Crusader Kings III is an amazing strategic rpg that has so much content. There is a crazy amount of stuff to do, you could start a religion, you could conquer the globe, or you could just grow your family until you have 425 generations.

Although there are some issues, whilst this was is an awesome game and one I would usually really enjoy (and I mean REALLY enjoy) Crusader kings just falls short, I can really only play it for an hour or two before I start to get bored. I think this has to do with a lack of an end goal. Other than this this though I would still recommend this to someone who wants to play a good strategic rpg.

Crusader Kings 2 was shat out into the world about 12 years ago. By the time its successor came out it'd developed a reputation as a game that was barebones without any DLC but was a gripping and indepth time-abyss if you had most/all of it.

Crusader Kings 3 decides to iterate on its predecessor by being a game that's barebones without any DLC, and still barebones even with all the extortionately overpriced DLC.

It is an inevitability in first-party Paradox titles that the player will eventually stumble into a period of empty space where all they're doing is advancing time at 5x speed until some events pop up and let you do something. Even Stellaris, the game that most often has you actively doing things, tends to fall into it at some point.

CK3 is sadly the worst for it, in part due to numerous under-the-hood changes that at first seem beneficial but in reality seem drab. Paradox's approach this time round involves dissuading players from attempting to colour the map as in past games and instead focus on a small corner of the world - whether it be a kingdom or an Empire, they don't want you playing with adult colouring books this time.

Instead the focus this time is on roleplay and/or kingdom management, with hefty penalties to expansion and harsh limits on how much you as an individual can control directly before needing to shove things onto your vassals. The game, including its tutorials, not-so-subtly nudge you into grabbing hold of a title and clinging to it. New and reworked mechanics like culture/religion/councils/language and more with DLCs all add to this; the focus of this game is in finding a place and staying there.

Unfortunately this focus results in a lot of waiting, as almost all of the mechanics up above boil down to clicking a button and waiting for a scheme to resolve. The much-praised Tours & Tournaments and Royal Court DLCs are much the same despite their praise, simply offering you more buttons before the wait begins rather than just one. It's all rather at odds with the intent to make you more actively partake in your realm's management, because in practice it's all very passive.
Further dulling matters is that many events often boil down to very static, very predictable stat checks. Oh, someone's trying to murder your son - who is 9th in line to the throne and has more defects than limbs? It's just a passive intrigue and scheme power check. Duelling? Martial and Prowess stats.
Much of these additional stats like Prowess were added to make the game less binary, but given how they scale it's relatively easy to stack the deck in your favour unless you gimp yourself...

But even then, this game's biggest problem is that it's easy. Metagaming is no longer required to stack ridiculous bonuses in your court, especially given the relative prominence of random lowborn courtiers with insane stat spreads. CK3 tries its damndest to have consequences for this, but what use is a hit to your legitimacy when you can pump out children that're functionally immune to rebellion, assassination, or the perils of inbreeding?
The DLCs just make this worse, as most of them are nearly consequence-free. Tours & Tournaments is a series of easy resource/stat boosts for relatively low risk, Royal Court is the same and both of them make socializing so much easier. Northern Lords supercharges a lot of the northern factions, and-

You know, CK2 had a bit of a problem with Eurocentrism, to the point where most non-European factions needed a paid DLC to be playable. Even then, it was almost always the titular Crusader King nations/cultures that got all of the updates and boosts.

CK3 seemingly averts this by having everyone on the map be playable, but it doesn't take a genius to notice that the non-European factions feel distinctly undercooked. Muslims can't even observe Ramadan. As expected from a CK title, Paradox sell the fixes back to you via Fate of Iberia and Legacy of Persia, but even these feel half-hearted and empty compared to equivalent CK2 packs. Go even further East and it's like wading into unfinished content.

I think what really broke this game for me is the lack of impact anything has. The first time a council member blackmails you with your own incest/kinslaying, it seems like a grand obstacle to be surmounted, but oftentimes it's a total non-issue. In my most recent game, everyone and their mum tried to expose me for pulling a Habsburg on my bloodline, but the end result was a few minor opinion penalties that were easily swept away by holding a Grand Wedding. It feels a lot like playing a mod for CK2 that's perpetually in beta; wowed by all the options available until they fire and you realize that you've functionally just skipped a stone across bathwater.

