Quick aside: naturally all of this is just my opinion, and I am not an expert in gameplay-systems-design (as many of the people who built Victoria 3 undeniably are). This post may be fairly critical in places, but I do genuinely mean it as a discursive jumping-off point rather than a simple "V3 good" or "V3 bad" shouting match. I tend to write long posts when I can't get them out of my head, so thanks to you for taking the time to read my insomnia-scrawl.
Preamble
I took a bit of a break between 1.0 and checking back into V3 1.2 recently. A lot has I think undeniably been modified and improved for the better, but after about 30 years or so in game I had lost interest. I was trying to interrogate myself as to why that was, and I think it comes down to Victoria 3's core gameplay loop. I'm fully prepared that, as not a V3 expert, I could well have been playing the game "wrong" (though if I am, I think I might consider that as a separate issue with the game's communication).
To nontechnically summarise, a gameplay loop is a set of activities in a game, the completion of which resets to a new version of the same loop - so the set of actions taken to complete a level might be considered a gameplay loop, because that then unlocks the next level, and that level will be completed using a similar bunch of actions. Loops sit inside larger loops, and the "core gameplay loop" I think is best considered as the smallest, frequent gameplay loop which can still be expressed in non-mechanistic language: after all, at some level all games involve the same loop of receiving audio-visual output, responding through a mechanical input (e.g. a keystroke), and then responding to the new audio-visual output. At some level, the core gameplay loop os what players of a game spend most of their time actually doing. Some examples of core gameplay loops might be:
Victoria 3's Gameplay Loops
I would strongly argue that construction is Victoria's core gameplay loop, and that it enjoys primacy in that over the other subgames that exist in Victoria 3, as most of these exist to serve the resource-deficit-construction loop. I found most of my time in the game was structured around the following cycle:
What about when I couldn't solve a resource-deficit problem through the construction sector? I would say this defines how the game's core loop interacts with its other activities:
Goals-setting
Gameplay loops tend to exist in service of an overall motivating goal (exceptions are sometimes gameplay loops that are designed to be in-themselves satisfying, like jumping around in Mario 64 or shooting enemies in Doom 2016). This is often a narrative goal, though strategy games in general and PDX games in particular usually have players set their own goals to some degree (even if that's just "how hard is the AI going to cheat in my game of Civilisation this time?"). For me, getting "this", and getting into a mindset where I understood the systems and the history well enough to generate interesting goals for myself was when I fell in love with Paradox games (I cannot express how boring I found my first game of EU4 all those years ago). However, PDX games tend to also have little nudges towards interesting things to try out, which ideally use the gameplay loops (not just the core one) to acheive a "narrative" objective the player might find satisfying to pull off (e.g. a historical underdog becoming a globe-spanning empire), and I think these are pretty critical in helping to create that pseudo-Pavlovian response where the game works with the player to help cooperate in the interesting story they are trying to tell together. I would argue that the game has the following systems to nudge players towards interesting outcomes:
So overall here, we have a game which places an economic-construction cycle at its core, but which struggles (I would argue) to use motivational systems like journal entries or historical connection to connect that economic gameplay to narratively meaningful objectives to the player.
Player impact
What effect does all this have on a player? I can only speak for myself (and, at this point, I really do want re-emphasise what I said about this being my opinion and this post being meant discursively rather than argumentatively), but the goals-setting issue means that I struggle to buy into any higher fantasy of the game beyond what I am mechanically doing in it for most of the time I spend playing it. Which...is acting as a building magnate. I tell my workers to build stuff, and sometimes we find out new techniques for building better stuff, so we build that stuff instead or modify existing stuff, and I can sometimes scroll around other systems (or the beautiful but pointless visual map) and see the stuff I've built. And that is a fine narrative fantasy to have (c.f. every city building game ever), but it neither makes me feel like a Victorian imperialist sitting at the highest seat of government, nor the inimitable "spirit of the nation" that whispers into Garibaldi's or Gladstone's ear as they plan out their next campaign. As someone who is centrally interested in the Victoria series as a society, politics and diplomacy sim, that presents some issues - to the point, where, not even terribly enjoying my construction loop, I am irritated at my country for even having domestic politics that restrict me from building more effectively, where in Victoria 2, I would both groan and grin when the "wrong" party won power.
