If you’re ever in dire need of a laugh, just hit up the Crusader Kings subreddit and read people’s honest discussion of the game. User mak112112, for instance, recently “discovered castration,” and said that they’re having the time of their life “lopping off people’s fun bits.” One of the sub’s most famous posts from a few years back was titled “If you have a sick child, use them as bioterrorism weapons.”
These anecdotes are the lifeblood of Crusader Kings. In the same way that The Sims is a comedy engine because of how badly you can screw up a facsimile of contemporary life, CK3’s approximation of kingdom management in the Middle Ages is just detailed enough to make its awry moments both frequent and hilarious.
That’s why I was disappointed to look over the yearly statistics Paradox released in a blog post celebrating CK3’s five-year anniversary. Some of them are striking, like the fact that five million seduction attempts have faceplanted hard or that players have collectively sunk 110 million hours into the game in the last year alone. But the rest? We can absolutely do better.
Where’s the spice? How many times has the Pope turned out to be a bisexual atheist? How many children born of adulterous, royal incest have been abandoned by their parents? At least give me a ballpark estimate on the castration numbers. This is the info I need, Paradox. Larian had the pluck to inform me that a third of my peers in Baldur’s Gate 3 had virtual sex with a grizzly bear, and now I need that level of transparency from everyone.
To be fair, I guess they wanted a slightly more wholesome post to celebrate five years.
Community manager Trinexx said in the blog post: “Working on Crusader Kings 3 is a dream job. There is a lot of passion for this project on the team, and it’s very fulfilling to see that passion reflected back to us through five years of enthusiastic play and discussion … There are more [players] than we ever anticipated, and though we may never meet, we hope that you can find a little of yourself in this beautiful thing we have made together.”
I wish you all 110 million more hours of bioterrorizing to your heart’s content. =
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