izigame.me

Let's get something straight: I love CK3 and this is a decent DLC. Despite it's flaws and shortcomings, I think it's superior to CK2 (which may be my favorite strategy game of all time) in many areas and overall I think it's a great successor that lays a solid foundation for future development. Unfortunately this first expansion has me worried for the future of the game.
Firstly, it's extremely overpriced. Despite having a similar amount of content to other paradox expansions, it costs like $15 more which is absolutely ridiculous. The amount of features here are not worth this price in the slightest. And I understand that the features here were very ambitious, time consuming and costly for paradox which is why they raised the price, but that's still not a valid excuse and this shows me that whoever is in charge has bad judgement. "Hey, let's waste our time developing a very time intensive and ambitious feature that we've never attempted before which will cause us to raise the price for the DLC, and this feature doesn't even have that big of an impact on the game or could've just simply been another GUI menu. That will surely make the fans happy!".
Secondly, as mentioned above, the features here are not as essential and impactful as you'd expect from such an expensive expansion. The royal court is a cool idea that loses it's novelty really fast and doesn't have that much depth. They should've spent more time fleshing out the actual mechanics of the royal court itself instead of making it 3d, but again the guys in charge clearly think otherwise.
I like the royal court and the new culture features, but they aren't game changing in any way. If anything, they should've just been part of the base game to begin with. The royal court has some neat features like changing the court type, changing the various amenities, initiating event chains to find or forge artifacts, and lots of new events but again nothing that will blow you away. I like that it helps keep a check on large realms by requiring you to spend more money, but this is why it should be in the base game. Without it, it just makes an already easy game even easier.
Not to mention that this DLC took longer than usual to come out and people were hungry for more content...just to get this. It was pretty disappointing and underwhelming. Then afterwards they retroactively increased the price for the smaller DLC's because (and I'm not making this up) future flavor packs will be bigger in scope. Uh...what? This is just blatant price gouging and that's why I'm so worried about this game's future. It's apparently in the hands of incompetent people who just want to price gouge the fans.