Victoria 3 Review It's Another Imperator! Wide As The Atlantic And Deep As A Piss Puddle! 

You always know a company has a lot of faith in its product when it gives the game out to content creators with a pretty strict review embargo.

The mechanics were deliberately cut to be sold as pathbreaking dlc later.

This battle system is worse than Stellaris' ground combat. At least in Stellaris you can do orbital bombardments, have regular troops fight giant super-soldiers or biophages, or hunter-killers. Or you know, just crack the planet into pieces. Jesus and I thought Stellaris ground combat was barebones.

Everything about this game was predicted by Martin Anward being in charge. The guy who insisted, despite years of pushback from players, that automated exploration would be bad for Stellaris. He leaves for Vicky3, and they implement automated exploration. The entirety of fun, to him, is micromanagement. Since this is supposedly the economic game, he thinks you have to micromanage the economy.

I'm baffled that people called this game "mid" and "6/10". It looks TERRIBLE. Like a mobile game

Victoria 3 is a pisstake. All I fucking wanted was Victoria 2 with modern graphics and a little polish to the historical events.. How the fuck did Paradox blow it so hard after more than 10 years?

“It’s without a doubt the most beautiful game Paradox has ever made, and arguably the most welcoming for newcomers” 8/10 - PCGamesN “Victoria 3 is the kind of game that sucks me in and doesn't let me go” 8/10 - IGN “Victoria 3 succeeds at rendering a tumultuous chapter in world history with a straightforward grace that educates as much as it entertains” Rock Paper Shotgun I wonder if people still are dumb enough to listen to these "professional critiques" (Read paid to say positive things / shills).

So it's a Victorian era game without being the Victorian era.

Paradox once again promised mountains, yet delivered molehills.

Victoria 3 is definitely a Paradox game.

must dumb down for wider audience, casuals ,and game jurnos

Don't worry Arch, they gonna add all those mechanic and complexity with DLC since it's Paradox game.

"Combat was kinda bad so we cuted it" -Creative Assem... mean Paradox games

Instead of Westernizing, the next victoria game will have "Steal Wakanda Technology" option instead

Honestly, watching you play this and hearing you talk about Victoria 2 makes me want to buy the second game

Paradox are gona fix all these issues one at a time with 10$ DLC. Your gona see "Rise of Capitalism" "Industrial Warfare" and "Build the empire" as DLCs and they will fix one issue each for ten bucks a pop. Mark my words

I have not played any of these games but i think it's telling that the Spiffing Brit managed to beat the game starting with 50 people on a island situated in the middle of nowhere on the polar circle and did it by making a "communist utopia" as he called it. Funny part: the party was winning elections with millions of votes when the population was 300.000 so the developers got at least that part right, although i don't think it was intentional on their part. Something is clearly broken within the systems of this game.

Oyo has nearly 40% Literacy? Nigeria is only about 55% literally in 1990 (admittedly it was highest in the south west) but in 1849 there is no way

Playing as sweden, first thing i've done was to implement state religion. Peple didnt like it much even though they are 9o% swedish protestants. What?

So, the irony is, all those years we were asking for Victoria 3 the story was, "it's too hard to make a sequel to Victoria 2". And now that Victoria 3 has come out, we find out they didn't make a sequel to Victoria 2, because it would have been too hard.

The thumbnail art was not completely wasted, for what it's worth. I like it.

I criticized them on the devforums that if they focused on making the games their fans loved and not political correctness and hiring blue haired overweight feminists etc the games would be better. I was promotly banned and the next dev video on Victoria 3 had an overweight PURPLE haired overweight feminist showcasing most of it, goes to prove sometimes you can be wrong and should not judge to fast.

Must be two reasons they don’t have westernization. Either it’s ‘wacist’ or it’ll be $25 dollar dlc to get westernization for each specific region.

"Anyone who don´t agree to you becomes a radical" Well this game is perfect for 2022.. its how everything works now. There is really quite a lot of 2022 stuff in the game i think.. its waaay to much in the year it as made

This is what you get when a game is made by predominantly people who went to game dev school and who have no other qualifications. They follow the formula they learned in school and little more. What else can explain the deluge of cookie cutter games we've gotten these last few years. There is no passion, no depth, just a soulless product to be consumed.

muh acessibility and wider market lol

But hey the implemented a Karl Marx Model.

One advantage of the wokeification of games. I am saving myself a lot of money.

When Tencent owns stake in a game company take that as a red flag.

We promise "The Sun, Moon and Stars". What you get "The Moon over the outhouse door."

