

These come in extremely handy when you're setting up marriages or considering someone for a job on your council. Everyone gets an epithet that sums them up, so you don't have to trawl their character sheet to get the measure of them. Big Game of Thrones fans.Ĭrusader Kings 3 doesn't really need us at all.Ī long-lived character can earn a confounding number of traits over their life, some of them slightly contradictory, but there are always a couple of reliable core personality quirks that bubble to the surface. One of my rival dynasties ended up almost destroying itself by keeping it all in the family, which made a whole generation almost entirely infertile. Inbreeding is one way this can be done-a perfectly normal thing to write in a videogame review-but that's a ticking time bomb. Parents can pass on congenital traits to their children that can be strengthened over generations, letting you promote things like intelligence and symmetrical features through arranged marriages and bad science. They start developing before they're even born. Everything has a root cause, something that the trait can be traced back to, like a childhood bully or a battle that went badly, creating characters moulded by their pasts. They might be greedy, cruel, pious, horny, perpetually drunk-if you're looking for an adjective, you'll find it.
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Each of them is full of agency and ambitions and will more often than not devolve into a petulant child when they don't get their way. It's fun for the whole family.Crusader Kings has always been about characters instead of nations, but they've never seemed so rich and so maddeningly real before. Plus, you can become a berserker and literally strangle people with their own entrails. And the price seems pretty reasonable for what you're getting, too, at less than half what some of the bigger Paradox DLCs cost. There will be bigger expansions that add stuff for everyone, but you won't need to worry about playing an incomplete version of the game just because you're missing a flavor pack for a culture or region you're not interested in. But that's the great thing about flavor packs, and I really like that Paradox is doing DLC this way now. If that's not really your thing, there isn't much reason to pick it up. I haven't even scratched the surface of the dozens of new events yet in the 20-ish hours I've played so far. If you like playing Norse rulers, there's a lot here to love. You'll eventually settle and start playing a more familiar sort of game, though you'll still have any Norse-specific dynasty legacies you've unlocked, as well as a nice little modifier that lets you continue to raise runestones even if you chose to convert to the local culture. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much for you in the long run, other than giving you the freedom to go plop down some bearded berserkers anywhere you want on the map.

And it's not just a rehash of features we'd already seen in Crusader Kings 2's fantastic Old Gods and Holy Fury expansions-unlike a lot of the rest of this stuff. It's a really interesting playstyle that feels a lot different from how a game of CK3 normally goes. Even the horse lords of the steppe in CK2 couldn't just up and leave their old lives behind, aside from a special, one-time event that was specifically tied to the Magyars.
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This is the first time in the Crusader Kings series we've had true nomad mechanics. And the ever-present suggestion widget still follows the stained glass motif of the default UI, which feels particularly inappropriate when I'm sailing my longships around the cold North Sea in search of plunder. The character screen, for instance, looks identical to how it would playing as any other culture. Even the menu buttons on the right hand side now look rougher and more tribal. The UI has gotten some nice little touch-ups, as well, with the top and bottom bars sporting thematically-appropriate, wood-carved dragon motifs. And they've added some gorgeous new backgrounds, including a cozy longhouse, to serve as the set for feasting, fighting, and fratricide. The shield for the Kingdom of Sweden, for example, bears a gold Thor's Hammer if you form it as a pagan, instead of the more familiar coat of arms the Christian Swedish monarchs wore historically. The coats of arms, too, reflect whether or not you've stayed true to your pagan traditions. Norse characters can pick from an armload of new hairstyles and beards, and wear historically appropriate clothing that even changes if you adopt a different culture or convert to a new religion.

The most immediately noticeable additions are all visual.
