I feel like when a person declared themselves caliphs in opposition to the Abbasid caliphs, it was a middle finger to the increasingly powerless caliphs in Baghdad. Just like when another person was declare pope.
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Revision of Events and Their Development In CK3
- Thread starter chr0me
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About as immersion-breaking as quotes from jolly Victorians. Neither are period appropriate. "Take that" is not slang, it's an English idiom.
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There is such as thing as bad localization you know. When is the last time you saw someone use "take that" who a) wasn't a literal child or someone seen to be childish and b) outside of a comedic context? Words and phrases have their own context beyond their strict meaning. There is a reason why I've been using the word "juvenile" a lot.
I'm sorry but there being worse events in the game doesn't make these particular events less worse. I would like Paradox to fix the minor annoyances, the mildly obnoxious, and the completely ahistorical. Never settle for less.
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Its slang if you grew up as a 90s kid in the US. Again, context, context, context, and, above all, context!
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I think that, to date, the comical tone of certain events has very much been considered to be an integral part of the overall experience - see below reference from the ‘Flavor of Iberia’ dev diary (emphasis my own). Whether there will be much of an alteration in future remains to be seen, albeit the devs have said they’ve taken the feedback about events on board.
“Fate of Iberia contains a multitude of events and decisions ranging from struggle-specific events which shake-up plans, to flavor events designed to enrich the experience with classic paradox comical occurrences and references to regional curiosities.”
“Fate of Iberia contains a multitude of events and decisions ranging from struggle-specific events which shake-up plans, to flavor events designed to enrich the experience with classic paradox comical occurrences and references to regional curiosities.”
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Classic paradox comical occurrences are great, but they need to know the rate at which to use them, and the time and place when to use them. If they use them inappropriately, they can end up with a parody of what they originally wanted to achieve. None of the people discussing here are explicitly against comicality. But when playing CK3, I still want to feel like the setting of the game is "an alternate medieval world with comic elements" and not "the world from the movie Robin Hood: Men in Tights". The key word that was mentioned here is believability. Humor must also be believable and natural, and not used forcibly in any situation.
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Inspired by "clicking away" events mentioned in another thread, I looked up the last stream of CKIII by the developers to see how events are treated by people who develop and then promote the game (I'm not bored, I just needed a mental break from difficult work...). Here's the rundown of the first 20 minutes with timestamps:
Sure, streams have their own rules and developers know the game inside out, but at the same time - these streams promote the game, are intended to show the actual gameplay, and it's the only way to get a direct view at how it is played by its creators. It speaks for itself. Much more scathing review of events in CKIII than I would ever imagine it to be half an hour ago.
- 7:23-7:26 clicked away event in 3 seconds (!)
- 7:27-7:32 in 5 seconds
- 7:33-7:36 in 3 seconds
- 7:37-7:42 in 5 seconds
- 7:58-8:02 in 4 seconds
- 9:02-9:14 took a moment to look at the event, by hovering over a few options, a choosing one favorable for stress
- 9:20-9:22 in 2 seconds
- 13:13-13:31 actually dedicated attention to the event (new trait)
- 14:51-15:10 scheme event
- 16:41-16:42 record in clicking away
- 17:20-17:37 hovered over options and chose the least negative
- 17:44-17:46 in 2 seconds
- in royal court (preceded by ominous "I forgot we have a royal court" comment...): 17:50-17:51 three paragraphs clicked away in 1 second (!)
- 18:10-18:12 in 2 seconds
- 19:07-19:27 hovering between two options
- 2:11-2:24 hovering over options
- 3:33-3:39 in 6 seconds with comment "who was that" about the person in the event
- 3:44-3:46 in 2 seconds
- 4:18-4:20 scheme event
- 4:24-4:27 scheme event
- 5:26-5:27 feast event, record 1 second
- 7:30-7:32 another instant feast event
- 7:41-7:44 in 3 seconds
- 7:49-7:51 in 2 seconds
- 8:37-8:39 in 2 seconds
- 9:53-9:56 in 3 seconds
- 12:20-12:23 in 3 seconds
- 18:13-18:17 in 4 seconds
- 18:31-18:35 in 4 seconds
- 19:02-19:04 in 4 seconds
- 0:02-0:04 it literally begins with clicking away an event
- 1:30-1:31 scheme event
- 2:49-2:51 in 2 seconds
- 4:40-4:44 scheme event
- 7:41-7:45 in 4 seconds
- 8:31-8:33 scheme event
- 12:44-12:45 in 1 second
- 14:00-14:02 scheme event
- 16:50-16:56 in 6 seconds
- 17:15-17:16 clicked away while the option text was covered by other ui elements...
