Victoria 3 video game review
a real racist reacts: is it true colonialism?
The problem in a nutshell is that the saying "write what you know" really means "you can ONLY write what you know", and it also applies to code and game design. Which is really the same thing at different levels of abstraction. All logic is a game, Wittgenstein proved this in 1953.
The product is limited by the limitations of the people making it. And the people making it are laptop liberals, middle aged, fat, balding but growing their hair out, hipster tattoo moustache epic bacon redditors, millennials clinging to their lost youth, big chubby babies in open relationships because they think they are eventually going to beat the system and have a threesome with two unstable 29.9 year olds covered in tattoos and not really attractive, they have just enough of a gut to where seeing them naked is a disappointment, but it doesn't matter, you tell yourself, you did it, you finally got the Threesome™ and that means you are Cool™ and have Value™, and neither of them really wanted to and you are all just going through the motions to re-enact porn, putting on a play for an invisible observer-audience that doesn't exist, not even looking in the mirror like Patrick Bateman because seeing yourself chubby and ugly and middle aged would ruin it for you.
The golden era of map games was made by autistic nerds who could never even dream about getting pussy. This is what made them great. You would have to be completely antisocial and insane to even have the idea for Victoria, let alone to make it. It is a product for no one. Insanely bad business idea. Europa universals, Victoria, Hearts of iron, are all really, really bad ideas, from an economic perspective. Very small potential audience. Very low possible return on investment. Victoria 2 was made in a single year.
The core problem with victoria 3 is the build que. Unfortunately it is also the core of the casino design dopamine trap they are purposefully trying to make. Mechanically it serves only as an arbitrary limit, like guard rails for not destroying your economy. But everything bad about the game is downstream from this.
First thing being, that once you know what you are doing and understand the systems and gameplay loops, the arbitrary limits are the only thing holding you back, and A) the human mind abhors the arbitrary, and b) rather than the game world of enemy nations, or the inner workings of your nations politics, the arbitrary build que becomes your de facto main antagonist. For reasons of a), this then becomes more and more frustrating.
Compared to Victoria 2, there is a clear distinction in game design philosophies. In 2, you can in theory order as many constructions at once as you want. The moment you order a construction, it influences the game world, and by the next time tick, influences the world market by increasing demand for the construction good - no matter what. In 3 it does this only if you have available construction Mana. If not, it is simply added to the que and does nothing.
This is the main frustration in the game, that most of the time you are just sitting, waiting, watching progress bars fill up.
The difference is in the amount of agency allowed the player. In 2, old vidya theory, the instant you press a button, you interact with the simulation. In 3, new vidya theory, it doesn't.
All map games are spreadsheet simulators, and the fun part is juggling many different intersecting progress bars at once, and trying to maximise the synergy and productivity of an increasingly larger amount of variables, towards some kind of end. Ex. In eu4, you are juggling money, mana, manpower, and the geographical environment, towards expanding your borders, by winning wars. In Vic 3 an attempt has been made to create this system, but streamlining it into a single bottleneck.
The core gameplay loop starts and ends at this single variable: "can I expand my construction sector". Literally everything else in the game loops around to this. It is the only thing limiting your agency, and it is deliberately designed to be this, which is clear from how you progress in the game by slowly, gradually, chipping away at it. Key word being slowly.
This is what we used to call "casualizing" or "consoleitis". Or later extremes, "mobile game design", "cookie clicker". What it really is the applied psychology lessons learned in military grade experimentations and organized gambling. Coincidentally the current CEO of paradox interactive, before she got that job, used to run a casino.
It is fine tuned like a slot machine to give you incremental progress, exactly only ever as much as to *keep you playing*. The progress bars makes this overt: it is literally you watching bars fill up. You are not playing the game: the game is playing you.
The UI is designed like a slot machine or a pinball machine, shining and blinking and making a lot of exciting visual noise. Whenever you push a button there is a loud fanfare and a bright visual reaction - yet nothing actually happens. You don't actually directly interact with the game world. You set up an action in a que, at best.
Everything the player can do is on a delayed timer, from building to controlling armies, to politics. Literally everything. Even when it doesn't make sense. The delay is just there to simulate the gambling excitement of "waiting", because mkultra, phone games and Science has proven that delayed gratification makes people cum harder. This design philosophy is essentially edging. Delayed gratification but entirely arbitrary and entirely artificial. Which is why I play it while watching bfwm race play porn (WITH nword) on another screen.
It is the core problem with the game, preventing it from being Good, but you cannot remove it because it is a load bearing wall. It is simply what it is designed to be. A slot machine stealing your time and money while propagandising you about Marxist economic models. Talk about capital integrating its own critique and selling it back to you as a product.
If the game is profitable and they make dlc for it, they are going to make slightly obscured pay-to-win options, marketed as “more complicated game mechanics”, but mechanically functioning as being "pay to cut the wait time down" microtransactions.
The fun part of the game is breaking it and making it do things you aren't supposed to be able to. Which is why I watch bfwm race play porn while playing it (WITH nword).
All the other paradox games were ruined by the mission tree system, which as a matter of game design changes the fundamental experience of a map game. Before mission trees, the titular Map was the main interface - every submenu you interacted with was in effort to affect some change in the Map. With the mission trees, this is longer the case, and the map becomes a sub menu you go into to affect changes in the mission tree UI. It takes precedence.
In Victoria 3, everything is a sub menu of the build que.
It really is stupid to compare it to Victoria 2, or other paradox titles. It is pointless to judge it by its merits as a grand strategy game. It is not a grand strategy game. It is technically speaking an arcade game, a pinball machine with a grand strategy visual design. And it may possibly be the worst arcade game of all time.
8/10
Insulting to pinball
video games are not real randy, i knwo this from eprsonal experiemce becaus ei am a gamer and also not real