You just keep the perfect bits and improve everything else.Ĭrusader Kings III is immense. How do you improve on a game that was so perfect in so many ways, but such a disaster in others?Įasy. In doing so, it has a big legacy to live up to. Not with another Crusader Kings II expansion, but with a whole new Crusader Kings game, one that dials back a lot of that bloat and has an opportunity to start things over. By 2019, Crusader Kings II was positively creaking under the weight of so much content.Īnd so here we are in 2020. The map got bigger, we got more customisation options, new religions were added, the Vikings got some time in the spotlight, as did Jews, and things probably peaked around the time you could marry a horse. It took a lot of work to be able to understand how the game’s relationship systems - based simply on positive and negative factors, like “we have the same religion, so that’s +10″ - and even more work figuring out how to tame the game’s leather-doublet-thick interface.Īfter releasing it in 2012, Paradox spent the following years endlessly expanding the game in almost every way imaginable. But really, Crusader Kings II was a game about drama, since almost everything you did revolved around people, not states or Kingdoms.Ĭrusader Kings II was an incredible achievement, but it wasn’t without its flaws. It was a military and economic strategy game, sure, in that you could go to war and build stuff. Everything you did in the game, everything you were and stood for, impacted how everyone else thought of you, and more importantly, how they reacted to you when it came time to deal with them. The entire game was built upon a vast network of relationships, with every person of note in the game, from the lowest official to the mightiest ruler, having their own distinct personality and traits. Unlike the studio’s other, admittedly drier experiences, though, Crusader Kings II had heart. ![]() ![]() ![]() At first glance it was just another Paradox Interactive grand strategy game, like Hearts of Ironor Europa Universalis, something terribly niche and with all the buttons and menus and abstract complexity that implied. How about with a quick history lesson - of the series, not the actual time period, relax - because what makes Crusader Kings III so special is going to require a quick understanding of what made its predecessor, a revolutionary strategy game, so good in the first place.Ĭrusader Kings III is the direct sequel to 2012’s Crusader Kings II, which I nominated for Kotaku’s Game of the Year back then, and then for around five years after that as well. So…where do we even begin with this game, let along this review? C rusader Kings III is a game that takes in 600 years of human history, from the 9th century through to the 15th, with all the geopolitical conflict, religious turmoil and interpersonal struggles that went along with it.
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