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CK3 - Dev Diary #0 - The Vision

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Greetings friends!

It’s my pleasure to finally be able to talk about what I’ve been working on ever since Stellaris came out (and before) - Crusader Kings III, of course! CK3 draws on the wisdom gained over CK2’s seven long years of expansions and patches - all the things we simply could not do in that game - and represents the natural evolution of Crusader Kings. Yes, CK3 is an evolution, not a revolution; it’s better across the board and does not alter the core CK experience. That said, we did not carry over everything from every expansion and update to CK2. Rather than trying to do full justice to the less appreciated systems, we decided to go deep rather than wide.

The main design goals with Crusader Kings III were:
  • Character Focus: Crusader Kings is clearly and unequivocally about individual characters, unlike our other games. This makes CK most suited for memorable emergent stories, and we wanted to bring characters into all important gameplay mechanics (where possible.)
  • Player Freedom and Progression: We want to cater to all player fantasies we can reasonably accommodate, allowing players to shape their ruler, heirs, dynasty and even religion to their liking - though there should of course be appropriate challenges to overcome.
  • Player Stories: All events and scripted content should feel relevant, impactful and immersive in relation to the underlying simulation. That way, players will perceive and remember stories - their own stories, not the developers’ stories.
  • Approachability: Crusader Kings III should be user friendly without compromising its general level of complexity and historical flavor. It’s nice if it’s easier to get into, but more than that, it should be clear what everything in the game is, what you might want to be doing, and how to go about it.
Now, you might say: “Cool, but I took the time to master CK2, bought all the expansions, and now it provides me an enormous breadth of options. Why should I buy CK3?”

That’s a fair question! As I mentioned earlier, we decided not to carry over all features from CK2, so if you play CK2 primarily for, say, the nomads or the merchant republics (the only faction types that were playable in CK2 but not in CK3), you might be disappointed. There are likely other features and content that will be missed by some players, but, in return, we believe that everyone will find the core gameplay far more fun and rewarding! To be clear, CK3 is a vastly bigger game than CK2 was on release.

I know this dev diary was short on details, but don’t despair - they will be revealed over the coming months!
 
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Evaris said:
Something I hope to see, is AI accepting offers to be vassals.

If I'm a king with a sizeable military, with +100 relations with a duke, who just lost a war and half his territory to another kingdom nearby he has a sour relation with, there should be at least a decent chance of him accepting such an offer.

Right now, the option to offer vassalization is only useful in multiplayer matches or if you turn on yesmen, and that annoys me.
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Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I've been able to offer vassalization to the AI more than a few times in my day. The trick is:

1. Same culture/religion

2. Must be part of your de jure kingdom/empire

3. You must be stronger than them

4. They don't hate your guts

There are exceptions to this, usually if you have a super-high relations bonus and can obliterate them with a sneeze. I seem to recall being able to diplo-vassalize duke-level characters as an Emperor, but never as a King.
 
the_dinks said:
Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I've been able to offer vassalization to the AI more than a few times in my day. The trick is:

1. Same culture/religion

2. Must be part of your de jure kingdom/empire

3. You must be stronger than them

4. They don't hate your guts

There are exceptions to this, usually if you have a super-high relations bonus and can obliterate them with a sneeze. I seem to recall being able to diplo-vassalize duke-level characters as an Emperor, but never as a King.
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Yeah, I've never had the opportunity where someone will actually accept vassalization, personally. Which, regardless of it's rare position at present, there should be more triggers and considerations and probability as to whether someone might consider such, including military campaigns, relative power, threat (eg, madlad king has conquered all your neighbors left and right, but we're on good terms, I'm sure you don't want your lands sacked, so why wouldn't you work for the king? ), Other threatening powers (eg, other madlad king is on his doorstep and they're not on good terms), and some counts / barons should probably be suceptable to simply buying their vassalage, I'd imagine, though I'm not sure of any historical examples of such.

Regardless, I just feel it needs to be more likely and useful.
 
Testeria said:
This is exactly why I prefer CK2 model then EU4. In CK2 when there is new faction to play (tribes, muslims, horse riders) it grant You almost new game (I played more than 1000 hours with Old gods alone!). Purely mechanical expansions like EU4 or even Holy Fury can offer me just few games at most, because they do not change enough in the game. In HolyFury I created panslavic green empire with custom religion, reactivated hellenistic religion twice and that's mostly it. Good value for 20$ but nowhere near what I got from tribal or Muslim expansions.

As to EU4 I only bought Dharma with more then 25% of the full price and Dharma was not worth the full price for me - didn't even finished my Mugal campaign...
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So you would rather pay extra to play certain nations rather than having them all be available with the purchase of the base game?
 
Awesome news!! Really curious how CK3 will shape up to be. And also...

Doomdark said:
Approachability: Crusader Kings III should be user friendly without compromising its general level of complexity and historical flavor. It’s nice if it’s easier to get into, but more than that, it should be clear what everything in the game is, what you might want to be doing, and how to go about it.
Click to expand...

Will this mean that land combat with finally be understandable? After 7 years of CK2 experience I still have no clue how it works exactly, and I've really tried to understand it... :)
 
Streletz said:
Well sorry for being negative but

->“Cool, but I took the time to master CK2, bought all the expansions, and now it provides me an enormous breadth of options. Why should I buy CK3?”

