PEGI 12
Victoria 3 is a grand-strategy game that takes place
between the beginning of the victorian age, in the 1830s to the early 20th century.
The 19th century saw the expansion of railways, the invention of the telegraph,
mighty steamships, new weapons of war, and most importantly, new ways of viewing the world.
So I want to start by touching a little bit on the past of the series and what made Victoria 1
and 2 what they are and what made Victoria 2 such a popular game and I really think it is
because the games focus so much on internal management of your population, your economy,
and the sense that you're ruling over real people in a real society.
What's really important and what sets the franchise apart as a series is the emphasis
on the political and economic management of your country
and that connection isn't something that we see in any games to my knowledge.
So something that really sets the Victoria games apart from our other titles,
is that there is a lot of focus inwards; what's happening inside your borders
rather than all of what's going on outside of your borders and in relations with other countries.
We have the simulation running underneath you don't have to look at it in detail on a day-by-day basis
but we aggregate all that information to you. So we show you trends we show you charts.
We show you averages. if you want to dig in and find out exactly what a farmer in Brandenburg
working on the wheat farms thinks about the politics of your country you can do that,
but you don't have to do that in order to play the game.
There is a lot going on especially with the pops. There is a huge complex simulation but we
give the player tools to work with that. So for example the leader of a million-plus population
country doesn't ask each individual person in the entire population what they want. They interact
through parties to political movements and through other such collections and that's what we tried to
recreate through the mechanics of Victoria 3.
So this lets us have really interesting laws as well
that can provide really powerful impact on your population when you do things like pass women's
suffrage or even laws that permit women in the workplace. These are new dynamics and new depth
to the population system that we didn't have before and that's really exciting to me.
To make sure that we actually simulate the world's population and not just a fraction of it.
When it comes to the player goals and you know, "What is the aim of a campaign?" "What are you trying to do?"
I think this is also where the society-building aspects of Victoria really shine true.
Because in a lot of games the goal is more like "I want to take over this territory,"
"I want to restore this empire," but it can be very different than in war-focused games
because instead, it can be about "I just want to take this country and I want its people to have a good life."
You don't have to have a grand ambition to go forth. You can. We always want that.
But it can be just as satisfying to just take what's there and build something.
Build your own little piece of the world just as you want it.
So most of our economic model is built on the idea of supply and demand: "homo economicus"
In Victoria 3 that isn't the only way that pop units make their purchase decisions.
We have a good substitution system. So pops have certain needs like the need for luxuries or the need for staple goods,
and the goods that they choose are often based on what is most available in their market
and what is cheapest, but in some cases, entire cultures can become fascinated with certain goods
over other goods. So their need for luxurious exotic drinks might favor tea instead of coffee if
you don't provide it to them they're going to get very upset. Their wealth is going to drop. There's
going to be more radicals and you're going to have to deal with that. So underlying Victoria 3
is this very complex economic simulation and that's what drives the game and even its politics.
One thing with Victoria 3 that has been a very stated design goal from the start is that we are
not making a war game. We are not making a map painter. We are making a game where war takes a
little bit of a back seat. That is not to say that war isn't in the game. Of course, in a historical
simulation of the 19th century, the 19th century was not, unfortunately, entirely peaceful. So war,
of course, happens. It can be a way to get things you want, but anything you can get through war
you can also get through diplomacy. Ideally, you should want to try to solve this conflict
before it escalates into war. If it does escalate into war
maybe that'll work out well for you, but a lot of your people are going to die. One way or another,
it's always best to try to avoid it if possible.
We start the game in 1836. We end in 1936. One thing that was definitely happening,
there was immense technological change and immense political change compared to previous eras in
history. Life could change rapidly in five to ten years just from the result of a new invention. And
that of course makes the inward aspects the aspect of focusing on your people and their lives that
much more interesting. The 19th century is also a fantastic era for alternative history because
there is so much potential for things to have played out differently. But also because it's
the era that shaped our era. I think it's really exciting to get the sense of being able to look
into the future of your campaign and imagine a different world right here and right now.
Victoria 3 is, and should be, a deep game with a lot of mechanics and potential complexity,
and that's not something we want to change, but we have prioritized accessibility. Not
in the sense of one extreme, streamline or just make the game simpler, but build
the interface, the tools, and the information that the player needs to be able to grasp
and understand, and eventually master all of this complexity.
As armchair economists and politicians we can sit and theorize "if this happens then these knock-on
effects would happen and then society would be shaped this way." This game actually lets you
play out uh and test your theories. So while you have people working in your textile mills
that doesn't just mean, "+15 luxury clothes, happiness goes up!" No, what it means is that
you produce some more luxury clothes. The people buying luxury clothes are the upper strata of your
society and their happiness doesn't just go up. What happens is the price of luxury clothes goes
down so their income will stretch higher. Their wealth will go up they will gain more loyalists
in their pot. That means their interest group will become happier and will support you more. So
by expanding this textile mill, the knock-on effect is that now you might be able to pass
a law without the landowners interfering in your affairs. And this is the sort of
long-term thinking and creative solutions that we really want players to first theorize,
and then carry out and test the theory, and see if there are any additional things that they didn't
think about. What really really excites me is just the opportunity to get to grips with all of these
things. The ability to build a complex economic model where everything ties into one another. A
game where the politics is not just a sideshow but so core to the experience of the game. And again,
where everything ultimately hooks back and you can look at your society and you can feel the
decisions and changes made along the way. I'm just really excited to be a part of this project
and the players who have been waiting for victoria 3 for years and years and years.
I really hope that in the end, we will be able to provide you with the armchair
economist armchair politician kind of fantasy that you've been waiting so patiently for.
So that was a little bit about the overall vision of victoria 3 but of course, there's a lot of
detail and nuance to all of this and all of the features and mechanics we have in the game. So
starting soon we are going to be covering a lot of these in coming dev-diaries. Next up is a pretty
significant overview of a lot of the basic things in victoria 3, like POPs how do they work? What
are they? and what changes and what things have we actually made deeper since the previous Victoria
games? Here we'll be talking about building capacities and a whole lot of other things.