Thanks for your review. Having watched a few hours worth of streams this is exactly what I saw from the gameplay. It obvious that making any form of competent AI is so expensive, Paradox have found removing any form of AI massively reduces development costs. Don't need a battle AI. Don't need global market AI. Don't need AI to control economic development, player can centrally control a capitalist society. Don't need AI to make political decisions, just arbitrary declare interest in a geographic area then roll a dice to see if it gets involved. Don't need an AI to govern pop political orientation.

Even if the war system is like this, troop movement could and should still be a thing. Its simply one more bar/information tab in the military/officer window saying "moving to front, estimated arrival: add date here" and show a bunch of carriages or a long train moving slowly along a road or railway towards the front. Its the least they could have done.

As soon as they talked about how much they were downplaying any kind of war mechanic and openly admitting they didn't want you to play this game wide, I knew this was gonna be bad. And then I heard about all the woke stuff they were just proudly admitting to, and was sure this was gonna be trash. Never expected it was gonna be THIS bad though. I expected nothing and I'm still disappointed.

Honestly I read it many years ago and agreed back then. If they were to ever make a vicky 3 it would be complete trash and lack everything that made vicky 2 good. They do not have the same team or even leadership for the vision. They proved this right, they don't understand what made vicky 2 an amazing game. They just want to make casual trash that they can milk the blind and ignorant for 100 more DLCs that pretend they're going to be more complex.

You should start a Victoria 2 LPs/Tutorial after this to show the people what they lost going into Vic 3

So looking into it briefly, the only census data I could find close to the game's timeline was for 1871, but even then the literacy rates could be measured in uh, decimal places. Also that was **Prussia**. So the agrarian commune economy of Oyo is actually vastly superior to most of Europe. Were I mean spirited I would guess they just fed the 2010 census data from UNESCO into the game and called it a day.

"Creating and focusing on a "Westernization" mechanic would be admitting Westerners were superior at some point in history, and we can't have that as a woke company!" - Paradox.

Paradox wokists: "You get to abolish slavery!" Me: "Really? I can set up a West Africa Squadron, or use gunboat diplomacy to force the African slave states to end slavery?" Paradox wokists: "Er... What?"

Nice to see paradox simplifying, or as its called today "streamline" complex games to appeal to the mythical wider audiance. After all Who doesnt like paying more for the expected mechanics that existed in previous titles

I’m sure it will be fun to play after 5 years and £1,000 of DLC

Paradox needs plenty of room to make DLC money.

In Vicky 2 you were able to manually build factories too, but you needed state capitalism or planed economy political parties in power. But yeah, I agree, in Vicky 3 every country is the Soviet Union. Also, the game lacks flavor, at least for the big powers. The Russian Empire has just 1 journal entry... And warfare... don't get me started on warfare.

They dropped westernization and a lot of the other mechanics that separate “the West from the Rest” because it’s not “politically correct” anymore.

I liked when Victoria said "its victorian time" and then died Rip her majesty

"This is another Imperator" is the perfect summary for this game.

I've seen the more recent Paradox games descriped as "grand strategy games made for people who deeply hate grand strategy games".

This looks like paradox is finally hitting the "thrones of Britannia" phase where everything is a cheap low effort copy with no heart

FINALLY! someone is talking about the issues this game has, all I see is positivity like they are just ignoring the very clear issues and how much of a downgrade this truly is from victoria 2.

Victoria 2 has a few of these problems too, but none of them are nearly as pronounced as with this sequel. It also had many many features that this sequel just completely lacks, just like with CK2 and CK3.

It seems like the best thing about this game is that it made you make a video about it. And now I heard about a bunch of cool mechanics that Victoria 2 had. I've never played Victoria 2, and now I want to.

Command economy simulator.

The instant I heard they were putting combat on the backend of the game I knew it wasn't going to even be worth the dirt on my shoe.

Somebody discovered the not new dlc policies of paradox -Those diferences are not in the game! -They will...

Don't worry Barch. I'm sure after years of DLC costing 300 USD, the game will be even worse somehow. I mean better. maybe.

Warfare in this game is just 2 men making mean faces at one another. Ya Hard pass.

I noticed how they were selling this as the most complex game ever. And then in the FIRST playthrough the "spiffing brit" manages to conquer the entire world as the british empire. Hope they can carve out a game out of this with patches. But I'm more confident in modders, as being historical is just diversity lacking for a company like paradox.

Victoria 2 complete edition (all DLC) is 10 USD less than Victoria 3. In case anybody wanted an actually good game. Though if you want something grand strategy and don't want your money going to a fallen game dev you can get Terra Invicta or Shadows of Forbidden Gods.

"All what has been removed and changed was thing that is wrong." - Paradox.

