Crusader Kings 3 Console Preview – Adapting a grand dynasty to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S

Paradox Interactive has spent the better part of the last decade figuring out how to bring more of their games to console. That’s a daunting task, considering the depth and detail of many of their biggest game series – Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis and the like –  but they’ve also had some successes. Cities: Skylines remains a great city builder, and Age of Wonders: Planetfall, Empire of Sin and Surviving Mars were all developed with consoles in mind from the start. Still, from the Paradox Development Studio games, it’s only Stellaris that’s previously made the jump.

Stellaris is easily the most accessible of the PDS grand strategy games and its console edition is a great entryway into their games, but now it’s time for something altogether more challenging: bringing Crusader Kings 3 to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Crusader Kings 3 is quite unlike almost any other grand strategy game out there. Where you’re typically leading a country or one particular ruler’s empire, Crusader Kings is like medieval Fast & Furious – it’s all about family. Whether the head of your family might hold a small fiefdom or have risen to rule over an entire country, your main concern throughout is the growth and prosperity of your dynasty.

You control one leader at a time through this, passing the baton down to your heir whenever the time comes (through peaceful and grisly ends) and will essentially find yourself role playing in the midst of this sprawling strategy game. You need to play to each character’s strengths, whether you have a mighty warrior for a ruler or a conniving back-stabber. Surround them with the right courtiers and you can engage in schemes to plot the downfall of your rivals, or protect yourself by gaining favour from your liege lord.

There’s countless story points to navigate through this as well, choosing how to act through a multi-day feast, going on hunts, tutoring your offspring, choosing what to do when confronted by a dark secret (such as the outing of your bastard children).

Up until now, this has been a game that you could only ever play with a keyboard and mouse – well, trackpads are also an option if you’re on a laptop.

Lab42 has taken a rather innovative approach to adapting the game for home console and gamepads. In a world where most developers would either try to adopt a quick-tab approach or lean on radial analogue stick wheels, Lab42 has asked “why not both?”.

It’s safe to say that this has led to an atypical control scheme. The controller triggers pull double duty, letting you quickly shift between the top level menus for your Realm, Military, Council and more with a quick pull, while holding them brings up radial menus for character and the map – on PS5 with the DualSense, the trigger tension will raise as your character gets more stressed! The Y or Triangle button is always dedicated to opening up the character menu, while X or Square brings up actions. Once you’ve entered the top level menu, the shoulder buttons then let you tab between the different sub-menus.

All of this has been done to free up your ability to navigate the world map and menus as freely as possible. Where Stellaris used the D-pad to access menus arrayed around the screen edges, the D-pad is now freed up to double up the left analogue stick to move around the map and shuffle around the game’s complex menus. The right analogue stick zooms in and out of the map, but also has a key role of letting you switch focus between whatever menu you have open and the map.

There’s a lot to take in for newcomers, and one of the greatest things about Crusader Kings 3 on PC was how deep the tooltips system goes, constantly offering you information on the game’s systems and concepts. That’s allied with context-sensitive control hints that live in the bottom left corner of the screen on console, helping to ensure that you won’t be lost for how to do what you want.

It does feel like Lab42 and Paradox have focussed on getting the fundamentals right for the initial console release, though this comes at the expense of a few frills and niche use-cases. For example, there’s no cross-play or cross-save support at launch. Cross-save is something I’m sure many would appreciate, letting you hop back and forth between PC and consoles at will. More niche would be mouse & keyboard support on console – something that the Xbox Series X|S has system-level support for – though that’s understandable given that the whole UX has been redesigned for controller play.

Crusader Kings 3 will also come to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in the wake of the first big expansion for the game on PC – The Royal Court. The hope is that the console version can catch up to the PC game so that future DLC can be released simultaneously.

For a long time, it was thought that translating Paradox Interactive’s core grand strategy games to console would be impossible. Crusader Kings 3 is sallying forth to prove the doubters wrong yet again.

Source: https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2022/01/26/crusader-kings-3-console-release-gameplay-preview-controller-layout-ps5-xbox-series-x/