Folks, I’ve got some bad news. Victoria 3 is not a game where you play the clone of the clone of Posh Spice. I was all geared up for some science fiction-tinged Spice Girls shenanigans, but I was left bitterly disappointed. However, I’d already installed it, so I decided to check it out and see what kind of game it actually is. Turns out that Victoria 3 is a grand strategy game, just like its Paradox stablemates Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron.
Trying to classify Victoria 3 is pretty damn important. Unlike, say, the Total War series, Paradox’s grand strategy titles are differentiated by a lot more than their time periods. Hearts of Iron its WW2 military ticker on its sleeve, while Crusader Kings (my personal fave) is secretly an RPG, just one that happens to cast you as the ruler of a country, rather than a random wandering murderer. Figure that out and you grasped the appeal of the game, especially for people who may lack interest in - or be downright put off by - the historical era it covers.
]]>I'm going to level with you: I'm not a GSG player. I play strategy, sure, but grand strategy has always been a bit beyond me. I'm a fundamentally un-grand person; I spend most days dressed like a 14-year-old fan of Tony Hawk, I do not like olives or scallops, and I'm unable to predict the consequences of actions if they exist outside of, say, a 12 month timeframe. A game like Victoria 3, where the whole point is making decisions that have country-wide effects and outcomes years in the future, is essentially operating in a different language to any I understand.
I'm trying to learn new languages, though, so it's not an unwelcome challenge. The problem is that previewing Victoria 3 is quite an advanced level to dive in, the Paradox GSG equivalent of being a live translator for a UN summit when you're only just about able to read the French version of The Famous Five. In a presentation before I and others were let loose on the better part of a week with the game, it was claimed that Victoria 3 is the best yet for onboarding newcomers, with a deep and detailed tutorial system. And to that I say: kinda. Luckily, the AI in Victoria 3 is so advanced it's better at playing the game than I am.
]]>There was a lot going on in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Paradox's grand strategy game Victoria III aims to simulate pretty much all of it, starting in 1836 and giving you a century to play with. A big selling point is that every inhabitant of your nation is simulated, from lowly farmer to high rolling capitalist, each having preferences and beliefs. Balancing the political needs of your state against diplomacy, economy and, you know, war, will take a lot of wrangling of lists, menus and percentages, which you can see in the new gameplay trailer debuted at the PC Gaming Show.
]]>The latest development diary post for Victoria III talks in detail about how Paradox's empire builder will deal with the topic of slavery. Extremely carefully, is the answer.
]]>There’s an inherent awkwardness in historical strategy games as entertainment, which is just how much of history is made up of stacked atrocities. Abstraction can do a lot to sidestep this, of course: many games feature real historical cultures, but pit them against each other in virtual petri dishes which might as well be fantasy worlds. Time, also, has a strange capacity to dilute grimness - whether rightly or wrongly, the more ancient a game’s setting, the more carefree we tend to be about burning farming settlements to the ground for the sake of expansion.
But if developers want to make games about real history, especially stuff which has happened within a generation or two of living memory, things become a lot more stark. Victoria 3, the next grand strategy project from Paradox, will see players take the reins of nations on the global stage of the 19th century. That means industrialisation, massive social upheaval, and a thousand other fascinations. But it also means rapacious national expansion, colonialism, and slavery - issues on which the public conversation has advanced a lot since Victoria 2 came out in 2010.
]]>There is a running joke, every time Paradox Development Studio says it will announce a new game, and it goes like this: "Vicky 3!" That's the joke. You see, Paradox maintains a quartet of big, complex historical strategy series - Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, and Hearts Of Iron - which each abut each others' time periods in an extremely satisfying fashion, so that players can experience a full millenium of human history in excruciating, day-by-day detail.
But while Crusader, Europa and Hearts have all had new versions in the last few years, their poor idustrial age cousin has been languishing since the release of Victoria 2 in 2010, without even any DLC since 2013. And needless to say, fans of the series don't like to let Paradox forget this. Hence the shouts of "Vicky 3!", which have gotten more and more memeified as the odds of Victoria 3 actually getting made have dwindled. Only now... um... Victoria 3's coming out?
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