It sounded so great on paper: Crusader Kings 3 (Steam) is getting landless adventurers in the new DLC “Road to Power”. MeinMMO strategy expert Schuhmann was excited, especially when he saw new heroes from the TV series Vikings like Rollo or Ubbe. If only the gameplay was as exciting as the power fantasy behind the idea. Crusader Kings 3 even makes a fool of the mighty Rollo from the “Vikings” series.
This was my expectation: I’m a huge fan of Crusader Kings 3 and have spent 1,380 hours playing the game on Steam: I had huge expectations for the new DLC “Road to Power”. The DLC is coming out today and costs €30. In a bundle with Chapter 3, it’s available for €44. I’ve been able to play the DLC in advance for about 2 weeks.
With the new DLC comes the opportunity to play landless adventurers. Imagine something like Robin Hood or William Wallace from Braveheart: you recruit a troop of specialists to take on tasks in your camp, assemble an army, complete tasks, have adventures and travel around. You can become a great explorer, a scholar or a conqueror.
The system was presented in long blog posts and it looked fantastic.
Crusader Kings 3: Trailer
More videos
Autoplay
Finally you can play the forgotten heroes of Vikings
This is how it was in practice: At launch, there are only a handful of pre-made adventures to choose from in the 3 different starting times:
In the “old start” the most exciting is probably “Rollo”, the brother of Ragnar Lothbrok from the Vikings series, but also Ragnar’s son, Ubbe. They have been in the game before, but only as non-playable supporting characters.
The “most important characters” with their own story line are available in the middle of the game: Here you can play the Spanish folk hero El Cid or the mystical founder of the Assassin Order, Hasan Sabbah.
Late in the game, there are no heroes that caught my eye. The selection is focused on Byzantium, the thematic focus of the DLC.
There is also the option to create your own hero and start playing with him.
A whole new game in Crusader Kings 3
These are the good sides of the DLC: The landless adventurers bring a lot of content and you can see that Paradox has put a lot of work into this part of the game:
Paradox has more or less developed a completely new game in this game system, since you have little access to what otherwise characterizes the game: the development of the country and contact with other princes.
The gameplay as an adventurer quickly becomes boring and not at all adventurous
These are the disadvantages of the system: Compared to the normal game, life as an adventurer is simply much more boring. Because you are largely cut off from the main content of Crusader Kings 3, which has been in development for 4 years.
There are many new quests and tasks, but everything quickly becomes repetitive. The tasks always follow the same pattern: you travel somewhere, automatically assign your followers to tasks and then wait motionless for a few cycles until the action has progressed far enough that you can carry it out:
Even traveling in Crusader Kings 3 is similar: It’s exciting for the first few hours, then you already know the events and things that happen on the journey from A to B and it starts to become tedious.
Even the “exciting events” like the Caspar Hauser boy who was raised by wolves or lynx lose their appeal after you find him for the 18th time. Even the super hot wild woman you meet while hunting gets boring at some point.
Playing the normal adventures without a special campaign is very similar, even though there are different paths.
Rollo is an animal in Vikings – In Crusader Kings 3 he is a leek
So the hope lies in the ready-made stories of the great heroes. Unfortunately, this takes place in a time period and area that is not one of my favorite scenarios in the game.
I would have preferred to be able to go around with Rollo and give someone a good Viking beating, but he doesn’t have a special story in the game and with “14 combat power” and no genetic “strength” advantages he also seems pretty toothless.
To be fair, this portrayal of Rollo is probably closer to the “real” Rollo, a Danish Viking, than the fantasy in Vikings. But in the series, he was a bully and womanizer who married a hot French woman, became Duke of Normandy, and became somewhat civilized. In Crusader Kings 3, he’s a talented commander who can’t do much else, and with a “14 in combat strength” he’s laughably average.
Crusader Kings 3 even manages to make a legendary assassin kind of boring
I tried to play the Spanish folk hero El Cid, but it was deadly boring because it was all about pleasing your king.
So I ventured to Arabia to see the mystic who is said to have later founded the Assassins, and spent 20 years wandering through the countryside with Hasan-i Sabbāh, the “Old Man of the Mountain,” but his story never really got going. “You’re somehow drawn to Alexandria,” they say, but not much happened there either.
Important feature for the future of Crusader Kings 3, but currently it’s not fun
I don’t want to do the DLC an injustice: a lot of work and love went into the feature. And with the Byzantine Empire and the estates you can build there, fans of this way of playing Crusader Kings 3 have received even more content.
But the “Landless Adventurers” are not to my taste at the moment. It is an important feature for the future of the game and if there is more meat on the bones, the feature could become important in the future. At the moment, however, the gameplay seems repetitive and boring to me. It was much more exciting in my imagination than it was to play. Instead of 100 hours like the last DLC, the new one only thrilled me for 14 hours. It’s a shame: I’ve already spent 100 hours with the new DLC for Crusader Kings 3 on Steam in 2 weeks.