Crusader Kings 3, coming to PS5 and Xbox in March, plays surprisingly well on console

polygon.com:

The Crusader Kings games are titans of PC gaming. These grand strategy role-playing games task players with guiding a dynasty of rulers down through the ages through diplomacy, statecraft, the manipulation of the weird legal system of the Middle Ages, and a little bit of backstabbing and intrigue. It’s complicated and baroque, with dozens of fiddly subsystems, and takes hours to learn.

It is perhaps surprising that Crusader Kings 3, the newest entry in the series that launched on Windows PC in 2020, is coming to consoles — PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X — on March 29.

I have to admit that my first thoughts about playing this game on console was an absolute, unvarnished skepticism that this would be a good use of anyone’s time. Crusader Kings3 offers a playable map that extends across a significant portion of Asia, a large chunk of Africa, and all of Europe. Due to its agent-focused gameplay, where each little person in the world’s desires and actions are being simulated and acted out constantly, it is regularly pulling a player’s focus across wide spans of space in microscopic detail. Sometimes it really matters what some peasant lord across the continent thinks about your heir, and my initial thought was that there would be exactly zero way this would translate to the TV, couch, and controller setup that console gaming is all about.

I was more wrong than I thought I would be. Put simply, Crusader Kings 3 on a console not only works, but it is playable and enjoyable. Stunned silence is appropriate.

It is clear that the developers of the console versions of Crusader Kings 3 had to introduce some key features to make this notoriously detailed game workable with a controller. The vast majority of decisions are made in