It sucks that games are so dumbed down to the point of an interactive wallpaper

Warfare is broken af and not just because of the mechanics involved. It is way too costly. Take the opium wars. In the real world, less than 10k people died total. around 1000 europeans and around 7000 chinese. Furthermore China fielded 200k soldiers. Yet in the game, China loses over a million in causalities. You lose over 30k soldiers yourself. War is 30x as costly as it was in the real world. Combine that with how they gimped natural pop growth (germany for example grew by 11% from 1871-1911) to something like 1% or less and you are forced to encourage migration. And of course this leads you down the path of multiculturalism in order to increase migratory attraction. You are railroaded to play a certain way, or you gimp yourself hard. Unlike the claim that all ways of playing the game would be viable when they announced the game, all paths are not viable, only one path is. Anything else is gimping yourself hard.

Consoom game. Buy the dlc. Paradox and CA has gone down the drain...

It's so sad how both professional movie and game reviews have become completely corrupted by pandering to woke advocacy for social credit points and/or studios for early access.

As soon as Wiz was announced as game director my interest level bottomed out because I knew he'd botch all the major decisions just as he did when in charge of Stellaris. His vision for games is apparently the polar opposite of mine.

Even people like me, who play Paradox games like a chimpanzee with a nuclear weapons platform control panel, can tell this was stripped down and not as good as 2.

They misses the opportunities to make a CONTINUATION of all good things Victoria 2 had, they bring nice ideas to the game but delete many things of Victoria 2 making the game so simple

Didn't Paradox fire their entire QA team at some point? That move is really paying off.

They decided they liked playing anno so they converted the economy to anno, wherein it's more about chains of production rather than dynamic economies. This was in response to Victoria 2's completely impossible to manage late game where factories would shut down but not build up fast enough which caused death spirals. An overreaction on the dev teams part, to a real problem in vicky 2. They decided it's racist and Eurocentric to have a westernization system, therein no country can put at a disadvantage to the west. An overreaction on the dev teams part, to a none issue in vicky 2. They decided to overhaul the war system to make it HOI light without the micro so they could move micro to the economy. This was in response to the impossibly insane troop management of late Victoria where you spend more time preening your armies than anything else. An overaction on the dev teams part, to a real issue in Vicky 2. While I'm having some fun playing it as an factorio or anno style numbers game, that's not Victoria. Its a victim of the modern school of video game thought, "Abstraction, Abstraction, Abstraction" wherein everything needs to be abstracted out. It's also the victim of post-colonial historical revisionism wherein anything remotely Eurocentric or European advantageous can't be present for Social Justice. Ultimately I feel they tried to address real issues in Victoria 2 (Factories shutting down and disappearing forever, Late game unit management being very micro intensive down to unit comp, a lot of rail historical roading, No CB wars in europe) while failing to maintain what worked and introducing trendy mechanics. Better than launch imperator but definitely not Victoria, there's some good in the bones of the game to make it into a Victoria game but it ultimately needs a complete overhaul to make it a true sequel.

its paradox they have been trying to figure out what is the least they can release and still call it a game for years, so they can nickle and dime you mechanics. i wouldnt be suprised if they just gave us a spreadsgeet one day and then sold us a texture pack.

You mean it's another Hearts of Iron IV, Stellaris, Crusader Kings II, Europa Universalis IV, and every other game Paradox has released since at least the mid 2000s. Even Victoria 2 had what I and many others would consider essential DLC that added content and mechanics that you could not imagine playing the game without. In fact, if you go back and play _any_ of the titles I just mentioned on their release version with no DLC enabled, you will quickly realize that the phrase "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle" applies to *every single one of them.* Paradox games are and always have been long term investments by both the developers and the players. If you are _just now_ taking offense with their model, all I can say is this: where have you been the last *16* years?

I miss feeling like a capitalist tycoon...

Seems that Victoria 3 uses the Wakanda version of Africa...

Now Victoria 2 fans get to experience the downgrade with 3 as the Hearts of Iron 3 fans Experienced with 4

HA! This is what you get for trusting in paradox! Or buying their stuff. Or not sending letters with concerning content to their execs. Like, seriously. Only reason paradox isn't considered worse than bethesda or EA is because they are making niche strategy games nobody plays, and thus don't know of.

I've seen the developers in the videos and i was worried...

Gameplay was sacrificed for making freeing the slaves and easier and more enjoyable process for people that want to do it the split second that that was the first thing announced that they focused heavily on freeing the slaves and not you know actual core game mechanics which bear in mind. That was the first thing they announced besides the game itself I already knew it was going to be s***. And the fact that I was right only further proves my suspicion that Victoria too will be the superior game until the far future unfortunately all the shills and people who paradox have ever sponsored will probably end up not playing Victoria too anymore because all the brainlets on RU-vid want to see the new hotness even though the new hot list is a lumpy potato that's been microwaved for 30 seconds so only the outside is warm and the inside is still raw!

