![]() The strategy is there, to great depth, but 99 per cent of what you’ll be doing in Crusader Kings is hoping that your spouse gets pregnant real quick because you need an heir, or begging and pleading with your most important advisors not to take the titles and lands you’ve given them and form breakaway kingdoms. Crusader Kings III is, at its core, a storytelling simulator, and not a strategy game. Having not played any of the Crusader Kings titles before (I was always more a Europa Universalis fan), I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this for the first time… but it wasn’t what I expected. This is good design work, a good port to console, and it should be studied as such. The logic behind it flows smoothly too, and especially in those early stages when I was learning the ins and outs myself I would find that I just happened along into the right military or development menus, or looking at the right vassal and their role in my kingdom, by going with the flow and the way the menus led me. The way that the menus are organised means that there’s a good triage system with information, with the options and actions that you’ll need the most being accessible with the fewest number of button pushes and taps. Better than I thought it would, actually. Despite that, I also know that there are going to be people that are overwhelmed by it, and highly recommend that you don’t make this your first strategy game, as it will probably put you off the genre. It needs to be this complex because it is a game that is really that deep, and I do think the developers have done everything they can to streamline the tutorial and onboarding as much as possible to get people into the game. To be clear here, this is a lot for new players that aren’t already deeply invested in strategy gaming. On the other hand, Crusader Kings III refocuses on the complexities and depth, and this means that the best way it can onboard players is to sit them though a comprehensive tutorial upfront, and then hope that they remember the bits they need as they play (or are willing to flounder away as they slowly learn the nuances), because any more information conveyed in-game would be a complete overload. In that way Crusader Kings is different to Civilization VI both are equally grand in scope, but Civilization has been designed to be people’s first entry into this kind of strategy experience, so it both teaches you on the fly and makes sure that you have useful tutorial information pop up whenever you need it. There are a lot of menus to wade through and if you’re not prepared to sit down for an hour and focus on the tutorial to learn how it all works and what it all means, then you’re going to be very lost playing this game. It’s not necessarily accessible, but then it wasn’t accessible on PC, either. ![]() Now that isn’t a problem for consoles, I do look forward to a console edition of Europa Universalis V, if that ever happens.Ĭrusader Kings III does play beautifully on the PS5. The real issue with these games is apparently simply that the complexity of AI is too much for console processors, and maps nearly the size of the world simply too much data to handle. One of the most cited arguments is that the interface and game design is too complex to work on controllers, and that is clearly nonsense. ![]() But the release of Crusader Kings on PS5 does put to rest at least some of the reasons that are often given for why Paradox’s work isn’t console friendly. Apparently, this game, much like Europa Universalis IV before it, is too much for the PS4 and earlier. Now, of course, a lot has changed in video games over the last nine years, and in fairness, Crusader Kings III is only available on the newest generation of consoles, which of course weren’t around in 2013. We hope they come across as grand, fun and challenging and we´re not sure we could make that on console.” In that context I asked them about the chances of a console port of Europa Universalis IV – their big new game at the time, and they flatly said this wasn’t a thing that they were considering: “PC gives us the freedom to create the games we want to create and make them just as we want them to be. ![]() I’ve always been a big-time fan of Paradox’s work in the strategy genre, but at the same time, I do prefer to play games on console where I can. To this day I remember that interview, and a big part of the reason why I remember it is also why I find the presence of Crusader Kings III on PlayStation to be so funny: this was a game that the developer assured me wasn’t going to happen. Many years ago now (back in 2013), when was still just a startup website and really little more than a blog, I was fortunate to land an interview with the good people of Paradox Interactive. ![]()
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