I can’t find the quote right now (and I have a headache so I don’t want to), but a quote attributed to Sid Meier is that in a video game, the goal should be for the player to be having fun, not the devs. I think of that a lot because one of the reasons I hate modern Paradox is because they think it’s the other way around. The player should dance to the dev’s tune, and if they’re not playing “right” then the devs need to “fix” that.

I say this because I recently posted about playing Imperator: Rome, and one of my friends thought it would be funny to gift me Crusader Kings 3, since I said in that review that I didn’t plan on ever buying another Paradox game. And when I started playing my gift, the first thing I realized is that CK3 is definitely a game that looked at CK2 and decided “the players weren’t playing right, we need to fix that.”

There’s a ton of things I could say about CK3. I’ll briefly mention that the lack of a ledger, most UI elements, and a MINIMAP make this by far the most tedious Paradox game to play. There’s some good ideas but it’s way to hard to get to any of them, pointlessly so. The whole thing needs a UI redesign from the ground up, but that’s not what I’m here for.

In CK2 and CK3, you play as a feudal family through the generations. From lord to lord you get to take the reigns of some feudal noble and expand your kingdom, fight off rebels, go Crusading, and what have you. As it’s a dynastic game, decisions about succession and titles are paramount. To cut to the chase, the primary inheritance law is called “Gavelkind” or “Partition,” in which the realm is divided among the ruler’s children. So if you hold 3 counties and have 3 sons (assuming male-preference), then each son inherits 1 county. This makes it difficult when your character dies and you start playing as the eldest son, since you’ve become 1/3 as strong as you were before.

This means that Gavelkind succession in CK2 was an endless loop of getting strong, realm partitioning, and working your way back to square 1. Most players hated it, and so the first piece of advice given to new players was always “get rid of Gavelkind.” It was fun to choose different succession laws for different occasions. Seniority let you reunite family lands as elderly, title-holding members of your dynasty were the primary inheritors. Primogeniture meant only your eldest son inherited. And elective meant you could choose your heir as long as you could game the election. It was pretty fun.

Then the devs saw this and decided that the players were playing “wrong.” They needed to be spending more time in Gavelkind as it was “historically accurate.” So now Gavelkind is renamed “partition” and it’s almost impossible to get out of it. Elective succession laws only apply to kingdom level titles, so your counties and duchies still get split on death even if you’re elective. Primogeniture has been relegated to being only available at the tail end of the game. To add, they’ve removed the ability to actually start at the tail end of the game, so you can’t even get any use out of Primogeniture since most people’s games will end much sooner when they get bored. And finally seniority succession is now locked behind a cultural tradition available only to the Bohemians. Because I guess no one else is able to just study the idea and decide “hey, we’d like to do that too.”

The game still isn’t historically accurate by any means. Succession was never this cut and dry. But the devs are having more fun now and the players less, so that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I’ve bought my friend Kenshi in return for CK3, and I feel I’ll quickly fall off of this one much like Imperator. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s moving in a direction I don’t appreciate.