It's already been made clear that Victoria 3 will be much more a management game than a war game, and the idea that conquest isn't key to satisfactory play is impressive. They should be able to have a great deal of fun not only building up a small power, but even remaining a small power and being locally powerful and influential.' 'We don't want people to feel that if they want to be successful in Victoria 3, they have to play as one of the big powers. 'It's something we've tried to enable,' says Andersson. We discussed the idea of playing as a power with no interest in colonisation at all. Expect to see lots of rarities, then, such as Lanfang: a Chinese miner’s confederation in Borneo, which existed as a loose political alliance with a unique form of democracy, before it was dismantled under the Dutch occupation in 1884. Not every political entity in Vicky 3's world falls into a neat dichotomy between colonisers and the colonised, and both Anward and Andersson are passionate fans of unusual, idiosyncratic starts. They've said it's something they're going to detail in greater depth closer to Vicky 3's release. Because while they’ve both been quite clear in their intention not to pull punches in presenting the reality of 19th century imperialism, they also realise the challenge of making this playable with good taste. Nevertheless, after speaking recently with game director Martin Anward and game designer Mikael Andersson, I'm feeling hopeful. But it also means rapacious national expansion, colonialism, and slavery - issues on which the public conversation has advanced a lot since Victoria 2 came out in 2010. That means industrialisation, massive social upheaval, and a thousand other fascinations. Victoria 3, the next grand strategy project from Paradox, will see players take the reins of nations on the global stage of the 19th century. Time, also, has a strange capacity to dilute grimness - whether rightly or wrongly, the more ancient a game’s setting, the more carefree we tend to be about burning farming settlements to the ground for the sake of expansion.īut if developers want to make games about real history, especially stuff which has happened within a generation or two of living memory, things become a lot more stark. Abstraction can do a lot to sidestep this, of course: many games feature real historical cultures, but pit them against each other in virtual petri dishes which might as well be fantasy worlds.

There’s an inherent awkwardness in historical strategy games as entertainment, which is just how much of history is made up of stacked atrocities.

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