As a man with hundreds of hours in Vicy 2 and thousands of hours in HOI4, EU4, and CK2, I want to like this game and in some ways I do. However, there are many glaring issues that cannot be excused. In its current state and price point I cannot recommend it to new players - just play Victoria 2 to scratch that itch.
The performance is horrendous. If you have a potato, forget even trying to load up this game. If you have a mid end gaming laptop, you will have a lot of issues running this also. Just as they claimed CK3 will run better than CK2 (which is nonsense), Victoria 3 was supposed to be an improvement on the performance of Victoria 2. The game map looks better but it runs worse! CK2 and EU4 have a lot of mods that make the game map look very nice without bringing the game down to a stuttering slog. Therefore we know its very possible to make a nice-looking map without the game becoming a lumbering beast, but it seems this game's performance is an apt metaphor for what has happened to Paradox as a company. They became a bloated corporation and lost sight of sensible game design for instead this design-by-committee corporate fetish. Paradox players down to a man (or woman) know that you can't run a country by committees - let alone a company. You need one man with a vision at the top preferably with high mana. To quote Marshall Lefebvre during Napoleon's coup against the Directory, "yes, lets throw the lawyers into the river". Paradox needs to throw out this bureaucratic approach to making games. The corporate fetish of design-by-committee is costing them serious money and reputational damage. They will feel it over time as the memory of the old games fades to the series of present mediocrities. This is very comparable to what happened to Creative Assembly and the Total War franchise.
Paradox games have also always been successful in part because up to now they were able to be run on virtually any computer. These are just map-clicking grand strategy games after all. Graphics are nice but not what the players are foremost looking for especially if it meaningfully takes away from performance. Even a basic survey of the players would reveal we care far more about improving late-game lag and AI behavior than having a prettier map at any cost. The success of CK2 and EU4 also revolved around intuitive UI which tells the player what he needs to know very quickly through colors, symbols, and easily-accessible map modes. That leads us to the Victoria 3 UI, which is cluttered, awful, and completely unintuitive.
The gameplay loop itself does not fare better. In recent Paradox style, they released a massive update which wasn't play tested and it subsequently broke the AI behavior so they declare suicidal wars. That's not even to get into the asinine and highly controversial decision to oversimplify the military aspect of this game. They removed army micromanagement from previous games and replaced it with a system that denies player control from the specific deployments and movements of troops. You only can control what front troops are sent to. I'm not sure why this decision was made, given how complicated the economic aspect of the game is. If the intention was to appeal to new players, that wouldn't make any sense with other design decisions they've made. The economy is absurdly complicated and it seems like random economic catastrophes fall on your country from the heavens. You used to be able to trade for goods, but that option seems to have been removed in recent patches. Either that or its hidden within the labyrinthine menus of the UI. You can run critically short of goods especially as a developing country, but the game fails to suggest any course of action to remedy this. The only solution seems to be waiting for your country to slowly industrialize. I ran short of military goods and this led to a 0 percent army organization yet my army kept advancing and winning battles, My only guess as to the meaning of this is that organization is a meaningless concept, as in real life or in previous paradox games an army with zero organization would surely get beaten. While EU4 or HOI4 often gives you suggestions or more information if you hover your mouse over a notification, this game does nothing of the sort. I get the sense that one part of the committee designing this game wanted a streamlined experience for mass appeal whilst another part wanted to create a ridiculously complicated economy simulator to live up to hype and expectations. The result is a jarring experience full of half-baked mechanics. The result is not satisfying gameplay.
Finally I have to comment on the obnoxious Paradox DLC pipeline business model. I'm not defending this model, but I'm also trying to reason with the corporate overlords. This DLC model existing in Vic 3 is imported from late-stage EU4 and CK3. It is based around routinely breaking the AI with massive updates to core game mechanics. These are NEVER meaningfully play tested and often result in disaster. Everyone gets impacted by the DLC whether we like it or not. Whether we buy it or not, the game code gets updated. This does to the AI what a huge truck does to a rickety bridge which is not certified as safe for that truck. Starting with late-stage EU4, they began to routinely break their own game code with such DLC overhauls. This was perpetrated through a nonsensical rotation of project leaders lacking a unified, coherent vision of what the game should be. Many players eventually dread such DLC not only for that but also because it invariably breaks all the best mods as well as game saves. The former requires modders to continually scramble to make their creations compatible with the recent potentially braindead update, while the latter can ruin ironman achievement runs. My contention has always been that DLC, if it has to exist at all, should exist in the background of a game. That seems to be how to make the most money if you look at CSGO or games like that. Create a popular base game that draws people in and sells itself, and THEN tack on some cosmetic or non-intrusive DLC if you absolutely have to. You will make more money and get better reviews on steam. It's more subtle. It will produce less animosity in the community all-around. If you absolutely have to sell DLC, sell skins, sell country reworks, or sell different scenarios (perhaps a WWI start date, since otherwise performance limits us from reaching that stage of the game). DO NOT for goodness sake sell us core game elements which were intentionally left out from the initial product for the sake of collecting tolls on them. DO NOT sell us broken overhauls which were not play tested by a single person. For goodness sake, play test your DLC. It's not that expensive and its much more useful than the pencil-pushers of corporate committees. The current policy is a blatant insult to your own players. My best guess as to why there has been such a focus on an obnoxious DLC pipeline is the increased need to pay the expenses of a bloated corporation. However, this should be irrelevant to the consumer. We expect a certain standard which they set themselves. This standard shouldn't be compromised by the expansion of Paradox into a much larger company than it once was. If anything, the expectations should be higher. There is no excuse for why a Paradox game from ten years ago is more polished and playable than what Paradox is releasing these past few years. We can see why small studios have a leg up in this industry, as the old Paradox did. Their old teams were small enough to understand what they were making and not get bogged down in corporate stagnation. The decision to make a DLC mill central to the game is invariably made by upper management. Most of Paradox's developers and coders are not at all to blame for this DLC mill or the unsound mentality behind it, and it's truly unfortunate that their hard work is often overshadowed by this elephant in the room.
