Crusader Kings III, a game completely about buttons and menus and probably the last one would you ever expect the PC jump to consoles to do so, with a version announced today for Xbox Series X S and PS5.
Your reaction to this news may be a laugh like that headline, or maybe fear what it might seem, but there is actually precedence, and a pretty promising precedence.
For starters, in 2019 Paradox launched another of its games, the intergalactic 4X Stellaris, on the console, and it was fine. Granted Stellaris it’s not as complicated as Crossed Kings, however, shows that Paradox knows a thing or two about switching keyboards and mice for controllers.
The following is Civilization VI’s launch of the console, also in 2019, that I said was “okay” because even though I had issues with issues like the speed of the game, real people would have been worried about the port, i.e. how the interface would workthere was nothing to worry about.
And finally, remember that while Crusader Kings III it lost nothing of its depth and complexity going from II, it cleaned up its interfaceand therefore navigating menus and priority items became much easier, which means that flipping through them using a controller should also be much easier.
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The game console trailer below shows some of this in action; while some menu screens will work just as they did on the PC, other systems make some more appropriate changes for a controller, such as using radial dials or pressing face buttons to reveal more information about something current on the screen. The PS5 version will even get some haptic feedback related to the game’s stress systems, while Xbox users “will be able to quickly switch between games and check out a YouTube tutorial on how to quell a peasant revolt.”
I like Civilizationhowever, taming an extensive interface is only half the battle, and it remains to be seen to what extent these consoles can handle the rest of Crossed Kings experience, including their performance. Limiting its release to next-generation systems is, however, a promising start and I guess we’ll all find out together when the game is out every time it comes out (sorry, there’s no release date yet).