Is CK3 as boring as a lot of people told me!?

[stmpunk]

So I do have some acquaintances who tried it out and basically recommended against, they said that by mid-late game it becomes boring as hell if you play rail-roaded to the start you pick. There's much less sandboxing potential than CK2 had, and it tends to narrow your choices due to quite arbitrary and unrealistic mechanics.

Two curators I follow to avoid marketing traps also recommend against it, one says it's way too buggy and unreliable, while both agree that it'll become a massive cash-cow that'll cost us hundreds if not more to experience the complete thing...

My question is are those people right? If so how much better CK2 is when you really think about it!? CK3 attracts me mostly for it's graphics and some new mechanics, but my favorite parts of CK2 seem to be missing like Warrior Lodges and more dynamic stuff related to religion. One of the guys told me that cultures are a nuissance, and succession is just ridiculously locked for late-game.

Thoughts?

[NewbieOne]

It can be. Whether it will depends on your attitude, including attention span, dedication, diligence vs laziness, attentiveness vs speeding through, micro vs macro, etc.

I kid you not, much of the time I can't be bothered to remember my character's name and am speed 5-ing through it. And don't even get me started on all the invitations from your vassals to feasts and all the notifications of secrets discovered once you blob out all over the map and have several dozen direct vassals.

It depends if you like big-picture strategy gaming, i.e. empire management, or if you prefer action-packed small scale (like the carving out of duchies and kingdoms, starting from the bottom rungs of the feudal ladder).

It depends on your willingness to remember all the names, faces, territories etc. The game gives you the same information anyway, but it depends on your personality whether you care or not. Again, how easily you get bored. How good your concentration is. How long —or short — your attention span. How much do you crave action. How much bean counting you can survive. Etc. etc.

Yes, there is less sandboxing potential than CK2, for good and bad. I like the way you can't just invite all the claimants you want and land them with a barony just before you sign the peace treaty on their claim, how you can no longer just simply invite the heirs of your smaller neighbours and give them titles on an equal tier with their dad's (so that dad's stuff is joined to your realm when he dies because e.g. you as the Holy Roman Emperor made the heir of the King of France King of Lotharingia or Bohemia in your realm), and how you can no longer invite old people with plenty of cash to your court in order to inherit from them. You can't means you don't have to — and that's liberating to an obsessive maximizer like myself.

The game can get boring, but in a lot of ways it can make realm management less boring than in CK2.

Cash-cow is likely close to spot on, though I wouldn't predict two or three $20 DLCs per annum. More like one.

Marketing? Let's say the concept and theme are extremely engaging, so a lot of people, professional critics included, end up being very forgiving about the game's flaws, and the level of skill and care in the studio is sometimes overrated. So yes, there is koolaid. There is precious little access to information about flaws, issues, outstanding problems etc. due to active efforts to discourage and drown out such information and bury it under copious layers of the aforementioned koolaid, like covering you in whipped cream.

But you can still play the game and enjoy it. I'm disappointed with the studio's level of skill and care (although there are some indications of improvement from the RC expansion and associated patch, e.g. the cultural traditions were meticulously thought out, conceived with an open mind and with quite some panache, including on the purely quantitative angle, meaning there are simply a lot of those traditions and all of them smart and good and well done), especially the AI design and the event writing and scripting (use of variables taken from the state of your game in order to dynamically create or modify the event text as appropriate), and in some cases the logic of the mechanics, but empirically speaking I still end up playing this game rather than playing, reading or drinking something else, which is also saying something. And I haven't played a single hour of CK2 since my first CK3 game, which is also saying something.

(For the record, my belief about CK2 is that due to the AI flaws and some other flaws it is just not the perfection many people make it out to be, the best example of what's wrong being the defender AI of Crusade Egypt vs jihads trying to recover it, which leads to the Christian Egypt army sitting on its ass in between the Delta and the Red Sea, sometimes with ships raised in both seas, taking attrition and ignoring smaller enemy stacks passing by and sieging Cairo and everything else into 100% war score. And in some cases sailing out to Iceland or Norway and ignoring sieges in the homeland, losing the war and getting bumped down from king of Egypt to a vassal duke under the Caliph. CK3 AI can be equally stupid, but somehow it doesn't have the same psychological effect on me.)

