While Crusader Kings III lacks the more baroque (and frequently humorous) intrigue schemes and story beats added to its predecessor in its later expansions, seasoned players can rest easy knowing this isn’t starting back at zero. This is a role-playing game as much as it’s about strategy, and you’ll be making decisions about how to proceed with character development, murder plots, and familial squabbles while you’re commanding your armies to lay siege to an enemy fortress. Crusader Kings III is a game about people, but the majority of what you’ll be doing as you play is staring at a map.
They look big and intimidating, and starting off it can be hard to set aside preconceived notions about what to expect from a strategy game. The most difficult thing about any Paradox game, I’ve found, is understanding what it is – and that’s particularly true of the Crusader Kings games. You choose a start date, then a ruler alive during that time, and then set off in a medieval sandbox to fulfil whatever goals you’ve decided upon – unify a shattered kingdom, restore a faith, or just fight for all the glory you can in order to secure your legacy and see that your family’s name lives on through the ages.
Veterans of Crusader Kings II will be immediately familiar with the setup. Every decision you make is inherently political, and the politics of the middle ages is a swirling vortex of relationships, tradition, violence, and wealth in which you immediately find yourself fighting for dominance – or in many cases, mere survival. The American political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote that politics is the process of determining “who gets what, when, and how,” and that’s a decent summation of what Crusader Kings is about. Over the past several years, the idea of keeping politics out of videogames has gained a certain amount of traction, and Crusader Kings III continues in the tradition of vividly demonstrating the absurdity of that notion. Thanks to a near total rework of its interface, an enhanced new build of the underlying Clausewitz engine, and a generous new system for keeping players informed, Crusader Kings III is the new gold standard for the genre. Paradox’s latest incarnation of its medieval dynasty simulator is not only strangely portentous, it’s also the most accessible the studio’s grand strategy games have ever been. Arriving as it does on the eve of what may be a succession crisis in the United States – that grand experiment in Enlightenment ideas of popular sovereignty – it’s tempting to think of Crusader Kings III as a kind of divine omen.
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