I guess I am increasingly worried, as someone who has cheered the existence of Victoria 3 from when it was first announced, that despite all the tweaks and improvements that are being worked on by the developers (who, fair play, engage gracefully with most post-release criticism online and seem personally committed to getting the game "up to speed" in its first few patches after a rocky launch), that this game might just not be for me.
Comparison to Victoria 2 (HPM)
I don't want to focus at length on how this compares to Victoria 2, not least because it isn't totally fair to the separate creative intention the developers have for this game as distinct from that one, and also because I know some people will disqualify my criticism on the grounds that my point of reference here is the "vanilla+" Historical Project Mod. To that latter point, I would argue that people are now more familiar with modded V2 than base V2, that HPM doesn't radically change the underlying gameplay loop and that it is reasonable for the sights to be set "higher" in some sense for a larger team developing a game in 2023 than a volunteer mod developed in a decade-plus old game by a small team. Having gone through this experience with Victoria 3, I was interested in what the core gameplay loop in Victoria 2 that I had presumably enjoyed so much was.
First off, there is supposedly a construction "meta" in Victoria 2 of selecting a reactionary or communist party, and using that to constantly build factories, dealing with rebel problems as they come. I have almost never done this, largely because the game offers more centrality to its political simulation (c.f. vast rebel stacks, all the time, usually requiring some intervention from the player to resolve) over its economic one and using my heft to force a party into power just felt "wrong" except in periods of massive turbulent unemployment, or if I was an out-and-out dictatorship anyway. In this way, the game seems to connect its abstract goal-setting behaviour much better to its moment to moment gameplay (I have no qualms in Victoria 3 about inviting an unpopular IG into power if it will help me pass a good law without tanking my stability), and I have never felt like I have been frustrated in my V2 goals for not having babysat my economy throughout a whole campaign.
There is obviously the warfare loop which is much like any other PDX strategy game - move units, or try to get enemy units to move into you, rinse and repeat. I've talked elsewhere about how I enjoy how the changing nature of units (particularly favouring defence in the late game) and conscription makes the warfare feel different over the course of a campaign in a way Victoria 3 lacks, and how the tedium builds a sense of weight to the decisions (and mistakes) I make with my units, but it is undeniably tedious. That said, I wouldn't consider warfare micro to be the "core" Victoria 2 loop because it revolves around a temporary subgame (that is, being at war) and the opportunity for gains while at war are usually fairly limited (i.e. a couple of states at most, before WWI).
I found that my typical gameplay loop in Victoria 2 was actually defined around the technology system, in the following manner:
***
If I had to give any closing thoughts (apart from thanks to you for reading this overlong scrawl), it would be that this buffet-system of different microgames which more impactfully connect to my top-level narrative fantasies of the period than the construction-centrality of Victoria 3 better supports my ludonarrative experience of playing/running/ruling a Victorian-era nation, though I will be the first to admit that, in my own analysis, it is also a weird experience that the central activity of Victoria 2 could be described as directing the government's non-existent research division to fix whatever problems the ruler was currently facing.
Preamble
I took a bit of a break between 1.0 and checking back into V3 1.2 recently. A lot has I think undeniably been modified and improved for the better, but after about 30 years or so in game I had lost interest. I was trying to interrogate myself as to why that was, and I think it comes down to Victoria 3's core gameplay loop. I'm fully prepared that, as not a V3 expert, I could well have been playing the game "wrong" (though if I am, I think I might consider that as a separate issue with the game's communication).
To nontechnically summarise, a gameplay loop is a set of activities in a game, the completion of which resets to a new version of the same loop - so the set of actions taken to complete a level might be considered a gameplay loop, because that then unlocks the next level, and that level will be completed using a similar bunch of actions. Loops sit inside larger loops, and the "core gameplay loop" I think is best considered as the smallest, frequent gameplay loop which can still be expressed in non-mechanistic language: after all, at some level all games involve the same loop of receiving audio-visual output, responding through a mechanical input (e.g. a keystroke), and then responding to the new audio-visual output. At some level, the core gameplay loop os what players of a game spend most of their time actually doing. Some examples of core gameplay loops might be:
- Running and jumping to overcome an obstacle in a classic Mario game, which sits inside the larger loop of completing levels
- Positioning each block in Tetris, within the larger loop of clearing rows
- Choosing what your cities should build
- Moving and fighting with your units
Victoria 3's Gameplay Loops
I would strongly argue that construction is Victoria's core gameplay loop, and that it enjoys primacy in that over the other subgames that exist in Victoria 3, as most of these exist to serve the resource-deficit-construction loop. I found most of my time in the game was structured around the following cycle:
- The game would whine at me that I had a deficit of something, through one of a number of notifications (e.g. shortages, expensive government goods, expensive military goods). The game takes pains to make this same point in a number of different ways, which reinforces to me that this is designed to be a core system.