This dairy absolutely don't answer to this question.

==snip==

Not convinced at all by all this stuff, just hoping for more informative diaries then this merely disguised ad.
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It absolutely does. CK3 will be a complete game with elements from CK2 and several of its expansions, with expanded and deepened mechanics that set it apart from its predecessor.

And you'll notice that this dev diary is labeled 0, almost certainly because it's less informative than it is an FYI.

the_dinks said:
Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I've been able to offer vassalization to the AI more than a few times in my day. The trick is:

1. Same culture/religion

2. Must be part of your de jure kingdom/empire

3. You must be stronger than them

4. They don't hate your guts

There are exceptions to this, usually if you have a super-high relations bonus and can obliterate them with a sneeze. I seem to recall being able to diplo-vassalize duke-level characters as an Emperor, but never as a King.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's very hard to get dukes to accept vassalization as a king because of the "small difference in rank" malus. On the other hand, I've found that as an emperor I can sometimes vassalize counts who aren't same culture or religion (but not both) outside my de jure lands if our relationship is high enough.
 
DreadLindwyrm said:
Someone who has reached the edge of what they can get the overloaded and bloated code that has 3 years of initial development and 7 years of layered updates might well declare it "finished", and move on to a new version that has most of the good points carried over, and has space to rework the areas that didn't work well, or turned out to make other areas of code harder to handle.


And "barebones" is hardly what they're suggesting we're going to get. A lot of the features will transfer over, with new ones to take the place of some of the things they're *not* bringing across.
Other things they're not bringing across can be handled in future expansions when they've written good versions that play nicely with the rest of the game.
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It’s never going to have all the content of CK2, and in a way that can be a good thing for freshness and identifying what should or could be dropped (Happy with what I heard so far on this although I do like playing nomads with JD).

I think the perfect recipe is.

1. Decide what can be dropped (appears to have been done).
2. Don’t release a “bare bones” game (luckily for us CK2 players, Imperator Rome has took the hit and lessons would no doubt have been learnt).

There are now three ways NOT to release a bare bones game.

1. Provide more content on release than CK2 did. The easy way is to offer us what we already had from CK2 like Muslims and Pagan gameplay.
2. Expand on something that really worked in CK2 like “way of life” (looks to be being done), improved Cellas belli gameplay like recruiting spies in the court.
3. Something entirely different, thinking out of the box with a new feature(s) that surprises everyone with its ingenuity. This will probably have to happen for it to have a standing ovation release, especially with the high expectations the fan base now has on Paradox. Reworking the combat mechanics could be this option and making battles more exciting.

What NOT to do Paradox please.

1. Don’t tone the game down. It’s such a fine line between making it more accessible and making it too boring. I personally thought CK2 was not a complicated game, make things like identifying counties within your duchy and kingdom easier to find for instance. I think HOI4 did a good job of opening it up to a new audience but it still took me three DLCs to get what I wanted out of it.
2. I thought I had another point but it’s gone lol but I guess if you keep any feature in CK2, don’t tone it down unless you want to expand on it later in a different direction fulfilling point 3 above.

Just thought of another point... not sure about the UI.
 
General Von Trapp said:
Just thought of another point... not sure about the UI.
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I just applied for the closed beta, and judging by the questions they're asking on the application it seems like they're still looking for input on user experience elements like the UI.

Mind you, I like the UI (aside from the lifeless event image that people have been complaining about, that was pretty eh), but I think there's still time for it to develop more to your liking as well.
 
What I am really going to like is the new 3D character model. I mean imagine how cool Glitterhoof will look or your beary son.

Also, here is hoping that after the successful treatment your character would really been shown without his arm.

I'D even going that far by saying that I'd pay for a DLC providing this features.
 
RaccoonCity said:
I have a question: is there gonna be a POP system? Or at least some type of population number in the provinces?
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You are weird, or even dangerous, who cares about peasants. I don't care about how many serfs I have, only how much taxation or levy I get out of it :)
 
I like that there is a new version on the horizon. Atm I have a really hard time to play CK2 on my computer and laptop because for mere technical reasons - like support for high resolutions and different font sizes.
 
It's a pity that they're removing supernatural elemets. In my opinion they were the coolest thing about CK2. And "witch" is something enteirly different than "mystic". Witch evokes image of some lame old hag who mixes frogs and herbs where mystic is an enlightened scholar summoning angels to gain esoteric knowledge about the universe or something similair. The latter sounds more cool to play
 
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Ozajasz said:
It's a pity that they're removing supernatural elemets. In my opinion they were the coolest thing about CK2. And "witch" is something enteirly different than "mystic". Witch evokes image of some lame old hag who mixes frogs and herbs where mystic is an enlightened scholar summoning angels to gain esoteric knowledge about the universe or something similair. The latter sounds more cool to play
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Hopefully with the systemic changes we can bring it back ourselves.
 
Prometheus_1 said:
Please Answer my question:

Will there be ASIA Expansion?
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We know the map is getting a bit expanded at launch (Guinea Coast and Eastern Tibet, namely). We don't know if they'll ever go even further east in future updates.
 
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