...Also I realized halfway into my conquest of Britannia as the Irish that the devs had forced a Legitimacy mechanic on me and that I couldn't meaningfully engage with it without forking out money for the recent Legends Of The Dead pack. Hurray!

The best way to experience this game is to read people's (probably made up) campaign stories on Reddit, for much of this game's remaining appeal is in doing stupid shit like banging the pope, and for once that's attainable without touching the game.

It's been four years and CK3 still feels as hollow and unfulfilling as it did when it came out.

Chuds will tell you Paradox went "woke." Casual fans will tell you this is the only Paradox game they're interested in. Hardcore fans, minus the chuds, (which are quite vocal) skew positive, with a not insignificant amount calling this the greatest thing Paradox has ever released.

I'm in the latter camp. I have over 1,000 hours in both Europa Universalis IV and Hearts of Iron IV respectively, and another half thousand minimum spread across their other games. The appeal to Paradox is that nobody else is really making games like them, and for good reason. These are massive games attempting to cover vast periods of complicated world history, all while giving the player a wealth of options for guiding a country through these eras. People often compare Paradox to Civilization, but really, that series is an abstraction only one tier above Risk. Paradox games are another simulationist beast entirely. Some have tried, most have failed, and only one has succeeded.

Crusader Kings III is the first grand strategy roleplaying game (I don't count CK2 because the base game is a demo that only lets you play as Christians with 1/5th the content of a DLC buyer, but that might count if you manage to get the full game). You can do just about anything in this game. On YouTube you'll likely see a bunch of streamers doing "incest" runs to see just how tainted their bloodline can get, but this is streamer bait. The most fun you'll have is scaring the absolute shit out of the Ethiopian lords under your magical albino dynasty by executing anyone remotely brave or strong enough to contest your rule. Or carving out a Hellenic paradise in the middle of the Mediterranean and slaughtering any Abrahamic who dares to invade by dumping all of your savings into fortifications and the fact that they have nowhere to run when they land. Or deciding you're going to single-handedly reverse the effects of the Northern Crusades through effective application of schizophrenic warlords.

All of this while being either a historical figure or custom character (let's be honest, the game is a lot more fun with the latter) that grows, learns, loves, and will likely die before they can witness the extent of their empire. Really, there are so many viable ways to build a character and play CK3. Even when you play as a lord with only a tiny sliver of land in the Balkans, there's always some sort of scheme or plot you can plan to claw your way up. Or maybe you're content with living modestly, and you just tend to your domain and serve your overlord loyally while assassinating that other micro-lord from across the way that insulted you at a wedding.

The craziest thing is that most of my experience is from the first month of release. Paradox, a company well-known for releasing unfinished games and putting the actual content in later updates and DLC's, actually made one of the most intriguing, indepth, and unique games in any genre remotely close to it ON RELEASE. You do not realize how unprecedented this is until you have almost 3,000 hours in their games.

got sucked into this hard this week and sunk 24 hours into while feeling like i'm just barely scratching the surface of what is possible in this game. i'm not finished playing it, and will probably continue to sink hours into it on and off for the next few years, but wanted to just throw some base level thoughts out now that i've wasted a day in this world. when i was in high school i had a friend who was obsessed with europa universalis iv, every time i logged into steam i would see him playing it, so naturally i wanted to give it a shot. i bought the base game and immediately become stunningly overwhelming by everything you had to try to figure out in it, only got about 30 minutes in before i just abandoned it to move onto other things. fast forward some years and i start seeing youtube videos about this game and immediately get fascinated by the amount of freedom possible within the systems the game employs, so i had to try it for myself.

crusader kings iii is a game where what you put into it is what you will get out of it. it lays all of these complex systems before you and you can choose how much or how little you'll care about each of these aspects of play and it will change the outcome of how the game feels to play. whether you are focusing mostly on intrigue and subterfuge, faith and piety, or just bloodthirsty warfare, each playstyle is just as fun as any of the other ones depending on how much you actually want to get to know it. when i say the game gives you what you put into it i mean that if you're not interested in trying to find out how exactly these systems work, the game will feel at times very random, especially when something you haven't been trying to learn comes back to bite you, like having to fight a war when you've been caring purely about diplomacy, or being denounced by your religious leader when you've been seducing your entire court. it's also what makes the changes in leadership feel that much more taxing on the dynasty, where a ruler you've put hours into succumbs to cancer and you have to then take over the kingdom as her stupid horny son and just watch everything crumble around you.