As expected, if they cant make an system work, just remove it

Remeber kids: HoI4 was 7 years ago.

If Victoria 3 was just Victoria 2 but with fancy graphics, I would be fine with the game.

There is no fundamental mechanical difference between capitalism, communism and etc in victoria 3.

Why is everyone surprised that a bunch of purple haired, nose-ringed Swedes made a game where communism, revolution, "equity" and "diversity" replaced capitalism and colonialism? I guess we should all be happy the game isn't "cancelled" yet.

At this rate, this game should be called "Victoria: Shadow Legends" because a lot of the things in the game got simplified, not to mention the warfare system. I saw videos of the alpha build and some of the pre-release reviewer streams and I know the red flags are there. I'm glad I didn't waste $50 for this. I'll wait until the game is on sale when it's more fleshed out with DLCs, I'll stick with Vic2, HoI4, EU4, CK2, CK3 and Stellaris for now.

Patches will fix it! (Copium Maximum)

Well a bit of history corection is at place here. USA was not (and still is not) the ultra capitalist haven that its described as. This was especially true around 1830 to the civil war. USA become much more capitalistic after the civil war, but the other side of that coin is that a lot of power was moved from the states to the federal government.

It's so sad what happened to PDX. I think it was mostly caused by them going public in late 2016. Investors don't care about passionate products for niche audience. This game was planned since 2015, so it's not like they lacked dev time. You want innovative, passionate projects? Look at indie companies. For example, Grey Eminence and Fields of History: Great War are looking promising.

DLCs: it's real free state

Imperator with the Invictus mod is 10x the game Vic3 is in terms of depth. Goes to show that devoted fans who work hard to improve care more about Paradox’s game than fucking PARADOX.

So they took away all ability to automatically run areas of the country, reworked literacy to make it mostly worthless, and didn't want to focus on war, yet made anyone who disagrees with you a radical, who could rebel against your country... Yeah Paradox couldn't decide where to focus so they threw out everything, for DLC if I had to guess, to milk the Victoria name. I also love how they removed the basic ability to move your army, and expect that to not be exploited. Really sad I was looking forward to this game, but it seems like if you got the beta, you got the game. I wonder if this is because of the consoles, mobile, or because they just didn't care. Maybe all of the above.

I can't believe they have a "mixed" review on steam. If people started speaking up and hitting the "not recommended" and their game gets rated to hell, they might rethink their strategy. Vote with your wallets, too. Don't buy their half baked DLCs, either.

10 minutes in and I have to point a few things out: -You're lying if you say the AI worked well in Victoria 2. -Different military methods demand different amounts and types of weapons, meaning that a high conscript army with no supplies will be beaten by a smaller, well supplied professional army with the same tech. -Westernization has been delegated to two fronts: Literacy and Wealth, & Government. Certain laws require certain people in power, which is not possible right off the bat, limiting modes of production and technological acquirement significantly.

Excellent review. Thank you for not sugarcoating the issues in this game.

Paradox did it again. A bare bones as usual. At this point everybody should expect only skeleton games from PARADOX.

So more dumbing down and over simplifying of games to try to grow the user base. SMH. Also another take away is to never believe the early paid reviewers. THanks Barch

I give the Game this, Made My want to play Victoria II

Wow. I'd been eagerly looking forward to Vicky 3 for years. Based on the gameplay videos I saw and dev diaries etc I decided with much sadness to pass on it for the major flaws I'd just picked up on that skim, but this deeper look shows that even when I was deciding not to get the game I still hadn't nearly realised the extent of its failings. Tragic.

The endgame for paradox games is when they can get a fool to pay 60 dollars to look at a map and dlc to click on a country in said map

Worst part of this game: >conquer territory >have to now press a hundred buttons updating the manufacturing processes. I tried playing a game where I just had hawaii conquer the whole world, and it runs sloooooooooow as molasses.

Paradox might not know how to implement capitalism in their games, but they sure as hell know how to implement it in real life with their DLC policy.

in a demo stream the developers where playing NETHERLANDS. they were using terms like "Inteligentsia" and "petit burgeosie" which are words invented by communists

Even authoritarian dictatorship wouldn’t go into details such as what kind of cannery some food industry is going to use. This is 19th century where governments were relatively small by today standards and weren’t as involved in managing the economy.

As a man born in former socialist country. This level of state micro management applies to central planned economy, not market run economy.