#CRUSADER KINGS 3 CONSOLE PC#

To view your character’s page, you actually have a face button dedicated to this – Y on the Xbox – to quickly bring up your menu and start diving into those of your relatives, wards, and so on. However, if you hold either trigger, then you get a radial menu, the right bringing up different map views and the left for menus related to your character’s dynasty, personal advancement.

You can then move around this with the left stick or D-pad, and tab between sub-sections with the shoulder buttons. To access the primary management pages for your domain you have the Command Bar at the top of the screen that you scroll through with quick pulls of the triggers, bringing up menus for your Council, Military, and so on that overlay the right-hand third of the screen. The new control paradigm is all about the triggers. Picking it up on console, you’re thrown into a tutorial the first time you start playing, and it’s practically a necessity, even if you know the game from PC. How well you do that, however, will depend on your character’s abilities and specialities, which may or may not be passed down to their children and your later characters. There will be banquets to host or attend, you’ll try to keep your vassals happy to stave off a rebellion, while perhaps getting into your own leige’s good graces, you can be particularly virtuous, or a conniving back-stabber, scheming and adultering your way through the times. Yes, you’re from nobility, and you might rule over an empire, but you’re really role-playing as a lord or lady and (eventually) their descendants. This game puts control of a dynasty in your hands, as opposed to a particular country or empire. It’s… mostly successful in Crusader Kings 3. Each game has a different approach to managing all the information it provides to players, a different controller layout that tries to make stuff as accessible as possible. Surviving Mars and Age of Wonders were both handled by the original developer, Cities Skylines and Stellaris both by Tantalus Media, and now Crusader Kings 3 is coming via Lab42.

The one thing that’s really been missing from Paradox Interactive’s efforts is a cohesive, unified approach to this task. Crusader Kings 3 is a very different challenge, due to its historical setting and character role-playing. The real mountain to climb has been in adapting their premier grand strategy games, and Stellaris did a great job, thanks in part to the sci-fi setting and tone of the game. Over the decades, strategy games have generally worked best when designed from the ground up for a console’s gamepad – unless using a PS1 mouse, Wiimote, Move or gimmicky voice controls – but Paradox has defied that ever since porting Cities: Skylines to console, and the simultaneous releases of Surviving Mars and Age of Wonders: Planetfall. For the last five years, Paradox Interactive has been trying to prove that wrong, but have now taken on their greatest challenge to adapt Crusader Kings 3.

#CRUSADER KINGS 3 CONSOLE PC#

On PC with a mouse and keyboard you can furiously click away to manage resources in an RTS, dive into menus four or five layers deep, and wrangle vast armies in battle. It’s been a long-held maxim of gaming that strategy games and management sims don’t work on consoles.

Crusader kings 3 console