Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.
If the most recent entry of The Backlog focused on two games that were made to play with your friends, then this edition is about a game that can isolate you, consume your life, and leave you in a daze, wondering where the hours went and when the last time you talked to another person was. That's right: It's time for Crusader Kings III.
Arriving like a thunderbolt on Sept. 1, 2020, CK3 was the perfect game for an imperfect time. At least personally, I can say that the novelty of to-go cocktails and sitting six feet apart from my friends in parks had started to wear off by Labor Day of 2020, and I was ready to lock back in on a meaty video game. I had never played a Crusader Kings game before; hell, I hadn't played a Paradox game at all.
Paradox Development Studio is the ne plus ultra of grand strategy game developers. Through a variety of series—Crusader Kings, yes, but also Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Victoria, Imperator, and the space-faring Stellaris—Paradox has perfected the process of controlling some form of historical entity, whether that be a country or a ruler or a space explorer (OK, Stellaris is its own monster that isn't grounded in history), and guiding that entity through a set time period, encountering strategic decisions left and right and random events bringing potentially horrific consequences along the way. Generally, Paradox games are rigid in their timeline and completely wide open in terms of what the player can do within them. To take CK3 as an example: The game takes place between 867 and 1453 AD (which marks the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire), though the end limit can be disabled to allow players to continue playing indefinitely, or until they get the itch to start a new save.
Within those 586 years, Paradox gives the player the opportunity to make their mark on the Middle Ages, no matter when and where they choose to start playing. Will you take over an emperor and try to paint the map in the colors of your flag? Or will you rise from a duke, turn on your lawful liege, and become an emperor on your own merits? Crusader Kings III has an almost unlimited combination of scenarios and goals that can occupy hundreds, if not thousands, of hours.
In its own way, Crusader Kings III was the game I needed as I faced down a winter of isolation. While I still played Among Us deep into the winter months, I was trying to learn Crusader Kings III. Learning a Paradox game feels like taking a master class in warfare strategy, economics, history, and art all at the same time, and that might be its biggest barrier to entry. However, sticking with it helped me start to unlock the many ways that Crusader Kings III can surprise and delight with its randomness and creativity. Is it worth the effort to get to that reward? I think so, but I'll let everyone make that call for themselves.
What Is It?
Crusader Kings III is a grand strategy game, and it’s a role-playing game, and it’s also really what the player makes of it.
Grand strategy games give the player control of some kind of realm, ranging from a small county to an entire empire. In Crusader Kings III, that means deciding who to tax and how much, which neighboring counties you want to absorb into your realm, what innovations you want your culture to focus on, and many, many more choices. On a moment-to-moment basis, this means making decisions and then advancing time to see how those decisions play out. If you want to, say, find a dirty secret in the court of your cousin, who is also your rival for the succession of the realm, and then use that secret to blackmail and extort that same cousin for gold and land, well, you can do that: Just set your spymaster to find secrets, wait the appropriate amount of time for that mission to complete, then utilize the secrets to get what you want. That's just one example of how granular the game can get, but it's the push-and-pull of granularity and the broader decisions of your realm (like, say, when to go to all-out war, or when to adopt a new religion) that makes grand strategy games so enthralling.
If this sounds a lot like a more complicated version of Civilization, that's by design, but it's also not the whole picture. While grand strategy games do have a lot in common with 4X (which stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate") games like the Civilization series or Humankind, one of the bigger differences comes from the roleplaying. In Civilization, the player is the “spirit of a nation,” essentially just the nation as a whole rather than any one individual. In Crusader Kings III, though, the player takes over as one specific ruler at a specific point in time, and plays as that ruler until their death, upon which they take over as the heir next in line within the dynasty. This allows for more immersion: You are not just controlling Ireland, you are controlling Petty King Murchad of Munster, and whatever rowdy children he might father. This provides the player with choices that range from “How do I make the next 10 years of my character’s life easier or better?” to “How do I ensure that my kingdom doesn’t break apart after my death?” and “How do I make sure my dynasty eventually overthrows England?” (The role-playing aspect of CK3 also enables some, uh, mild eugenics, but we’ll get there in due time.)
As for the last part of CK3, the freedom to use this playground that Paradox has created to fulfill your own goals and whims is both the best and hardest part of the series. While Paradox can provide specific goals for certain rulers—you can try, for example, to reunite France as one kingdom—the player is not at all obligated to follow them. To take the Ireland example again: The game encourages you to unify all of Ireland under your rule, but I have had games where I just grab the south coast then move down into continental Europe, while other games have ended with a unified Ireland slowly but surely taking over the British Isles.