Edit: From purely the perspective of life advice, if you don't mind a middle-aged guy talking a bit like a smartass uncle, perhaps consider this: The time spent thinking about whether to buy the game or not doesn't really give you either money or entertainment. It's spent neither productively nor recreationally. So it might be a good idea to cut down on 'deliberation time', i.e. spend less time in 'deliberation mode' (a phrase and concept I learned from a Starcraft streamer called Day Nine), and consciously apply your time to either trying the game so that you know first-hand if you like it, or generating some income so that you have some money to burn if the expense is a concern. As a freelancer who works in a gig system, I've learned that it's more efficient to produce more money than to meditate on the expenses. Investing (even investing your time to make some money) generally makes you more money than cost-cutting can save you. For example if you spend a whole day thinking about how not to waste $50, it may be easier to actually spend that $50 and use the remainder of the day to make $100 or $200, depending on how much you can realistically get paid. People who are middle-aged and working sometimes waste weeks agonizing on expenses that could recovered by two or three days' overtime work, and students sometimes spend days thinking about something that costs $20 instead of just asking for some work at the nearest construction yard/supermarket/gas station/whatever. For example when buying a computer in 2015 I lost the opportunity to earn $500 because I didn't have the time to fit a last-minute project in my schedule due to having spent time looking for deals on the various PC innards so as to save maybe $100, not even $200. That taught me it's best not to overthinking expenses if you at all have the opportunity to cut the thinking time and spend it earning money instead of overthinking expenses that can be easily recouped.

[mk11]

They seem contradictory so I hope they come from different people.

One seems to say it is boring in comparison to CK2 after a fortune has been spent on DLC for that. The other says says don't buy it because you will end up spending a fortune.

My recommendation, wait 4 years, buy the base game cheap and get the DLC on subscription for a month or two.

[NewbieOne]

On the other hand, the cost of the DLCs is more manageable if it is spread out in time, like a sort of subscription, where you fork out $60 up front and add anywhere from $20 to $40 annually. That's way more manageable than getting everything at once. As for sales and discounts, they will often leave out some of the DLCs, especially the newest, so you won't be getting the whole package at a huge discount in a single transaction unless it's a limited big opportunity like Black Friday 5 years after release.

Always consider the value you get out of simply getting the game earlier and being able to spend more time playing it. Your recreation and enjoyment don't have a price tag, but they definitely have value. :) Value that usually outclasses small monetary savings.

Generally, life's too short for agonizing over trivial things and thinking much about small savings, especially when there's money to be made somewhat easily and comfortably in the very same time. (Like, working some sort of part-time job for a week instead of spending the same amount of your free time meditating about a relatively small expense. I think it's healthier to invest that time in productive work that will enlarge your budget than to spend it agonizing on ways of cutting your expenses from your existing budget.)

[D34DLY]

it is extremely rare for this game to crash when unmodded. Like, you should be able to go 250 hours without a crash. Mod conflicts can cause crashes, but only when loading the game, if the game loads you are fine after that. Once you get your mods working right, and not fighting each other, you are back on the 250 hours between crashes stability train.

Compare to Civ 6, which crashes about once every 4 hours, or even more often for some people.

"unstable" is not a word one should use to describe CK3.

[Machiavelli]

I have to roleplay to make it fun. I shouldnt have to force myself to play a specific way to keep me entertained.

[D34DLY]

If you don't think the midgame is fun, well quit, and start a new game. This is true for all strategy games. When I feel I reach the point where things get snowballing out of control, I chalk that up as a win, and start a new game. I do this for almost every strategy game, not just CK3. Once you have "won" you don't need to spend more time playing it, to grind it out to the very end, if you don't want to.

[D34DLY]

If you aren't having fun, don't play it dude. Don't force yourself to play something you don't want to. Only you know what is fun for you. If it was fun once, but now isn't, give the game a long rest and play something else. You can always come back later, when it might appeal to you more.

Go play Warhammer III that just came out.

