Greetings from all of us in the CK3 team!

The game is finally released, and what a journey it has been! It’s truly humbling to see something that we’ve worked on for so long, and poured so much of our passion into, finally out in the wild. We’re overjoyed with the response we’ve gotten so far, it’s great that so many of you seem to enjoy the game. The amount of stories and experiences already being shared is nothing but mind-boggling, and lots of them are circulating throughout the team, putting many smiles upon our faces (especially all the memes!). We in the team wish to extend a grand ‘thank you’ to all of you for making this launch so fantastic.

In the near future we’ll be looking at collecting and addressing as many of your issues as we can. The upcoming patch (release date TBD) is a mix of improvements that didn't make it into the release (including some really fancy UI upgrades!), and bug fixes based on your feedback. Patch notes will be posted closer in time to when the patch will be released. If you have an issue, make sure to report it here so that it’s sure to be looked at!

In the next few weeks there will be no Dev Diaries, as we’ll focus our efforts on working with the feedback we’re getting from all of you. When something of interest happens, we’ll of course be back! Until then, please keep enjoying the game, sharing your stories, and shaping the world to your liking!

 

[Keizer Harm]

On top of that, that this is a fantastic release is something called "an opinion" of yours. It's not some objective fact.

It's the most successful game release in Paradox history, both in terms of sales, critical rating, and consumer rating. 8.2 user rating on Metacritic. What metrics for a fantastic release do you accept?

A tip for the future. When you're trying to discredit people by pulling things about them out of the nether, at least try to keep your narrative consistent. Because in the span of just two posts you managed to change your tune from portraying the people that "disrupt" a thread you declared yourself the king of as lacking manners to outright being emotionally stunted. It's not super convincing.

I'm just going to quote this and let your tone speak for itself.

 

[dect69]

This game certainly has the potential to be the greatest Paradox game so far, but it would be good if certain game-breaking bugs and balance issues are ironed out as quickly as possible. Still, CK3 had a (for Paradox titles ) solid launch...

 

[ZeRedleg]

And thank you for making a great game!

 

[SauronGorthaur]

It's the most successful game release in Paradox history, both in terms of sales, critical rating, and consumer rating. 8.2 user rating on Metacritic. What metrics for a fantastic release do you accept?

I'm sorry, does it being the best Paradox release mean that it must automatically be fantastic? I missed the memo where any given studio must have a fantastic release to their name.

What game release would constitute "fantastic" to me"? One in which Paradox actually addresses the glaring issues in their QA department. Again, the issue with matrilineal marriage for example is an outright downgrade to the state of things in CKII. An 8 year old game where patrilineal marriage being the standard was hardcoded.

Meanwhile in CKIII there are literally female rulers among the suggested starting characters and yet if they are left to the AI they marry patrilineally within weeks of starting the game. That the game released in this state indicates no one actually noticed it. And that no one noticed something this wrong indicates no one ever checked how even those suggested rulers fare when played by the AI.

On top of that, because knights (most of whom are rulers) drop like flies, a whole boatload of titles ends up getting inherited by women. I.e. Paradox had an abnormal amount of female rulers to check during playtesting. And even then the AI's unwillingness to use proper marriage still flew under Paradox's radar.

Don't get me wrong, I like the game a lot and from design perspective I find it to be pretty damn impressive. Aside of some instances of the game not launching properly for some few people it also seems to be very stable. But from QA perspective CKIII shows that even the last few Stellaris patches that were a bug breeding ground haven't taught PDS anything.

Which you'd have realized even from reading my previous post if you didn't cut out a single sentence out of what I said. Because I already explicitly stated that to me the game can't be considered fantastic from the QA perspective. If it wasn't for that aspect, I would most certainly have agreed with using that label for the game as a whole because most everything else in it I find to be amazing (I do have some minor gripes about deliberate design choices like renown, but not nearly enough that would make me drop my rating).

I'm just going to quote this and let your tone speak for itself.

What is that even supposed to mean? And what tone would you have preferred for me to use when I was pointing out how the narrative the user I was replying to constructed just to discredit people being critical of things was so blatantly dishonest they couldn't even keep it consistent for more than one post? Speaking of which, the fact that you focused on said tone rather than the dishonest nature of what I was directing that tone at also speaks for itself. So cheers for you making the decision to do this.

