I never knew that there was a Crusader Kings the first. There's an enormous and extremely dizzying array of buttons in Crusader Kings II. This isn't a good thing - while it is a Grand Strategy Game, there are so many complicated mechanics thrown at you in the first ten to fifteen minutes of the tutorial - lineage, sieges, levies, naval combat, invading armies, vassals, heirs, marriage, offspring, ambition - just to name a few - it is very easy to become completely overwhelmed.
This is exactly what happened to me. I read some forums about the game after that. The game's forums are still incredibly active. The main question is "how the hell do I play this game?", this coming from new, and experienced strategy gamer alike.
At what point is a game no longer a game?
Does Crusader Kings cross that line?
Each icon you see, every button that you see in this screenshot has a sub menu. Each sub menu has flavour text of at least one dense paragraph. Some have sub-screens below this. If you zoom out from this particular map view, you get an impressive world-spanning view, the likes of which cartographers would drool over.
Spin the mouse wheel in the opposite direction, and you've got the same thing, except full of attractions for beach goers, or people who want to look at verdant countrysides and the historical accuracy of villas.
This game is saturated in so much detail it actually hurts, and it is preposterous to call it a "game" - yet, it isn't a form of torture; either. There's so much to do that you feel overwhelmed, that the game could be called "anxiety simulator", in that you suffer from many different types of anxiety when playing.
- Paralysis as there's far too many options
- An overwhelming sense that you don't belong
- Just how insignificant any given action may be
Yet, everything in the game is filled with consequence. Every choice, every selection, every button press and decision that you make has that consequence etched into a lengthy tooltip for you to consider and ponder. It's an enormous amount of information to digest, and thoroughly places Crusader Kings into the most hardcore of the grand strategy genre.
There's some games where "dumbing it down a touch" - wouldn't hurt, and this is one of them.
Sounds like quite an immersive game, although maybe a little too much for anyone but the truly hardcore gamer.
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This is why I never really got into strategy games that took it too far. Take Pokémon, for example - Pokémon Red and Blue were simple affairs; catch the monsters, battle the monsters. Modern versions of the game make it so you need spreadsheets of data to constantly refer to, or you'll wind up with a slightly underpowered Squidgee (I'm assuming that's a real one) that you've sunk hundreds of hours power levelling, and find you've wasted all that time. Fear of failure should not be present in games, ever.
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