Short post because I didn’t actually get to *play* this game, I watched a friend play it and he complained to me about this every step of the way.

I used to play Victoria 2, I blogged about it on this blog. But now Victoria 3 has come out and I’m still not into buying Paradox games. Anyway, my friend knew I loved Vicky 2 and wanted to get me into Vicky3. He failed, mostly by his own doing.

He showed me how he was learning the game as Sweden, and asked for my expert Vicky 2 advice (nevermind that Vicky 2 advice is useless in Vicky 3, I think he was humoring me). I wasn’t much help, but then neither was he.

At one point the game told him he had a shortage of lead. He immediately opened up the trade menu to find out both if he could buy lead, and what exactly was using lead because he didn’t know what that resource was used for. The trade menu helpfully said that Sweden was using 1.88 units of lead a day, but also that *no buildings in Sweden use lead*. What?

After clicking around for minutes wondering what the hell was going on, he finally figured it out. He had Norway as a puppet, and *Norway* was using lead. So the tooltip was technically true, BUT IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY. You go into these menus to find information, not to be more confused!

Speaking of Norway, at one point a big tooltip popped up that he could reduce their independence to “puppet.” Wanting to eventually annex them, he took the opportunity, then also used that interface to give them knowledge sharing and support their regime. Later on he wanted to revoke these costly privileges, only to find that he couldn’t find the original tooltip he used to enact them.

The diplomacy menu? Nope. Diplomacy lens? Still no. Going into diplomacy then clicking on Norway itself? That just tells you about them. Interactions menu with Norway? Nadda.

After minutes of frustration he just left them be. But this begs the question of why there have to be a dozen different flavors of “diplomacy menu,” with only one of them having the ability to use the support regime/knowledge sharing tools. At one point he could hover over a tooltip helpfully telling him he was knowledge sharing, but no tooltip telling him *how to stop doing so*. It’s like the worse online service you could ever give your credit card too, thousands of menus about how much you’re paying, but no way to *stop* paying. Sounds like Paradox alright.

This is just the tip of the iceberg but the whole game is like this. There’s a lot of tooltips telling you what something *is* without giving you the opportunity to interact with it. Those interactions are hidden in a *separate* menu, but we won’t tell you which one. And don’t think it will be as simple as “Diplomacy is done through the Diplomacy menu,” we made sure to split everything into dozens and dozens of separate menus just to keep you guessing.

He did eventually find what he was looking for, under a separate menu of course. But I think any menu that will tell you *about* something should also include a link letting you *get there and change it*. With such a menu-heavy game like this, little things like that are almost mandatory.

I’m sure the people who have been playing for thousands of hours think this is all fine and understandable. Ignore them, they have Oslo Syndrome from playing nothing but Paradox games and thinking this kind of UI is acceptable. Everything from Political Parties to Trade to Diplomacy being split between dozens and dozens of disconnected screens is not good gameplay design, and Paradox really needs to learn how to hyperlink so if they *are* going to demand so many screens, at least you can navigate to them from anywhere else instead of following the one and only trail of breadcrumbs that they themselves have laid.

Anyway I’ll try to have another few posts on Factorio up sometime. I have a lot to say about it.