Ireland is one of the more obvious and straightforward starts; there are nomadic leaders that open the world for you, sibling rivalries to navigate in Iberia, and though I’d call CK3 Eurocentric, there’s also the opportunity to explore the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Really, this specific world is your specific oyster, which can be overwhelming, especially when combined with the myriad systems that Paradox has thrown into the game. But it also allows for creative expression of both strategy and role-playing to create an experience that I have not really seen matched in any other series, not even in Paradox’s other stalwarts like Victoria, Stellaris, or Europa Universalis.
What Went Right?
Crusader Kings III is a beautiful game. This is the most evident point in its favor when first booting it up. From the stunning loading screen art, to the character models, to the gorgeous map, it's a joy to just see this game in action. While hours of gameplay might show some cracks—military combat is simplistic visually unless you zoom all the way in, which rockets performance down—I can say that this is the best-looking grand strategy game I've ever played, and since this was a gateway drug of a game for me, I've played a decent amount of them in the last five years.
That level of visual care also goes towards the menus that make up most of the CK3 experience. While there's a lot to process, each menu is well-designed, showing most of the important information at face value while allowing for granular decisions through each sub-menu. This makes managing an empire less a chore and more an exploration, and it's fun to see your cities grow on the map as you pump resources into them.
Elsewhere, CK3 is addictive, thanks to having so much to do and so many stories to tell. There are thousands of leaders spread out across various start years, and the game plays vastly different based on your title, your people's cultures and religions, the laws of your realm, and your neighbors' attitudes and preferences. While the over-arching endpoint might be the same—conquer the world with your immortal dynasty—there are so many ways to go about that, and so many more ways to ignore it and do your own thing. While I've had some enjoyable Big Campaigns, where the goal was regional domination, some of my favorite games involved establishing a modest realm and building "tall," or just focusing on my own lands and making them as strong and lucrative as possible. Looking at you, gold mines of Sardinia.
To put it another way, what goes right with CK3 is that it lets so many things go wrong while still delivering a stellar gaming experience. There will be random events that ruin your best-laid plans—spouses will have affairs that will cause your ruler stress and kill them; your idiot son will plot to assassinate you; your most pissed off vassals will get their asses in gear and form a revolutionary faction to overthrow you—but that's exactly when the game is at its best. You haven't truly played CK3 until you discover an assassination plot and execute everyone involved, raising your infamy throughout the world. Just don't piss off the Pope, though. Trust me.
What Went Wrong?
It is impossible to talk about Crusader Kings III without talking about Crusader Kings II, and the comparison does not always flatter the newer game. This is to be expected and understood, of course: CK2 has more features and polish because Paradox developed it for six years at a rapid pace, while CK3 is just hitting five years old, and with a slower development cadence. But it’s noteworthy anyway that CK2 still feels like the better and more complete game, and that’s without even getting into the modding community, which is strong for both games but significantly more fleshed out for the second game in the series, thanks to its now 13-year lifespan.
So, with that context in mind, what does CK3 do worse than its predecessor? Quite a bit, actually. The main thing that stands out is the difficulty and focus on strategy; with CK3, Paradox leaned much more into the role-playing aspects, and the game can feel easy at times in ways that CK2 never did. With a bit of investment and a plan, players can break the CK3 economy by earning thousands of gold pieces a month, which in turns breaks the military combat, thanks to overpowered Man-At-Arms regiments that you can buy and upgrade to full with your overflowing coffers. In turn, this makes mid-to-late game CK3 feel boring: You’re not being challenged by the AI or by the struggle of keeping a dynasty together. Instead, the challenge is just going through the slog of conquering a country, or continent, or the whole damn world.
It’s a bit ephemeral to complain about the “feel” of a game compared to a very similar game, but CK3 just “feels” less engaging past, I’d say, the first two generations of a dynasty. It’s in this time period that the game is most alive, as the player is trying to establish a foothold, form powerful alliances, develop the realm, and secure the future for the kids. Once that’s set up, though, it all becomes a bit bland and samey: Go to war, conquer more territories, breed more godlike children with the best traits you can find, repeat. CK2’s focus on strategy made it so that even deeper into the game, there were resource challenges and military conquests still felt more engaging, at least to a point. Is it fair to hold this against CK3 when it has so much going for it? A little! The more streamlined experience has made the game more popular than CK2, and there’s value in all of the quality of life, but for fans of CK2, it might feel shallow enough to overpower all of the good that the third game brought into the series.
