Dev Diary #141: A Year in Review

For those of you who do not know - I am Rageair, the Game Director of Crusader Kings III, and as we’re coming up to the end of 2023 it's time to look at this year in review - and take a quick glance toward the year to come! I will share our reflections, learnings, and opinions on the content we’ve made this year, and - while this diary will not be a roadmap/floor plan per se - I’ll make sure to share as much as I can about 2024.

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2023 in Review

So, what have we done in 2023? Quite a few things, it turns out!

The Community Choice Poll

We started out the year by having a Community Choice Poll for the theme of the upcoming Event Pack, where among the three themes (Wards & Wardens, Love & Lust, and Villains & Vagabonds) the winning theme was Wards & Wardens, which gained 41.5% of the over 10,000 votes.

While it was fantastic to see all the engagement, we won't be doing another poll for this year's event pack - mainly because we want something that will improve and expand upon existing content as well as content we're introducing next year, and we already have the perfect event pack for that in mind!

We will instead continue reading your discussions, thoughts, and suggestions and focus on making content for areas that you would like to see expanded - it’s a more indirect way, but remember that you still have plenty of opportunity to affect what we do by simply discussing themes, ideas, or mechanics as you do normally.

That said, it’s not impossible that we’ll have another poll in the future, especially if there’s demand for it!

Tours & Tournaments

The highlight of the year was definitely Tours & Tournaments, our second Major Expansion. It made strides to connect the characters to the map, with travel, activities, and much more - and it’s obvious that the efforts were appreciated! While the expansion and its update leaned more towards roleplaying with its centerpiece Grand Activities, it also contained plenty of systems that enhanced the game overall, such as travel, regencies, MaA Stationing, etc. This combination made it a quintessential CK3 expansion that appealed to most (if not all) of you in the community, and we’ll definitely take a lot of learnings from the things we did right when looking into what to do for the future. All in all, we consider T&T a huge success!

Of all the features we developed, travel is the one that we didn’t necessarily expect to be as fun as it turned out to actually be - we knew that it would be good, and fill a void that has existed since the early days of CK, but it turned into a very versatile system that we’re very likely to keep developing and progressively weave into as many other systems that we can. Travel also provides a great and versatile foundation for all sorts of features that may or may not appear in future updates…

The expansion itself took a lot of time and effort to develop, over 10,000 days of work from various disciplines. During, and especially towards the end of the project, we started doing parallel development in order to up our cadence of releases, something which we’re successfully carrying with us into 2024. For those of you who might not be familiar with the concept, it means that we worked on several