It’s… mostly successful in Crusader Kings 3. Each game has a different approach to managing all the information it provides to players, a different controller layout that tries to make stuff as accessible as possible. Surviving Mars and Age of Wonders were both handled by the original developer, Cities Skylines and Stellaris both by Tantalus Media, and now Crusader Kings 3 is coming via Lab42. The one thing that’s really been missing from Paradox Interactive’s efforts is a cohesive, unified approach to this task. Crusader Kings 3 is a very different challenge, due to its historical setting and character role-playing. The real mountain to climb has been in adapting their premier grand strategy games, and Stellaris did a great job, thanks in part to the sci-fi setting and tone of the game. Over the decades, strategy games have generally worked best when designed from the ground up for a console’s gamepad – unless using a PS1 mouse, Wiimote, Move or gimmicky voice controls – but Paradox has defied that ever since porting Cities: Skylines to console, and the simultaneous releases of Surviving Mars and Age of Wonders: Planetfall. For the last five years, Paradox Interactive has been trying to prove that wrong, but have now taken on their greatest challenge to adapt Crusader Kings 3. On PC with a mouse and keyboard you can furiously click away to manage resources in an RTS, dive into menus four or five layers deep, and wrangle vast armies in battle. It’s been a long-held maxim of gaming that strategy games and management sims don’t work on consoles.
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