Were People Normal About This Game?
Oh boy. When it comes to Crusader Kings III, there is no normal. This is not a bad thing. Thanks to the freedom that the game provides the player, there’s a lot of incentive to dive fully into the deep end and see what you find. What people seem to find most is incest, adultery, cannibalism, murder, blackmail, and the aforementioned eugenics. These are all core aspects of the game, so it’s not like people were wilding out within the confines of what Paradox created, but the fervor with which people seem to enjoy talking about their games is quite funny. There’s even a subreddit called “Shit Crusader Kings Say” that catalogs some of the more outlandish situations players have found themselves in. Choice subject lines for post over there, just from the last week: “The Pope found my missing dog,” “So I sent my son into a suicide battle, and the unwanted fucker won...... TWICE!” and “Need help getting rid of Kids.”
As far as the reception goes, that’s a bit more convoluted. As outlined in the previous section, there were enough differences to its beloved predecessor that fans of the series might have been disappointed at launch. I will say, though, I have found the Crusader Kings community to be among the most understanding in gaming; no one expected CK3 to launch with the same level of depth as CK2. This was always going to be a long process, one that would slowly but surely get better and better, and it mostly has.
What's Happened Since?
Since the release of Crusader Kings III in 2020, Paradox has released a steady drip of additional content to bolster the base game. Some of it has been around various regions of the world, providing additional scenarios and storylines. The Northern Lords DLC focus on Scandinavia and Vikings, the Fate of Iberia adds a "struggle" mechanic in the peninsula (this is a really fun one, letting you play as one of three brothers or their sister, who is having an affair with one of the brothers), and Legacy of Persia focuses on the Iranian Intermezzo and all of the intrigue that goes along with it. These pieces of content add depth to those regions, but don't really affect the wider game as a whole.
There have been, however, bigger pieces of DLC that do in fact change the whole game. Royal Court adds a throne room for kings and above, with various hearings and decorations and court customs that must be accounted for. Tours and Tournaments is even better, adding the ability to host treks into the wilderness, regal tournaments, and also letting rulers give their knights accolades. Finally, Roads to Power expands upon the Byzantine Empire, an intimidatingly large section of land that also doubles as the most in-depth and strategic of regions. All three of these major expansions are must-haves, which does rocket the price of a complete CK3 game up by quite a bit, but which also makes the game even better. There is also a fourth major expansion coming at some point this year, and All Under Heaven will expand the map to include a more fleshed-out Asia, alongside new cultures, religions, and traditions to interact with.
There have also been smaller packs that add in-game events and attire and other minor additions; none of these are particularly noteworthy, save for Legends of the Dead, which adds in the Black Death plague. I hate that one and have disabled it, but your mileage may vary.
Is It Worth Playing In 2025?
It’s hard to answer this question, because if you are someone who would enjoy Crusader Kings III, you would probably already be playing Crusader Kings III, and the answer would be a resounding “hell yeah.” This type of game demands to take over your life, and anyone who might have an interest in it has to know that it will likely do so, at least for some time. But it’s also not the type of game that everyone would enjoy. CK3 is complicated, even as one of the bigger complaints about it is that it is too streamlined and easy. It requires juggling a lot of menus to manage military concerns, the state of your council, executing prisoners, marrying off your children, improving your castle walls, and other such minutiae that is both the main appeal of the game and what I could see being the biggest obstacle.
Even with a robust tutorial, being dropped into a new start still disorients me, and I have over two hundred hours played on the game. (This is not a large amount to series fanatics, but I feel like it makes me at least comfortable in saying I know how to play the game on more than just a basic level.) All of the downloadable content that has made the game better with each passing year is great, but it also costs a lot more money than just buying the base game on its own. I will say, though, that a lot of the DLC is not stuff you need to start playing, and you can pick and choose as you get more invested in the world of CK3. All that being said, if you come out of this edition of The Backlog with more than just a passing curiosity in Crusader Kings III, I can recommend it wholeheartedly, and I believe, quite strongly, that everyone can find something for them in this ridiculous world. For that reason, Crusader Kings III earns an 9.4 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale.