- If the good was a raw resource, I would find a place to build more of that resource and add it to the construction queue, potentially jumping it to the top.
- If the good was a developed resource, I would find a factory that made that resource, and build more of that factory as well as repeat this entire loop for any expensive inputs for that factory
- This would usually eventually create new deficits, so the process repeats (typically before the entire construction queue has run through).
What about when I couldn't solve a resource-deficit problem through the construction sector? I would say this defines how the game's core loop interacts with its other activities:
- The next loop "up" is probably the technology-PM loop, which was the one I found most frequently engaging with after construction. I would unlock a tech (sometimes directedly, sometimes undirectedly), modify my production methods all at once or gradually, releasing and creating new production bottlenecks, and reengage with either the construction or the technology loop as a result. I'll also point out that unlike many other games, the technology system doesn't introduce fundamentally new modes of play - new subgames or loops - or radically alter existing ones beyond what buildings you are building where, with possible exceptions being technologies that introduce new organisations of political parties (which I think does meaningfully complicate the political game) and how multilateral alliances can in principle completely reshape war and diplomacy to generate alliance chains and webs.
- Trade is fairly obviously aimed at fulfilling this deficit-construction cycle where resources are not available domestically, and at least in my experience is not terribly engaging as a system in an of itself.
- War and colonisation seem to mainly exist to gain access to resources that can be used to fill up holes in your deficit-construction cycle (e.g. getting access to rubber or oil). These processes are both taken so far out of the player's hands that they a) don't hold much ludonarrative heft in themselves (I never feel proud or satisfied when my soldiers make a breakthrough because I have so little connection with what they are doing) and b) have no gameplay loops inside themselves, so I would argue broadly should be considered in terms of the service they do to the deficit-construction gameplay loop rather than fully independent subgames in themselves - some people would be happy playing V3's construction game without any warfare, but no-one would want to play its warfare game without any national economy.
- Diplomacy is fairly bare bones - I would say that it can be considered under trade systems (national markets), warfare and conquest, and domestic resource-construction capability in national unifications.
- Politics is frequently (though, to be fair, not always), a mechanism for freeing up more productive capacity through either labour, trade or capital for your resource-construction capability. Political changes tend to occur as the result of economic movements, further tying the system fundamentally back to the resource-construction cycle.
Goals-setting
Gameplay loops tend to exist in service of an overall motivating goal (exceptions are sometimes gameplay loops that are designed to be in-themselves satisfying, like jumping around in Mario 64 or shooting enemies in Doom 2016). This is often a narrative goal, though strategy games in general and PDX games in particular usually have players set their own goals to some degree (even if that's just "how hard is the AI going to cheat in my game of Civilisation this time?"). For me, getting "this", and getting into a mindset where I understood the systems and the history well enough to generate interesting goals for myself was when I fell in love with Paradox games (I cannot express how boring I found my first game of EU4 all those years ago). However, PDX games tend to also have little nudges towards interesting things to try out, which ideally use the gameplay loops (not just the core one) to acheive a "narrative" objective the player might find satisfying to pull off (e.g. a historical underdog becoming a globe-spanning empire), and I think these are pretty critical in helping to create that pseudo-Pavlovian response where the game works with the player to help cooperate in the interesting story they are trying to tell together. I would argue that the game has the following systems to nudge players towards interesting outcomes:
- The "tutorial" campaigns - I know implementation is a bit funky, but I think these are unreservedly a great idea, not just in conditioning players towards interesting play, but giving them tools to identify interesting play in future campaigns.
- Achievements - I'm not terribly motivated by this, but they all look like pretty fun things to do. I would, though, point out, that most of these refer to diplomatic/military/political objectives that are broadly disconnected from the underlying economic meat of the game - this has some relevance to the next section on "player impact".
