There’s another message about Crusader Kings 3’s Coronations DLC for you to read, sire. Developers PDS Black have apologised for the update not being up to par, and issued the first of multiple patches aimed at rectifying its issues.
To recap, this add-on fleshes out ascending to the throne in the crown-heavy strategy game a bit more, as well as letting you set a key goal for your regime. It arrived earlier this week, and the Steam reviews quickly sank to mostly negative. The main gripes were buggy oaths – you can swear oaths at the end of coronations, earning rewards if you fulfil your oath on time – and whether gating some relatively small-scale yet significant features behind paid DLC was justified.
Paradox have now responded to that backlash, with a statement penned by Riad, a QA manager at Crusader Kings 3 developer PDS Black. Writing that the Coronations wasn’t “up to the standard you deserve”, the developer continued: “It is clear we didn’t give the project the resources and attention it needed, and the result was a release that let you down. You have every right to be upset, and I want to acknowledge that openly.”
According to Riad, the upcoming All Under Heaven DLC, which’ll expand the game’s map into China, Japan and southeast Asia, has required the vast majority of the studio’s attention and resources. As a result, the team working on the smaller Coronations had to get by with “limited resources” and less staff.
“As a studio, we’re taking a hard look at how we assign resources, and support our developers so that every release meets the expectations you rightfully have,” the QA manager wrote. “For example, we will be more stringent about allowing last-minute changes to the game (which can cause issues like broken oaths). We will also ensure that we dedicate more time towards full-length playthroughs throughout the entire development cycle, to ensure that issues like these can’t slip through.”
Riad added that it “hurts so much when we fuck up like this”, and that the studio will be aiming to earn back the trust of players. That’ll likely be a very tall order given that this is hardly a one-off for Paradox. The publishers have acquired a bit of a reputation for regularly releasing DLC which is either low quality, viewed as unnecessary extra monetisation, or some combo of the two. The latter’s been front and centre recently with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2’s paid DLC clans, a mess we’re currently waiting to see the full extent of Paradox’s cleanup plans for.
Regardless of whether you’re ready to trust Paradox again, the Crusader Kings devs have quickly put out a patch aimed at fixing the main issues with Coronations’ oaths. Riad also specified that there’ll be “at least one more patch” for the DLC coming, “to fix many of the issues we encountered ahead of the release, but didn’t have enough time to fix”. You can find the full notes for the first patch, which is out now, here.