- 19:09-19:10 in 1 second
- 19:27-19:28 in 1 second
Sure, streams have their own rules and developers know the game inside out, but at the same time - these streams promote the game, are intended to show the actual gameplay, and it's the only way to get a direct view at how it is played by its creators. It speaks for itself. Much more scathing review of events in CKIII than I would ever imagine it to be half an hour ago.
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PDX should hire the guy who writes the acoup blog to write a couple of dozen events...
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I'll be reposting something from a while ago that just awestruck me playing the game
Take that, Paradox!
This fits into the recent criticisms of the tone of responses, as well. Comedy is fine but if you're dealing with touchy subjects like sex and murder I'd prefer not having juvenile responses that at best make me sound like a gameplay trailers' strained co-op 'banter'
Take that, Paradox!
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I mean, that just makes sense, you read an event once, maybe twice, and then you just go for the bonuses you need/want. Just watch Florryworry play EU4 and how he deals with events. They're cute, but should never be the main meat of an expansion.
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I don’t think this says anything at all about the quality of events in CK3. Events aren’t going to be interesting to read for the 30th time no matter how well written they are. Do you think other Paradox games are going to be any different? Personally I play every event-heavy game this way once I know the events.
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Emphasis added, and I generally do too, which suggests that events maybe should be de-emphasized.
Responding to the cat-apult discussion from a few pages ago, the whole thing reminds me of Monks and Mystics Society events, where I (a Serer African pagan) and my best buddy (the Flemish Catholic count of Holland) sneak into my rival's laboratory (my rival I guess is a Sunni duke based in Baghdad). How are all of these people in the same place, and why? Why is the count doing this rather than hiring some goon or having his unlanded brother do it?
You know what I'd love? I wish each event just had a little toggle, and I could press that toggle to turn it off forever, then save that to a config file and, if I choose, load it when I start a new game. Because once you've had the Latrine Disaster one time, do you honestly really need to have it again?
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Hopefully tours and tournaments prevents such nonsensical events like that Monks and Mystics event.
The Latrine event would happen again but there needs to be a sensible cooldown before it can happen again. Just ignoring it or applying a “band-aid” solution would cause the event to be able to fire again soon. I don’t know what would be an appropriate cooldown for that event.
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I think there are actually more events than the ones you typically see, but there's like ~5 events that appear so often it makes it feel like there are less in the game than there actually are.
(I'm talking about the various adultery events, specifically.)
I discuss it in the thread that OP linked; but I think that the trigger conditions for events need to be pruned so that you can only get events concerning "important" figures; which creates a familiar cast of characters around the player and helps with emergent storytelling. As it stands, you currently click blindly through a sea of "Oh no, Count Fartsworth of Nowhereshire has slept with a maid you didn't even know was in your court!"
When it comes to event quantity, I think the main place where more events need to be added is specifically the Court. There's just not a lot of court events that can actually show up, and very few of them are that consequential.
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Something like that. There were events in CK2 too (and a lot of them weren't good), but those events were an addition to an otherwise sandbox game. In CK3, events are one of the core mechanics of the game. It may sound interesting in theory, but I think in practice it didn't work out nearly as well as the developers intended. I'm a roleplayer, 90% of the games I play are RPGs. And the developers claim to focus heavily on roleplaying. So why that doesn't work for me? Why I don't feel like I'm roleplaying when I play? The problem is that when developers talk about roleplaying, they mean events. Every DLC they released was primarily focused on events, they created new ways to introduce events, they even created new DLC event packs. Events are what they primarily focus on, but those events don't contribute to roleplaying and very often disrupt it.
I've written this elsewhere, but events are very limited, and even good events limit roleplaying. Events are pre-created situations that we can react to with one of the pre-created options. The lack of event variation doesn't help either (Why does every romance scheme end with a character saving another character from a thief/wolf/whatever? How is that supposed to contribute to roleplaying?), which limits it even more. In contrast, if there is a working system of complex and interconnected mechanics in play, it can generate a variety of situations that we have to respond to somehow using the mechanics at our disposal. If my brother dethrones me and usurps my title, I have a rival without some random event generating some random rival I don't even know.
