I found myself more willing than usual to roll with failures and not get hung up on wondering if I was doing things efficiently. Instead, you're able to focus on learning how the game works, how its systems interact, and which parts you find yourself wanting to explore. It relieves the pressure to min/max in order to find the optimal path to win. Such a loose structure can feel liberating. You've got a whole new life to lead and, with any luck, five or six decades to enjoy it. Dynastic legacies will be passed down from one generation to the next, and the education a child receives will affect their skills and personality traits, but in terms of your new playable character's abilities and outlook, the slate is essentially wiped clean. When that person dies, you can carry on playing as their heir, assuming you left one.Īs the heir, you'll inherit any titles you're due, though depending on the succession laws of the realm, you may well find yourself fighting off envious siblings. You assume the life of a particular person-a tribal chieftain on the Eurasian Steppe, a Danish countess, a sultan from Basra, a Nubian king, the Queen of Ireland, to name but five of the potential thousands-and you're free to set your own aims and motivations. At least, the game itself doesn't set you any sort of end goal. There is no objective, no victory condition, no win state. Ultimately, what you do with this power and influence is an open-ended debate. Your ability to influence all those with whom you interact will shape not just individual relationships but the destiny of entire empires. Literally every single person, from the highest ruler to the most lowborn, has an opinion of you, and the likelihood of success for whatever friendly or nefarious scheme you're working is coloured by these opinions-plus a roll of the dice. Your vassals harbour their own ambitions and will pursue their own agendas, while neighbouring rulers will have to be dissuaded with either military might or a smooth tongue from expanding into your territory. Yet as powerful as you are, you are not omnipotent. The decisions facing you are those of a politician, not a town planner or army commander. Prestige, piety and renown are the real currencies of the realm. Gold is just as likely to be used to grease a palm as it is to pay for the construction of a barracks. The resources at your disposal reflect your status. As the months and years pass, you choose how to tend to your realm, consolidating your holdings with new infrastructure, forging alliances through marriage, and pressing your claims-both legitimate and fabricated-to lands occupied by others. You play as a single person during the Middle Ages, whether the ruler of a minor county or the sovereign of an entire empire. It's a marvel of connectivity, effectively linking together complementary elements plucked from different genres-the role-playing game, the visual novel, the life simulation, the city-builder, the wargame-even if at times you can sense it straining at the seams. Regardless, this memorable event served only to highlight the singular vision of Crusader Kings 3, a grand strategy game that successfully operates across a bewildering scale, feeling vast and unknowable one moment yet awkwardly intimate the next. Perhaps it was also a failing, a breakdown somewhere between the calculations of a mass of colliding gameplay systems and how their results were communicated to me. Perhaps it's a credit to Crusader Kings 3 that I didn't have an immediate answer, a sign of the depth and complexity of its simulation and its capacity for surprise. Was this newfound fashion choice a portent of his impending madness? Was it some bold power move designed to put me off my game? A sign of the contempt in which he held his ruler? Or was it a bug, a highly specific graphical glitch that just happened to leave one of my councillors undressed? I didn't know. This was the man I'd entrusted to manage the paperwork of my realm, to ensure taxes were being collected. On JAD, my steward, vassal and knight, Earl Muiredach mac Carthach of Desmond arrived at the meeting of my small council dressed only in, well.
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