Cube Engineers Episode 52: By God Alone for Crusader Kings 3 Review: A Masterclass in Game System Redesigns

With all that out of the way, let's get into the actual review of By God Alone and let's learn why this is such a really fascinating piece of game design.

So let's start by just covering really quickly what Crusader Kings 3 actually is.

since we usually talk about Magic the Gathering on this channel, it's a bit of a different type of game.

Crusader Kings 3 is a grand strategy roleplay game where you play as a character somewhere in the medieval Eurasian slash North African world.

You can pick from three start dates, 867, 1066, or 1178.

You can play as a count, king, duke, or emperor and try to navigate the evolving situation of the medieval world, whether it's through religious conflicts like crusades or just trying to manage your own realm.

Maybe you want to play as like the emperor of China and try to avoid having your entire empire fall apart as it kind of was prone to do during the middle ages.

There's all sorts of really fun things you can do.

You can even play as, like, a landless adventure and try to carve out your own kingdom.

Or maybe you just want to, like, go learn a bunch of stuff.

There's, like, scholar adventures, which are kind of weird.

But anyway, a lot of cool stuff to do in Crusader Kings.

We've actually previously covered this game on the show in an earlier episode, but that was talking about the After the End mod, which is set in a, like, post-apocalyptic North America.

This is more Euro-Afro-Asia-centric.

The By God Alone expansion and the free 1.20 patch that accompanied it are really focusing on reworking religious life in the Crusader Kings world with a focus on making the gameplay for Christians a lot more interesting.

So for context, like Western Europe kind of has been treated as like the quote-unquote default region in a way because, you know, the feudal hierarchy in a lot of the systems that the game are kind of built around.

were made with Western Europe in mind.

So a lot of the content for places like the Byzantine Empire or the Arabian States or Iran or China, these were all kind of built on top of those Western European feudal systems to make them more appropriate for the way that those regions worked.

Now, the problem is that it's kind of left itself in Western Europe, which is arguably the core of the game.

I mean, it is called Crusader Kings.

Kind of feels, like, just very, like, generic and default.

A lot of people tend to, like, not want to play with, you know, a feudal government if they can avoid it and try to move into, like, the more Byzantine slash, like, Abbasid-style administrative government if they can.

As a whole, like, before this update...

You know, like, it was fine to be a Western European Catholic, but it wasn't, like, the most interesting gameplay experience unless you were specifically playing a character who had an interesting situation.

But, like, if you're just going to create your own character, you know, there wasn't a lot of interesting roleplay to be done just being some random French count.