 

[DominusNovus]

I'm a bit disappointed that some of us here don't know basic savoir-vivre and bring their complaints to a celebratory thread. Guys, there's whole sections on these forums dedicated to voicing your concerns. Please be courteous and keep bug reports and similar out of this thread. Regardless of whatever it is that bugs you, PI has worked extremely hard for literal years to bring us this fantastic release. Let's celebrate with them for a minute, shall we.

What a silly notion. This is a dev diary, in which the devs specifically let us know that they have acknowledged some of our concerns (both bugs and general UI issues). To reiterate to them in a thread we can be more confident that they’re reading how high a priority we rate those issues is entirely reasonable.

Dev Diaries are always places for the customers to provide feedback (with a few infamous exceptions).

Paradox gets our money quicker than we get fixes to issues.

 

[stnylan]

It's the most successful game release in Paradox history, both in terms of sales, critical rating, and consumer rating. 8.2 user rating on Metacritic. What metrics for a fantastic release do you accept?

What defines "successful" or "fantastic" depends very much on what you choose to measure those terms by. By the metrics you have selected, you can call it a success. That's fine. Other people might validly select other objectives. And us humans are hard-wired to naturally select the data that accords most with our gut feeling, or with our hopes.

For example, given the prevalance of various bug and balance issues some people may consider CK3 not playable. Other may have look at Stellaris at launch, but with its launch bugs and balance issues decided that game still very much was playable. By that comparison Stellaris' launch was better.

I am not, believe it or not, saying CK3 had a bad launch. But I am saying there is room for alternative interpretations.

 

[SauronGorthaur]

What defines "successful" or "fantastic" depends very much on what you choose to measure those terms by. By the metrics you have selected, you can call it a success. That's fine. Other people might validly select other objectives. And us humans are hard-wired to naturally select the data that accords most with our gut feeling, or with our hopes.

For example, given the prevalance of various bug and balance issues some people may consider CK3 not playable. Other may have look at Stellaris at launch, but with its launch bugs and balance issues decided that game still very much was playable. By that comparison Stellaris' launch was better.

I am not, believe it or not, saying CK3 had a bad launch. But I am saying there is room for alternative interpretations.

Hell, I'm not saying it's a bad launch either. There's plenty of wiggle room between bad and fantastic after all. It'd say it's good, great even. But not fantastic. And not just because it has some bugs (all games have those on release), but because of the nature of some of those bugs. If all of them were things like "AI ignores attrition when selecting a raiding target" (I've seen my Polish vassals raid Navarra while going there on land), I'd have still agreed with the fantastic release label.

But, as I mentioned before, the bugs extend even to CKIII's core gameplay loop of acquiring titles, getting new children and passing those titles onto your children. And some of them are blatantly easy to spot. Launch a game in the 1066 starting date and watch what AI Matilda of Tuscany does. Within a minute she'll marry patrilineally despite being a childless female ruler. And this is where I draw the line.

 

[Keizer Harm]

What defines "successful" or "fantastic" depends very much on what you choose to measure those terms by. By the metrics you have selected, you can call it a success. That's fine. Other people might validly select other objectives. And us humans are hard-wired to naturally select the data that accords most with our gut feeling, or with our hopes.

For example, given the prevalance of various bug and balance issues some people may consider CK3 not playable. Other may have look at Stellaris at launch, but with its launch bugs and balance issues decided that game still very much was playable. By that comparison Stellaris' launch was better.

I am not, believe it or not, saying CK3 had a bad launch. But I am saying there is room for alternative interpretations.

I'm not denying that other opinions exist, but some have more factual basis than others. "I don't like the game" is 100% opinion, it's not wrong or right. "The game was released on September 1 (CEST)" is 100% factual, no opinion about it. But "The release was fantastic" is in-between. The metrics usually considered to measure the success of a release all point in the same direction, including the opinions of tens of thousands of people in aggregate, so holding a differing opinion makes you a minority by definition.

It is the same way we can say "North Korea is a bad place to live" with some degree of objectivity. Yes, you may happen to personally love the landscape or be a fanatic Kim stan, but all usual, accepted metrics for living conditions say the same, so "North Korea is a good place to live" would be an opinion met with much more scepticism than the inverse.

 

[SauronGorthaur]

I'm not denying that other opinions exist, but some have more factual basis than others. "I don't like the game" is 100% opinion, it's not wrong or right. "The game was released on September 1 (CEST)" is 100% factual, no opinion about it. But "The release was fantastic" is in-between. The metrics usually considered to measure the success of a release all point in the same direction, including the opinions of tens of thousands of people in aggregate, so holding a differing opinion makes you a minority by definition.