For example, I just finished playing Mother of us All run and pop up events now have the same effect on me as pop up ads. Just before the end, the Byzantine Emperor declared war on me, the loss of which could have ruined my entire run. The armies were huge and evenly matched, fought on several fronts. I controlled almost all of Africa and had to manage armies against both the Byzantine armies in the east and their allies from Galicia in the west. It was the most important war of the whole run. Every little mistake could have meant defeat. And every few seconds an event popped up that someone was sleeping with someone, that a vassal was inviting me to a feast, that someone wanted to play chess with me... Often I could barely manage to closing them (and now I'm not exaggerating). It was so terribly annoying and immersion breaking. Now imagine that situation. The Emperor standing at the head of an army on the battlefield, tens of thousands of soldiers behind him, an equally large army opposite them. He commands a charge, a massacre begins, all fighting for their lives, for the existence of the empire. And suddenly, in the middle of it all, the councilor appears.
- My liege, my liege, I have important news, count Humperding is humping his courtier!
- What? I don't even know him, why are you bothering me with this?
- Also, the King of Maghreb would like to play chess with you.
(The Emperor deflects an attack that could have decapitated him.)
- I'll be happy to play chess with him when this war is over, but right now I have other problems.
- Oh, that won't please him, -30 opinion. How about an invitation to a feast? You have about 10 to choose from.
No, this really does nothing for roleplaying and I'm so allergic to pop up events already that I don't have the slightest desire to read them even if they were a work of art. I just want to get rid of them as soon as possible.
I hope that tying some events to a location after the next patch will change things for the better, but certainly not nearly as much as I would like. I'd like the option to not display information about each lowborn's sex life, maybe only receive that information regarding the closest family and pinned characters. I'd like the option to not display invitations to feasts and chess during war. I'd also like a game rule that would limit the frequency of events (like 75%, 50%, 25%). That way events would be more special and I would also be interested to read some of them, instead of just seeing them as annoying spam disrupting the game.
But I guess we can't expect something like that. It was decided early on in the game development that events would be the primary component of the game, and given the development so far and the event packs, we probably can't expect a big change in approach. And based on some discussions here and on reddit, the developers have explicitly said they don't want any rules to limit added events.
But I'm still hoping that at least in some ways the developers will change their minds. If any developers are reading this, I'd like to give some advice, try to spend a few hours trying to read an interesting website that has annoying pop up ads popping up at you every 10 seconds and you'll understand how many of us feel when playing CK3 (of course now I'm exaggerating, but only to make a strong point about what I consider to be a significant problem). @Meka66 @Wokeg @Vaniljkaka
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That highlights a big problem that I have with CK3, war is the only time where you actually do stuff
Everything in CK3 is abstracted to a level where you basically wait for a roll dice every month, with nothing to do in between but wait
Intrigue? You wait for the hostile scheme to have the correct roll
Diplo? You wait for the personal scheme to have the correct roll
Ruling? You hold court once every 5 years, get 3 events, and then wait
Religion? If you're lucky you can ask the Pope some money once every 5 years
War? Now you have day-to-day actions with an immediate response. Now there is risk and potentially a race, maybe you'll capture the enemy's heir and secure that white peace? Maybe you can catch the enemy in a favorable terrain where their MaA are effectively useless?
So you have these two situations where peace time is calm and with next to nothing requiring your attention, so you are bombarded with non-sensical events that at best make you scratch your head.
Events being the main, if not only, way to interact with the game really prevents it from being enjoyable in the long term. Emerging stories from mechanics can create thousands of enjoyable and unpredictable scenarios. Pre-scripted events can be enjoyed once, and then you just click on the objectively best option and never think about it.
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It happens that way with uninspired and poorly thought out events.
Now, if the options in the events are situational, if some of them only appear sometimes at random, if others only appear based on dynamic game world data, if the object of the event changes (for instance, the same event dealing with any of the Council positions picked based on dynamic game world data or even at random), if the actual effects given by each option are not the same everytime they appear, if the choices carry with them penalties as well as bonuses, you can't just memorize the best answer or chose immediately the more convenient option as every time the event fires your answer will be different.
It all rests in the quality of the design of the events. Please notice that is very different from the quality of the code. A scripter can produce great code but fail to understand how to design good events.
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In my opinion the event should fire very rarely and there should be a cooldown to only happen at most once per lifetime.
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I would be quite happy if that one in particular had a MTTH of, like, a thousand years.
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