Crusaders Kings 3The epic medieval RPG released in 2020 continues to evolve with DLC. PDS Black, one of the development teams under the Paradox umbrella, has a strict system for handling feedback and providing post-release support. However, deciding when to move on and allocate resources to the next task remains challenging.
“This has to happen” Crusaders Kings 3 producer Maria Lucia Zediti told Game Developer during an interview at the Tokyo Game Show. “Sometimes it's circumstances that decide it, not what we want. You have a super creative and passionate team, they'd love to keep working on the same thing for three years if it meant getting the perfect, flawless experience. But it's about prioritizing.”
When it comes to bugs in the game, the team strives to fix them as quickly as possible. As for “nice offers” offered by players, the team usually takes them into account in future work plans, including free patches, since they are committed to releasing at least one free patch for each paid release. These fixes, among other things, resolve issues that have occurred in the past.
“Essentially, we keep a backlog, and our community team is very good at finding them on the forums, prioritizing them, maintaining an active backlog, and then updating them with each release,” Zediti said. “We have a collection of them. And then, I don't know, it's like playing darts, you just shoot. We have an internal process where we prioritize and see what works best with the staffing we have for a particular release at a particular point in time and try to fit them in there.”
In a huge and complex game there is always something to tweak.
But as quality assurance manager Riad Deneche told Game Developer, the team reviews this internal process after each release because “there's always something to tweak.” This is due to the team considering DLC support Crusaders Kings 3 being a live service, which requires different development considerations than creating a base game. Each DLC provides an opportunity to learn and implement, as Denes said, new ways of working that are more focused and efficient.
PDS Black was released back on September 9th. Coronationadding to the extensive DLC for Crusaders Kings 3. However, players quickly learned it, primarily due to a bug that caused problems with oaths. The developer released a fix to address this and other issues within 24 hours of release, along with an apology.
“Coronation did not live up to the standards you deserve and it is my fault,” reads a message written by Denes in the magazine Paradoxical forums. “As the studio's Quality Assurance Manager, it is my job to ensure that our releases meet our stated vision of quality. It is clear that we did not give the project the necessary resources and attention, and the result was a release that let you down.”
When asked what this standard was, the quality assurance manager said it was important for the team to maintain “a certain quality stance that people expect from our games.” This position includes the technical standard of the game, which works well and does not have any major problems, as well as the fun factor. QA, for example, checks not only functionality, but also imagination, since this is fundamental for a game like Crusaders Kings 3 to ensure the correct operation of historical niches.
“[The players are] very dedicated people, they can't expect anything less than us, also dedicated [to] the game itself,” Denes said.
Working on multiple DLCs simultaneously has taught the team many lessons over the years. One was to not focus too narrowly, but to look at the big picture, deciding on different priorities depending on the scope of each release, taking into account the testing required. This is important considering that everything added to Crusaders Kings 3 intertwined with a variety of existing and future DLC.
“As you continue to add content to the game, you have to make sure it works with what you already have in the game and what you'll add in five years,” Zediti said. “The team that was there when we released the live game, you don't know when you're going to release the game and that's what saving it will look like in five years.”
“But that's what we're learning and what we're trying to do. And I think a lot of the way we do it is by listening to the community because they play this more than we do, frankly.”
Developer diary entry
One of the ways the team listened more closely to the community was through dev diaries, which began with Roads to power The DLC was released back in September 2024. This allowed PDS Black to share content and ideas with the community early in development and solicit their feedback, which in turn allowed the developers to observe how players reacted to, for example, possible fantasies or different ways to expand the map.
“The sooner we do this, the more creative freedom we will have to create freedom in time, because the reality of game development is that you have to do it in a short time, and that’s the challenge,” Zediti said. “I think both us here and the whole house team would like to take all this feedback and turn it into something concrete within the time frame that we have, but unfortunately that doesn't always work out.”
