Crusader Kings 3 dev diary is all about making the right lifestyle choices

Ensuring you have a healthy well-rounded lifestyle is hard at the best of times, but now imagine that you’re a medieval nobleman looking to do anything and everything to get ahead in the world. In the latest Crusader Kings 3 dev diary, Paradox Interactive dig into the overhauled Lifestyle System and how it’s beefing up the role playing side of the popular grand strategy game series.

Lifestyles in CK3 are a dramatic overhaul compared to those found in CK2. You have five Lifestyle categories, each of which let you select a Focus within, which give you an immediate bonus (so if you need to be more pious, you can pick a Theology Focus), after which you start earning experience to unlock perks through a Lifestyle category tree.

Perks earned the skill tree will unlock special modifiers, decisions, casus bellis and schemes, and making it all the way to the end of a tree will earn you a trait. You’ll be lucky to get a few traits, but given that you’re managing a dynasty in CK3and not just one character, you’ll have to explore different branches through several generations, or different games.

There’s also Lifestyle Events that get thrown into the mix, creating some of the personal stories that you’ll create in the game. These don’t tie into traits anymore, but instead give you opportunities to take advantage of (or crises to survive). These depend on the category and Focus you pick, giving you narrative points to decide what kind of ruler you want to be.

This is the third video dev diary in the series, the first of which was released in November and looked at Dynasties and Houses.

And the second of which looked at scheming, councillors, personality traits, courts and more.

Announced at PDXCON last year, Crusader Kings 3 is a sequel to the 2012 game that quickly became one of their most popular Grand Strategy games, and set out the focus for the company through much of the last decade. With countless expansions to CK2 over the last seven years, CK3 is able to refocus on the core gameplay, building it up on a new 3D engine, refine the gameplay to be much more accessible and reconsider all of the gameplay elements.

Crusader Kings III is expected to release in 2020.

Source: press release