- "Number go up" - the numbers in the top left of the screen are a huge part of the game, and reinforce the underlying economic nature of the game. I have seen many posts with people cheering their absolutely ludicrous GDP, but it's the SoL system that gets me. It's a clear "narrative" goal - few people *want* to go into a game making their citizens poor (and if they do, it's a great visual indicator that they are - this is some real jackboot oppression right here!), and it ties neatly into "why" you're building all these factories and making sure everyone can have their beef and potatoes for Sunday roasts. I think a lot of the specific implementation is a bit visually muddy (I don't immediately click that capitalists with their unbuttoned, ill-fitting shirts are fabulously wealthy, and I have an ill-sense of how rich someone needs to be before they think it worth buying a parasol), but it's also fun in principle to see your different citizens physically look different as your economy develops (when I was a kid, I really wanted Civ 3 to show you the average person's living room rather than the presidential palace). The whole needs system reacts dynamically to what you're doing without being a micromanagement hellhole and works in concert with the player to tell a compelling story. A+! A side point here is that some very smart person whose name I can't remember suggested that perhaps factory PMs could work in the same way as pop needs to efficient transmute needs (e.g. fuel for the furnace, regardless of whether that's coal or electricity) into outputs, rather than this being a player diktat, and I think that's a fantastic idea (even if the AI and linear algebra computational costs might be prohibitive in reality). But! Back onto the "SoL goal's" relationship to gameplay - the SoL system is fundamentally one kind of goal (make people well off - the information readily available is too high-level to really prioritise making one kind of person, bar an economic class, better off than others), pursued largely through this one core resource-construction loop. There are to my knowledge few other ways of making your citizens happier than building more factories.
- History and historical counterfactuals - "what if this but different" is often a big motivator for me as it allows me to use real-world information to help build out the story the game is trying to tell me. The game's simulation of history is frequently wonky (c.f. the 1.0 CSA), which makes it harder to connect what is alt-historically happening in the game with a counterfactual of real-history if what is happening in the game is so obviously "untrue". To be fair, the devs are working on fixing this so the modal V3 universe looks more like our own, but annoyingly for me, the focus on economics and relatively abstract politics and warfare systems takes the focus off areas of history I know and care about, and can think of interesting counterfactuals for, to ones I don't know enough about to care, except in gameplay terms. I would wager more players are engaged with the alt-history of "what if the USA had fully annexed Mexico?" or "What if the 1848 revolutions had been radically more successful?" than "What if Peru had become the number one exporter of automobiles?"
- Journal entries - in principle, I really like the way that journal entries guide you towards interesting narrative objectives, like industrialising quickly or maintaining autocracy. Events and decisions are a big motivating factor for me in other PDX games because they often present at least slightly-OP rewards ("Slightly-OP" is a big reason why I prefer the railroading in base-game EU4 and Vic2 HPM to that of HOI4, as it feels like a powerful reward that isn't game-breaking) and sometimes whole new game mechanics to play with. But the journal entries in Vic3 generally feel like they confirm what I was doing anyway (which is largely this construction loop) rather than reward me for playing exceptionally, as the rewards are typically frequent, small and grounded in either the construction or research loops (choose between marginally higher output or a small tech discount is a very common outcome). Even events that feel like they should be enormously catalytic, like the game's representation of Russia's Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy ("Religion, Autocracy and Nationality") or the 1848 Revolutions are relatively small (like...temporary buffs to ruler popularity or assimilation rates rather than, say, your entire elite buying into the system) or grounded in systems that, partly to emphasise to supremacy of the economic system, feel misrepresented: elites representing economic interest groups who you can potentially invite into government skewing to democratic 21st century multiculturalism is not, I'm afraid, a good representation of the centrifugal property-holder-democratic nationalism and non-elite urban unrest that swept Europe in 1848 and 1849. Frankly, seeing Religion, Autocracy and Nationality time out and to get basically nothing for it was what had me quit after my 30 years.
So overall here, we have a game which places an economic-construction cycle at its core, but which struggles (I would argue) to use motivational systems like journal entries or historical connection to connect that economic gameplay to narratively meaningful objectives to the player.
