of improvements.
In particular Paradox games usually just tell you how to use the UI and how to do certain things, but they don’t teach you how the strategist thinks. Where your attention should go, what kind of long terms objectives to pursue, and so on. You spend a HUGE amount of time in a Paradox game just to draw the line between the things that are possible and the things you have little control on. And only then you have an idea of what you actually want to do with the game.
It’s actually funny/intriguing to find out what various people like about these games. I mean I would rather spend 2 hours sitting around trying to set-up my son or my king to arrange a marriage with a princess across the world to see if we can get that throne and do a light skirmish or two, which sounds boring as hell, than to sit there and watch a 200 year war playout… and certainly couldn’t careless about whether that war is historically accurate or not… then you go to a Paradox forum and you wonder if you’re playing the same game.
CK2 kind of making queens viable and mods too was ultra fun too.
