Some final, disjointed thoughts on CK3.

Crusader Kings, more than any other game in Paradox’s library, is primarily event-driven. The game lets you set up as the king of England, and then set up schemes to go to war with your neighbors or build up your finances, or whatever else. But the primary way you’ll interact with the game is actually random events. This is where the problems start, and they don’t stop.

Some of the events are quite fine, there are a lot related to the “lifestyle” you choose for your king that are honestly quite good. If you’ve focused on a war education, you’ll get events where your king trains in mock battles, or debates strategy with his marshal. If you’ve focused on learning, you’ll get events to translate old books.

But many of the events have no sense of time, place, or consequences. And those annoy the hell out of me. There is an event where a cult believes that the head of a saint has rolled down into your castle. Nevermind that most castles would be built on high ground, the cult wants to be allowed to search your castle and find the head. If you tell them no, then a few months later the cult leader will break out, hold your king at knifepoint, and if you still refuse to let him search the castle he’ll decapitate you.

Let’s break this down:

No sense of time. This game is set in the middle ages, your character is a king. Kings don’t just walk around on their own like it’s a Hollywood movie. They have guards, servants, and hangers-on at every point in time. Why can a cult just barge into a castle and confront the king? Why can the leader then sneak into the king’s bedroom? If security is this lax, then why are peasant revolts in the game so unsuccessful? This event makes it seem easy to barge in and kill the king whenever you want. This sort of thing breaks the illusion that the game is a living, breathing world because the event runs contrary to the actual logic of its setting and to the logic of the rest of the game!

No sense of place. Again, this is an event that happens in the castle of a king. Those things tend to be located on high ground and are heavily fortified against invasion. This is because both foreign kings and disgruntled peasants would love a chance to kill the king and either take his land or get reprieve from his taxes. Yet these facts are ignored to create and event where a head rolled into your castle and a bunch of cultists have barged in.

No sense of consequences. If the cultist does succeed in killing your king, there isn’t any reaction from the rest of your family or friends. You just start playing as your heir and the cultist wanders off. And if you weren’t happy at the cultists barging into your throne room earlier, you aren’t allowed to just have them all arrested and thrown in the dungeons, even though that’s the logical action to them breaking into your castle and demanding to break into it further. The actions of this event have no consequences outside the event itself. Either they search the castle and you get some small bonus, or they kill you and you play as your heir. In a game that gives mechanical benefits to you hiring bodyguards and hangers on, none of those things matter as the cultist will just waltz in and cut your head off because the event demands it.

This is just one event out of many, but it is very indicative of all of them. If you’re studying a foreign language, far off kings will teleport across half the map to knock over all your notes, even though again you’d be presumably studying in your own damn castle. All this because the game wants you to develop rivalries but can’t do so based on the actual conquering that happens in the game. If you have a cat, a foreign king may sneak into your catapult armory to launch the cat out of a catapult, again despite that making no sense in the time and place and this presumably happening on your army grounds where you should have soldiers capable of subduing him. The game desperately wants to spice things up with a small handful of events, but none of those are written well enough to be in any way meaningful or interesting. So instead they try to go over-the-top and just completely break the spell that this is an actual game about medieval kings and such.