Player impact
What effect does all this have on a player? I can only speak for myself (and, at this point, I really do want re-emphasise what I said about this being my opinion and this post being meant discursively rather than argumentatively), but the goals-setting issue means that I struggle to buy into any higher fantasy of the game beyond what I am mechanically doing in it for most of the time I spend playing it. Which...is acting as a building magnate. I tell my workers to build stuff, and sometimes we find out new techniques for building better stuff, so we build that stuff instead or modify existing stuff, and I can sometimes scroll around other systems (or the beautiful but pointless visual map) and see the stuff I've built. And that is a fine narrative fantasy to have (c.f. every city building game ever), but it neither makes me feel like a Victorian imperialist sitting at the highest seat of government, nor the inimitable "spirit of the nation" that whispers into Garibaldi's or Gladstone's ear as they plan out their next campaign. As someone who is centrally interested in the Victoria series as a society, politics and diplomacy sim, that presents some issues - to the point, where, not even terribly enjoying my construction loop, I am irritated at my country for even having domestic politics that restrict me from building more effectively, where in Victoria 2, I would both groan and grin when the "wrong" party won power.
I guess I am increasingly worried, as someone who has cheered the existence of Victoria 3 from when it was first announced, that despite all the tweaks and improvements that are being worked on by the developers (who, fair play, engage gracefully with most post-release criticism online and seem personally committed to getting the game "up to speed" in its first few patches after a rocky launch), that this game might just not be for me.
Comparison to Victoria 2 (HPM)
I don't want to focus at length on how this compares to Victoria 2, not least because it isn't totally fair to the separate creative intention the developers have for this game as distinct from that one, and also because I know some people will disqualify my criticism on the grounds that my point of reference here is the "vanilla+" Historical Project Mod. To that latter point, I would argue that people are now more familiar with modded V2 than base V2, that HPM doesn't radically change the underlying gameplay loop and that it is reasonable for the sights to be set "higher" in some sense for a larger team developing a game in 2023 than a volunteer mod developed in a decade-plus old game by a small team. Having gone through this experience with Victoria 3, I was interested in what the core gameplay loop in Victoria 2 that I had presumably enjoyed so much was.
First off, there is supposedly a construction "meta" in Victoria 2 of selecting a reactionary or communist party, and using that to constantly build factories, dealing with rebel problems as they come. I have almost never done this, largely because the game offers more centrality to its political simulation (c.f. vast rebel stacks, all the time, usually requiring some intervention from the player to resolve) over its economic one and using my heft to force a party into power just felt "wrong" except in periods of massive turbulent unemployment, or if I was an out-and-out dictatorship anyway. In this way, the game seems to connect its abstract goal-setting behaviour much better to its moment to moment gameplay (I have no qualms in Victoria 3 about inviting an unpopular IG into power if it will help me pass a good law without tanking my stability), and I have never felt like I have been frustrated in my V2 goals for not having babysat my economy throughout a whole campaign.
There is obviously the warfare loop which is much like any other PDX strategy game - move units, or try to get enemy units to move into you, rinse and repeat. I've talked elsewhere about how I enjoy how the changing nature of units (particularly favouring defence in the late game) and conscription makes the warfare feel different over the course of a campaign in a way Victoria 3 lacks, and how the tedium builds a sense of weight to the decisions (and mistakes) I make with my units, but it is undeniably tedious. That said, I wouldn't consider warfare micro to be the "core" Victoria 2 loop because it revolves around a temporary subgame (that is, being at war) and the opportunity for gains while at war are usually fairly limited (i.e. a couple of states at most, before WWI).
I found that my typical gameplay loop in Victoria 2 was actually defined around the technology system, in the following manner:
- I would pick a general mid-term goal to achieve (e.g. go to war and conquer some territory, improve my great power ranking), problem to address (e.g. a tax deficit, general economic weakness) or a decision or invention I wanted to achieve (some of which unlock whole new mechanics, like the scramble for Africa)
- I would work out a tech that I needed to work towards that objective (e.g. improving my military, getting a pre-requisite for a decision or an invention), usually from a small selection without a totally clear front-runner (as some other techs might help with other overall objectives I was considering, or something might have multiple pre-requisites)
- Random stuff would happen, like other inventions, other nation's play or a crisis, over the course of researching that tech, which would affect my goal selection process
- The tech would complete and I would either have completed my goal, or need to re-evaluate and potentially select a new one
***
If I had to give any closing thoughts (apart from thanks to you for reading this overlong scrawl), it would be that this buffet-system of different microgames which more impactfully connect to my top-level narrative fantasies of the period than the construction-centrality of Victoria 3 better supports my ludonarrative experience of playing/running/ruling a Victorian-era nation, though I will be the first to admit that, in my own analysis, it is also a weird experience that the central activity of Victoria 2 could be described as directing the government's non-existent research division to fix whatever problems the ruler was currently facing.
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