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by D34DLY:

it is extremely rare for this game to crash when unmodded. Like, you should be able to go 250 hours without a crash.

850 for me, I think. Vanilla or light mods.

Compare to Civ 6, which crashes about once every 4 hours, or even more often for some people.

"unstable" is not a word one should use to describe CK3.

Even in absolute terms, CK3 is simply not unstable. Its stability is practically perfect.

Originally posted by My Lord of Fellington:

I have to roleplay to make it fun. I shouldnt have to force myself to play a specific way to keep me entertained.

My exact problem.

To some extent the lifestyles and their perks fix this. Architects and administrators play out differently from diplomats and patriarchs and from gallant knights or tight controllers (efficient military governors) or strategists (improved commanders), and scholars and theologians also play out differently. So you play in cycles, often dedicating an entire lifetime to either decking out your demesne or expanding your realm by diplomacy (True Ruler, etc.) or might.

The lifestyles and now cultural traditions, as well as some other things open some ways and close some others, so that there is at least some variety, though the extent can be debated.

Originally posted by D34DLY:

If you aren't having fun, don't play it dude. Don't force yourself to play something you don't want to. Only you know what is fun for you. If it was fun once, but now isn't, give the game a long rest and play something else. You can always come back later, when it might appeal to you more.

The CK franchise has this particular problem of being quite addictive on account of the theme, concept, visuals and music. Perhaps more so CK2 than CK3. If you're a hopeless fan of the time period and setting and there is no other game to give you your fix, you can end up — like you say — playing something you don't really want to play. In which case, yes, the rational thing to do would be seek out a different game. A roleplaying game, a mediaeval city sim or something else like that, set in a mediaeval world.

[snuggleform]

In all likelihood if you have any affinity for the genre you will probably get a good 100 hours minimum out of it before it becomes boring. I have 900+ and I'm still going strong.

[DinoMight]

the fact that vast majority of people didnt play from starting date to end date, even the white knights who defend PDX and this game, and they say they "like it"

you can just imagine how boring it is

it becomes boring literally with first ruler you play because it takes only one lifetime to become the strongest entity on the map and to see all the events the game has to offer
feasts and hunts are the same 5 events for all the rulers and thats what you do when you play this game, thats gameplay
just form kingdom and hold the majority of holdings in it and there you go
you passed the game

otherwise you have to gimp yourself to "role play"
its not even real role play, its called "self limitation"
like, you jump through hoops you yourself have imagined to make this game fun


its very boring, dont invest in it for now, and probably quite long in the future too

royal court dlc is borderline scam for what it costs

[JC]

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[JC]

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[Townsendvol]

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[Townsendvol]

I am honestly curious why people like you are here.

Again not trying to be an azz but I wouldn’t hang out on the boards of games I hate and or just don’t enjoy. I would be going to boards of games I do enjoy or am curious about.

I personally enjoy the game and played past the ending year. So I don’t think it’s boring or a scam or whatever. It’s a game I enjoy.

You and many others don’t enjoy it or didn’t enjoy it. That’s ok, we are all different. I just don’t understand why spend time here.

Anyway I don’t want to get into a discussion with you about it so I will just say thank you if you reply and if you don’t, on.

Either way best of luck to you.

Originally posted by DinoMight:

the fact that vast majority of people didnt play from starting date to end date, even the white knights who defend PDX and this game, and they say they "like it"

you can just imagine how boring it is

it becomes boring literally with first ruler you play because it takes only one lifetime to become the strongest entity on the map and to see all the events the game has to offer
feasts and hunts are the same 5 events for all the rulers and thats what you do when you play this game, thats gameplay
just form kingdom and hold the majority of holdings in it and there you go
you passed the game

otherwise you have to gimp yourself to "role play"
its not even real role play, its called "self limitation"
like, you jump through hoops you yourself have imagined to make this game fun


its very boring, dont invest in it for now, and probably quite long in the future too

royal court dlc is borderline scam for what it costs

[Townsendvol]

This comment is awaiting analysis by our automated content check system. It will be temporarily hidden until we verify that it does not contain harmful content (e.g. links to websites that attempt to steal information).