Let Me Love You, Crusader Kings 3

I have a problem: when I started working at Kotaku in February 2016, many of my coworkers were big fans of The Witcher 3. Even though a giant fantasy epic was very much not my kind of game, after listening to Luke and Kirk rave about it, I finally gave it a shot in January 2017. Things didn’t go so well at first, but eventually the game won me over hard. Even if I whiffed it in the end, The Witcher 3 is now one of my favorite games. The problem here is that ever since then, I keep thinking I’ll like games Luke likes, and then making a total ass of myself when I try to play them. 

Last week, Defector wrote an article about Crusader Kings 3. This got me thinking about CK3, a game I really tried to get into way back when because Luke made it sound so fun. I really put my back into it. I watched the entirety of a lengthy explainer YouTube playlist Luke sent me. I played the tutorial multiple times. I read a bunch of game guides, and then I played the tutorial a couple more times, and then I watched some more videos, and then I accepted that I would just never figure out the sprawling history roleplaying strategy menus of it all, and I moved on to other things.

I made a wiseass Bluesky post about Defector’s article, which led to one person sending me a Friends at the Table playthrough that I started watching. Like Luke talking about the game, they made it seem so fun and rife with storytelling possibilities that I redownloaded CK3 over the weekend. Maybe I’m ready for the game five years later, I reasoned; maybe I’m smarter or more patient, or my life now as a business guy has given me an aptitude for jargon I previously lacked. Maybe this time could be the time I finally become the kind of person who can play Crusader Kings.  

After ignoring the warnings of old saves titled things like “wwwhhhhyyyy” and “oh no” and, intriguingly, “do something about ulster,” I deleted them all and started a new game. I played the short version of the Ireland tutorial, reading slowly and nodding along. Then the tutorial pushed me toward a little war with a neighboring area, which it seemed like I was a shoe-in to win. Instead, I lost massively, watching my tiny guys get slaughtered by some other tiny guys while I stared helplessly at my computer screen trying to understand what had gone wrong.

Oh well! I deleted that save and started again, trying the longer tutorial this time. I read even slower, sometimes aloud, and I hovered over all the tooltips and opened up all the menus and read all their tooltips too. I finally won a little war, taking over the entirety of Munster. Progress! I was playing CK3 like a big boy!

I’m not totally sure what happened next: for some reason I ended up with a hostage from Dublin, even though my war was against Desmond. The game told me I could declare war against Dublin, so I did that–completely forgetting about the whole hostage thing and pissing off everybody. I lost the shit out of that war, and now I have negative prestige (I am, fittingly, “disgraced”), everyone in and out of my court is furious with me, and I have basically no idea where to go from here. I tried going on a hunt, the only way to get more prestige that I could afford, but the hunt also went to shit, so now I am still “disgraced” but I also have less money.

I just want what everybody else has with this game: funny stories and interpersonal intrigue and wacky twists on history. But to get to all that I feel like I have to hack a path through a jungle of nitty-gritty bits and so many people and a zillion menus full of information that I feel like I’m constantly too new to the game to understand. Everything in the game connects to everything else, in a way that I understand a tutorial could not possibly encompass, but for me this means that I feel like the tutorial ends way too early. The introduction to the game feels like it’s either telling me how to use WASD to move the camera, or I’m outmatched by a list of chores to tackle and no one to ask for help, which feels way too similar to my everyday life as it is.

The way through this is probably to just keep playing the game, letting myself actually fail instead of quitting when I feel like I’m in over my head, but CK3 feels like one of those games where I barely even understand what I’m clicking enough to keep moving forward. I get myself into situations I can’t understand through my choices and then don’t understand how to rectify things, or I set a little goal for myself and then have no idea how to go about pursuing it. I feel like I understand what’s going on in the YouTube videos I watch or the articles I read, but somehow that never translates into actually being able to play the game on my own. 

What are you supposed to do in this fucking game, and how the hell do you do it? What is the path from where I am, lost and horrified, to the hundreds of hours of CK3 fun that Luke and Defector and so many of my pals rave about? Can those of you who are good at this game even remember a time when you weren’t, when you looked at CK3 with the wide-eyed bafflement of a total newcomer like me? I’m playing Friends at the Table’s videos in another tab as I write this, and they’re laughing and plotting and sound like they’re having the time of their lives. How did they get that? How do I get it?

A friend has offered to watch me play the game, which I am 100% going to take them up on; maybe the only way to become a CK3 guy is to have another CK3 guy convert you, the way I understand you can do with religions in the game itself and which I badly want to do but cannot figure out how. But if you have any other tips, at this point it isn’t even about trying to impress Luke anymore, I just want to not feel like a total failure.