1/7/2024 0 Comments Crusader kings iii.As much as historical epics and fantasy media are about adventure and exploration, they’re also about admin. Crusader Kings ticks a lot of my gaming boxes, but it also appeals to the part of me that really, really enjoys the bits in A Song Of Ice And Fire (or Game Of Thrones) where characters sit around and organise things. Plus, I also love the sweet combination of micromanagement and a fantastical setting – be that sci-fi, fantasy or historical. I love games that offer the player a great deal of choice and can be replayed over and over again without feeling tired because of those choices. I love a game that gives me the space to create and control my own stories. It’s a bit of a mystery to me that I didn’t arrive at something like Crusader Kings sooner. I am somewhat mortified to report that I have clocked over 1,000 hours on titles like Fallout: New Vegas, Breath Of The Wild and Skyrim, and even the more structured, linear games I play (those with a fixed 30-50 hour play time) are sitting at several hundred hours from obsessive replaying. The games I do play, however, I tend to spend a humiliating amount of time on. I don’t play a lot of games – or at least, I don’t play many different games. Though I initially stuck to more modern and mainstream combat-based RPGs, during the pandemic I dove into some more niche, top-down titles such as Disco Elysium, Pillars Of Eternity and Planescape: Torment. The Fallout series (particularly Fallout: New Vegas) was my first love, and I am, for better or worse, a massive BioWare fan. ![]() As an adult, I gravitated away from simulation games and toward RPGs. Generally, I am all about the story and character-based gameplay. In Frostpunk I was missing the soap opera – the stories I’d enjoyed creating in games like The Sims and Space Colony. The employees all had names, backstories and personalities – and because of this, the player was able to create their own little space opera of friendships, rivalries and romances in among the mining and farming of the colony. Originally disappointed and confused by the more strategic elements of Space Colony, my ten-year-old self soon caught on to the mechanics and found herself greatly enjoying the farming of “space turkeys” and mining of various ores while caring for the 20 or so employees of the Weyland-Yutani-esque Blackwater Industries. I was (and sort of still am) an obsessive player of The Sims, as is to be expected of any woman born after 1990. It reminded me of Space Colony (2003) a real-time strategy game I played as a child which more or less advertised itself as “ The Sims, but in space”. ![]() Frostpunk is complex and punishing and comes with a number of set scenarios which are interesting to replay – as well as “endless” mode – but it was limiting in its scope. It had been years since I’d played a game with that management/building element and I wanted something more intricate. I began playing CK3 after diving into Frostpunk (2018) – a game that has the player build and manage a colony struggling to survive on a frozen Victorian-era Earth after a climate catastrophe leads to a severe drop in temperatures. For instance, if I were to begin playing CK3 as an “Arrogant” character with the “Imbecile” trait, I may enjoy making very ill-advised, quixotic military decisions which lead to my total financial and dynastic ruin. I’ll describe RPGs here as games in which the player occupies the role of a character they have been assigned or have constructed from scratch and makes gameplay decisions based on how they feel that character would behave. The definition of role-playing games (or RPGs) is extremely broad and the genre encompasses wildly different titles. All three Crusader Kings games blend the military strategy gameplay of tabletop games like Risk with the financial and familial management of simulation games like SimCity or even The Sims proper. Paradox Interactive debuted the series in 2004 with Crusader Kings, releasing its first sequel in 2012. Crusader Kings 3 is a medieval grand strategy role-playing game released in 2020.
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