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Victoria 3 will be Paradox’s next strategy game, and it’s not mucking aboutThe important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of Austrian dairy import tariffs
The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of Austrian dairy import tariffs
But while Crusader,Europaand 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 ofVictoria 3actually getting made have dwindled. Only now… um…Victoria 3’s coming out?
Victoria 3 - Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Victoria 3 - Announcement Trailer
It looks very, very complicated. To the extent where, rather than spend the whole of this post barfing out paragraph after paragraph of mechanics descriptions, I’ll urge you to get it from the strategy horse’s mouth, and watch what was just shown at PDXCON. In a nutshell, though: Victoria 3 is one of those Paradox games where you’re playing as a nation, on a great big map. Where it differs from its grand strategy siblings is in its setting (roughly, the period between the Napoleonic wars and World War 2, centred on the back half of the nineteenth century), and in its strategic focus.
If Hearts Of Iron transplants old-school wargame components onto the basic Paradox template, andCrusader Kingsdoes the same with roleplaying elements, then Victoria does so with the stuff of management games. Yes, there is war to be fought (though that wasn’t shown to me), and there are characters to interact with (although you can’t excommunicate and eat them). But these are both secondary to the business of running a state. Paradox are billing it as a “society simulator”, which seems pretty apt.
All this talk about complexity isn’t just me being thick: I spent a lot of the game presentation shaking my head in awe, at the sheer amount of granularity with which the factional politics of the Prussian middle classes had been modelled. You could probably fit entire, decent management games worth of features into the conceptual space Victoria 3 allots to Danish carceral policy in the mid-1870s.
It looks bloody impressive. But does it look fun? Potentially. I can’t decide whether Victoria 3 looks like the strategy game equivalent of trying to eat an entire pack of Carr’s water biscuits in one mouthful, or whether I’m going to sit down to play it and not leave my chair for a month. It really could go either way.