it's all of these system's interacting with each other that leads to what makes this game so special to me, which is the completely player driven narrative structure. this is another way that the game gives returns based on how much investment is put into it, where creating narratives and goals for your characters on your own can lead to some of the most rewarding and surprisingly immersive gameplay i've ever had, though if you go in without any ideas for what you want to do with your characters i don't think there will very much for the player to gain even through the very emergent narrative structure. i find this whole concept incredibly fascinating, of just allowing systems to have full control over what your game is actually about, allowing for any number of different stories to emerge from it, and ever playthrough being completely different even if you try to keep everything the same. it's a grand idea that feels incredibly difficult to pull off (and judging by some of the reviews of paradox's other grand strategy games it can indeed be very hit and miss) but crusader kings iii accomplishes it almost with ease.

and when i say that i feel i'm barely scratching the surface i really mean it, i've only done a couple playthroughs here only lasting about 100-150 in game years before wanting to try something different with the systems paradox has set up, but i still haven't even really been able to get into the religion and culture systems here, or creating empires, radically changing history, etc. and i'm just excited to delve in deeper.

Nunca achei que diria isso, mas a Paradox deu uma rasteira em todas as desenvolvedoras do mercado e isso graças a ‘simples’ ideia de dar ao jogador o que ele quer.

O tema principal de Crusader Kings 3 tem uma ligação contrária ao que estamos acostumados nos jogos do gênero, essa coisa de controlar uma dinastia e não um único país ou império é sensacional, pois ao desenvolver afeto pelos personagens o jogador se torna o objeto central de uma peça com tempo limite.

Intrigas, guerras, comércio e diplomacia parecem ser o único ciclo, porém as possibilidades, ordens e como você chega nelas não. Tudo parece ter sido feito para a diversão e o fato do jogo não ter um objetivo colabora ainda mais para a sensação de controle, mostrando que indiretamente sua imaginação é o seu limite.

Apesar do jogo ter se tornado popular pela quantidade de vídeos sobre reinados com relacionamentos duvidosos, CK3 apresenta muito mais do que isso, permitindo ao jogador recriar diversos momentos históricos ou de simplesmente curtir um sistema de vassalo ou duque sem se preocupar com a quantidade absurda de problemas e falta de conexão que a dominância gera.

Não achei bugs ou problema de otimização, então o único ponto negativo que poderia ser considerado são o custo de suas expansões, mas quem já conhece a Paradox sabe que isso é basicamente a marca deles (mesmo com esse valor abusivo eu ainda sinto que vale a pena).

Inicialmente, Crusader Kings 3 não parecia um jogo muito interessante, sua dificuldade me fez repensar bastante se o investimento seria agradável, porém após três semanas de vício acho que consigo dizer que ele entrou no meu livro de “melhores jogos que você faz o que quer”, seguindo Project Zomboid e Rimworld.

Paradox Interactive's third foray into medieval dynasty grand strategy modernizes the classic series at the cost of losing a few of the things that made Crusader Kings II (2012) so enjoyable. Control a dynasty from the late 800s to the 1400s, and use diplomacy, war, and subterfuge to control counties, duchies, kingdoms, and even empires. The map and the characters have been made fully 3D, which is a pleasant improvement from 2D headshots of characters and a map that looked like it was pulled from Creative Assembly's Medieval II: Total War (2006). While you do lose a lot of the features that were introduced in CK2's DLC, the game has been remade and reimagined to bring back those features back in an improved state, and to introduce new gameplay that was not possible in CK2. If you're a fan of strategy games, or if you enjoy games that encourage roleplay, this game will have no difficulty stealing a couple hundred hours from you. Just be aware that this still a Paradox game: you get a pretty good base game experience, but a lot of the fluff and improvements will come in the form of paid DLC.