Who said anything about whether it was successful or not? Because it wasn't me. And whether an opinion is a minority one or not is immaterial.

 

[Keizer Harm]

Who said anything about whether it was successful or not? Because it wasn't me. And whether an opinion is a minority one or not is immaterial.

It is not immaterial. If you go around claiming North Korea is a good place to live, you will be met with scepticism similar to if you went around claiming that vaccines cause autism.

 

[PDX-Nicou]

Annnnnnnd it's gone.

Keep in mind that it is never acceptable to insult other members of the community, and that even heated discussions should remain constructive and civil, so we encourage everyone to please be respectful of one another’s opinions.
We are listening to your feedback, and questions, and reports; And thanks to these we can all move forward and enhance the game even more.

Even if you can voice your issues about CK3 here, it is less easy for us to collect it. That's why we have multiple categories to further split the feedback but also to gather users within the same thing in mind to contribute to a given topic. It adds weigth to it and is clearly easier for us to read.

This said, thank you very much for your messages here, we are very proud of our work on Crusader Kings III and our aim is to make it even better as it ages!
Cheers

 

[Pellaken]

should this be pinned or something?

 

[tapewormlondon]

Hey, there are some niggles, but man this game is good. It feels like an even better version of Vanilla EU4 - I don't mean that in terms of mechanics obviously, but EU4 was, I feel, a spectacular example of how to produce a game sequel. Keeping in the elements of as much DLC as possible, reworking and fine-tuning, and just all-round and overall making a much better game than its predecessor in almost every area.

There will be people that will swear down that CK2 is the better game, and yes, there might be more "content" in CK2 at present (debatable what gaming value that "content" has) but just the same as EU3 the stats on this will speak for themselves. Hardly anyone will be playing CK2 in half a year. I freaking LOVED EU3, it made me fall in love with strategy gaming again. I've never touched it, not once, since EU4. I freaking LOVE CK2.... I can't see any situation where I'm going back to CK2. As far as I'm concerned that is job done.

This is a solid, solid base game. Long Live the King.

 

[daawod.messymess]

Will we see character creation in this update?

 

[DominusNovus]

Hell, I'm not saying it's a bad launch either. There's plenty of wiggle room between bad and fantastic after all. It'd say it's good, great even. But not fantastic. And not just because it has some bugs (all games have those on release), but because of the nature of some of those bugs. If all of them were things like "AI ignores attrition when selecting a raiding target" (I've seen my Polish vassals raid Navarra while going there on land), I'd have still agreed with the fantastic release label.

But, as I mentioned before, the bugs extend even to CKIII's core gameplay loop of acquiring titles, getting new children and passing those titles onto your children. And some of them are blatantly easy to spot. Launch a game in the 1066 starting date and watch what AI Matilda of Tuscany does. Within a minute she'll marry patrilineally despite being a childless female ruler. And this is where I draw the line.

I will agree somewhat that there are bugs that should have be caught. My main issues are that the game is too pretty, and the UI suffers for it, and that many basic UI features in CK2 are gone from CK3.

That said, AI not using matrilineal marriage isn't really a bug. That is really just a feature for the benefit of the player, who is constrained by only being able to play their dynasty. The AI is playing everyone else. Until we have individual AI's running each dynasty, there is no real benefit to the AI if Matilda doesn't marry matrilineally.

 

[GreekSov]

Congratulations for making a game which can make us forget CK2!

 

[cray935]

When will you fix the launcher in the Steam version?

What's wrong with it?

 

[WarwolfOmega]

I'm usually a PDX Fanboi but this time I've got to call you guys out on AI Seduction!

How could you have thought it wouldn't be a huge issue to a lot of players after all the uproar Way of Life caused.

You even added a game rule to disable it, why oh why didn't you put one in CK3 as well????

So please, maybe a quick patch just for a game rule to disable AI seduction, pretty please.

 

[monoxism]

Congrats on a great launch. Having a blast with the game, and looking forward to seeing where you guys will take it.

 

[Jimboy93]

I've been playing Paradox games for over 12 years now, and this is one of the strongest release you've ever had. I'm excited to see what's going to happen with CKIII in the next few weeks and months.