Crusader Kings III: Royal Court Review (Bob1004)
Update: After some 20+ hours of play and strategic cultural mixing (cultures main function seems to be to quickly knock out some innovations by hybridization) finally made it feudal and got my royal court. And boy, what a let down it is. Seriously, what is this? Visually, looks as bad as in the development diary pictures. Awkward few second animation loops or completely static characters. Functionally pointless. The court grandeur is just a punitive system (get to a certain level by spending gold to avoid punishments) with limited benefits (good to know that as Emperor people are now more willing to accept my children for tutoring...) Events are meh, 3 petitioners asking for random stuff, usually money or court appointment. But they don't even play out in court, it is still a textbox. The thrown-together "adult" visual novels that flood the new release page of steam have more visual interactivity than the royal court. Most of the time it is easy to forget that there is even a royal court, so disconnected it is from everything else: it is basically a completely self-contained subsystem because somebody at Paradox just doesn't understand that I did not want a dollhouse to display their mediocre 3D assets.
Ultimately does Royal Court make the game better? Not really, its additions are disconnected and have very limited affect on how the game is played. Does it make it worse? Kind of, royal courts are just a massive resource sink, court positions are convoluted, and culture now overlaps with religion in weird ways. What the DLC definitely does is put a nail in the coffin of any hope that Paradox can or is interested in delivering major additions to the underlying game.
I had this nagging feeling throughout the dev diaries and the whole game that royal court was some developer's gf/bf idea and they were very proud of it, so the dev had to put it into the game or sleep on the couch. How divorced royal court is from what the game actually needs (better economy, better warfare, better alliances, better diplomacy, etc.) it is as good an explanation as any.
*****
There is just nothing major here: the cultural mechanics only imparts small differences and are pretty safe to ignore. Artifacts are ok, but it is not a major mechanical addition.
The most egregious thing is that after all this wait, half the people won't even get the courtroom or have to wait hundreds of years to do so. The idea that it would not be available for tribal leaders is just ridiculous: playing as Hungary (one of the recommended starts) it takes centuries to become feudal because of the way that progression is set up. One can have an empire level title but still can't hold court? After 18 hours of play, the key selling feature of the DLC is still unavailable to my non-feudal empire. By the time I will eventually get to it, I doubt I will care at all. It is such a weird decision, it fits into the generally questionable mindset of Paradox perfectly.
Overall, it was a lot of build-up for a decisive dud. After all the anticipation, the DLC is thoroughly forgettable and is not a major addition to the game. Other Paradox games delivered a lot more for/with a lot less. Waiting almost an entire year with no content for this is just a let-down. This is the kind of DLC one would expect at the end of a game's life cycle: minor fluff to fill out some gaps, none that is essential to make the game better. As first DLC (and after all the hype) one could reasonably expect something significantly grander than this.
Coat of Arms designer is good, but it should have been a base game feature.
Also, not sure whether it is a DLC or Mod issue, but suddenly everyone is wearing turbans and random clothing which is both jarring and slightly amusing.
This feels like they delivered it to fulfil the DLC promise with as little work as possible either (a) saving anything more substantial for future paid DLC that will be out of the season pass most of the community got or (b) to sunset development on the game. How inconsequential the whole thing is, it really feels like an obligation they wanted to get out of, rather than any form of passion for developing the DLC.
A strong meh out of 10. Worth the wait? No. Worth the money? No. Would I buy it if I didn't already own it? No. So much about taking longer time to deliver larger DLC I guess. The way this cursed industry is going, I guess I should be thankful that the artefacts are not NFTs.