Paradox Interactive has announced a release date for the long-awaited Victoria 3. The new grand strategy game will be coming to PC on 25th October 2022.
Update: Paradox has decided that Victoria 3 will not be a Steam exclusive at launch, and will not launch on Xbox Game Pass or the Microsoft Store. This is a change from the game’s original announcement last year, with the short statement issued on the Paradox Plaza forums.
Victoria 3 is a grand strategy game based around the 19th and early 20th century, a period where war was far from the only means of asserting your dominion over the world, as the political influence of grand empires, industrial advances, trade and diplomacy were just as important. This provided the backdrop for significant social change, the populations of many countries becoming more enfranchised through the democratic process.
All of this is simulated within Victoria 3, which features a deep societal simulation based around ‘Pops’, units of a country’s populace that slots into various demographics, classes, belief systems, and more. Where many grand strategy games would focus on warfare or the machinations of a country’s leaders, here you’re predominantly massaging and growing and economic system and playing politics to get ahead. In fact, war is a measure of last resort, with diplomatic plays forcing two sides in any dispute first to a negotiating table, everyone trying to avoid a costly war (while still getting what they want).
Victoria 3 was announced in May of 2021, following years of speculation over its existence and memes within the community calling out “Vicky 3, when?” It’s spent a long time germinating within Paradox Development Studios, the ideas distilling and iterating on many of the concepts that ran through Victoria 2, while also modernising many aspects of the game to match the progress in accessibility that we’ve seen through the likes of Stellaris and Crusader Kings 3.
We’ve been hands on with Victoria 3, delving into its deep social simulation, setting up trade routes and putting in a few diplomatic plays. In our Victoria 3 preview I said, “you’re more like a grand engineer tweaking and modifying the machine to steer it into one course of action or another — managing the environment as much as you can to ensure continued growth and success.
Source: Paradox Interactive, press release
