One of the most complex strategy games of all time is getting a console edition and it works far better than you would’ve expected.
As its name implies, the grand strategy genre does nothing by halves. Rather than giving you control of a person or military unit you’re usually place in charge of entire nations. The Civilization series and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri are good examples, giving you free rein to explore, engage in diplomacy, conduct scientific research, and manage far more about your people’s destiny than just military might. Another uniting factor in the genre is that the overwhelming majority of releases are only for PC and rely on mouse and keyboard to work your way through their labyrinthine complexity.
Crusader Kings 3 is initially concerned with a far smaller corner of the globe than a whole country, casting you as a medieval nobleman with a small fiefdom of lands, and titles to match. Whether you start in what will one day be Great Britain, or anywhere else in the startlingly well researched version of the Dark Ages, your job is to manage a dynasty over hundreds of years.
Despite featuring a tighter geographical purview, the level of detail you need to manage, control, and turn to your advantage, is astounding. Along with making sure you have the right heirs and succession laws in place, you’ll also need to keep local vassals on-side and paying taxes, use underhanded schemes, bribery and chicanery to exert your influence, and in many cases send armies into battle to ensure your family’s survival and the extension of your lands.
Crusader Kings 3’s PC release was universally well received, but what happens when you attempt to distil its intense levels of intricacy and micromanagement down from PC to console? The answer involves plenty of re-engineering and subtle adaptation of systems, which co-developers Paradox and Lab42 assure us captures absolutely every aspect of its desktop-based older brother, while making it playable using a controller.
Undoubtedly, the hardest part of eliminating mouse and cursor control is the conundrum of how to navigate amongst complex, disparate systems quickly enough to play the game. Even on PC you regularly needed to pause time to make thorny decisions or issue detailed orders, so translating that to console was always going to need an element of reinvention.
The system that’s emerged uses the top bar, accessed via the controller’s triggers, to give you command of your lands, military, council of advisors, and other decision-making tools, while holding each trigger opens elegantly crafted radial menus for your current character and the map, respectively. Since the entire game effectively takes place on the map screen, and your character is the agent you use to effect change, these are always your two highest priorities.
Beyond that, there’s a quick access bar at the bottom of the screen, navigated using the bumpers, which shows your current initiatives. These include ongoing military operations, plots, and intrigue about to come to fruition – letting you jump into any of them straight away, as well as allowing you to keep an eye on what’s happening right now.
That’s important, because the sheer quantity of information you need to make choices in the game is also an issue that needed reshaping for use on a TV rather than a monitor. Part of that was ensuring font sizes are large enough to read from 2 metres away, and another is making sure you get the right data at the right time.
That information hierarchy presents you with quick ‘toast’ messages that pop up at the top of the screen, and a feed in the bottom right that delivers timely but non-essential updates on, for example, current diplomatic engagements. They disappear after a few seconds, whereas larger pieces of news, like an accepted marriage proposal or the outcome of a war, appear centrally and need to be actively dismissed.
While we’ve only had a preview build to test, early impressions are favourable. The lengthy, text-only tutorial provides a broad overview designed to give you a general understanding of what’s going on and how to manage it, with true familiarity only accruing through actual play. It’s a useful introduction though, and talks you through your character and their family, the map screen, scheming, diplomacy, land stewardship, and of course war.
While the latter is almost always to the fore in grand strategy games, that certainly isn’t the case here, with your most effective avenues for expanding your dynasty’s legacy dependant on your character’s traits, skills, and lifestyle. You’ll also need to be wise in your choice of spouse. Will you marry someone from your own court to consolidate your legacy, or choose a bride from another land, opening up potential alliances?
You also need to consider heritability, both of useful character traits and wealth. Succession laws vary by region, and the heirs you leave will inevitably divide your fortune amongst their number. When your main character dies, you take control of one of their children, and ensuring your chosen heir is the one that does best is achieved through scheming, and in many cases, murder.
It gives you an incredible degree of control over an entire family lineage, whose fortunes you’ll guide across the centuries, conquering, plotting, and befriending their way from minor nobles to illustrious emperors if you consistently play your cards right. You’re free to make decisions against your character’s personality type, but doing so induces stress, which can fray relations and cause further ruptures amongst your dynasty and allies.
Despite its formidable complexity, perhaps the biggest barrier to many console players will be Crusader Kings 3’s interface, which is easy on the eye but not exactly cinematic. Interactions are via clicks and menu selections, with battles represented by shifting power bars rather than legions of small, sweaty avatars with gleaming swords. Once you get into the flow it’s profoundly addictive though, with each choice you make echoing down the ages – but getting to that point takes serious dedication.
At launch, the Console Edition will be the same as the base PC version on its release in 2020. All the game’s DLC is planned for release over time, and its developers aim to have simultaneous future releases of DLC for PC and console, although at time of writing that’s an intention rather than a guarantee. Even without that though, Crusader Kings 3 remains a phenomenally deep challenge, which thanks to the artful re-engineering of its presentation and control systems will soon be available to a great many more armchair (grand) strategists.
Formats: Xbox Series X/S (previewed) and PlayStation 5
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Paradox and Lab42
Release Date: 29th March 2022
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