Victoria 3 is a gross oversimplification.
SUMMARY:
- A hollow experience where you choose a "unique" country and you spend scores of hours "playing", and at the end of the XIX century, all you remember of the Victorian age is... that you built lots of buildings?! Something here isn't right.
- There is one inescapable and straightforward gameplay loop, concealed under layers of derived statistics - "always increase your Construction capacity". The rest will come to you.
- As it tries to represent period-specific historical circumstances, the game neglects the driving forces behind the political and societal development of the leading countries of the period.
- Since to me it's not justifiable to buy an incomplete product on the promise that "it will get good thanks to developer support", and then have its price balloon through addons, I can't recommend Victoria 3 to you!
REVIEW:
Victoria 3 is advertised as a grand strategy game, where the player manages the economics, diplomacy and politics of a state in the XIX century.
In reality, it's a game where you win by having a number go up.
Which metric will you choose to compare your country to others? It might be the "global rank", the "prestige", the "standard of living" of countries. It's up to you, but as most things that are up to you in this game - it's not really important.
And it's not really important, because underneath most of those metrics lies the same Number, and that Number is your country's GDP. The rest are all derived from GDP in one way or another. And GDP is expressed as the sum of your weekly expenses and income. Add that up for 52 consecutive weeks and you have your yearly GDP.
Is the history of the growth of economic output and population wealth sufficient to present the story of the progress of XIX century world powers? Victoria 3 seems to think it is, and you could say it is, but with the caveat that it's a gross oversimplification and distortion of the truth. Which is the statement this review starts with.
The game has a few gameplay loops, but they all reinforce the main one. That main loop is the construction of enterprises which the game, somewhat confusingly, calls "buildings". Buildings which turn profit will pay out this profit to the employees and owners of the building.
The profits of buildings are what drives most of the other "success" metrics. Dividends and wages drive the population's wealth, which wealth is the main contributor to its standard of living, and which also determines the population's loyalty or radicalism vis-a-vis the government, and its preferences with regard to which political faction should be in charge. The political factions, when in charge, determine what legislation can be passed, and legislation on various issues will put in force modifiers to the existing economics, diplomatic, and governmental setup.
You are provided with buttons to push and levers to pull and cogs to rotate, in order to balance the strain on the various parts of the system, so at the time you need to extract more money you can do it, and at a later time when you need to placate the public, you can relieve some of that strain.
But what's behind all of this is a simple dependency - the higher your country's capacity to have construction of buildings going on, the faster your population's wealth will increase, provided those constructions are, on the whole, profitable. A universally valid strategy is to work towards increasing your "Construction", which is what in "Hearts of Iron" (1 and 2) used to be called "Industrial Capacity". This "Construction" resource is then used by both AI-controlled agents and by you, the player, to increase your industrial sector, i.e. the buildings which make your country and people richer.
The very existence of "universally valid" strategies is an alarm bell for a badly balanced grand strategy game. In a grand strategy game, it is the geopolitical situation which in its sum dictates what the good strategy is for a given player. And geopolitical factors are very sparsely modeled in Victoria 3.
The Diplomacy, Politics, and Warfare gameplay loops merely reinforce the main loop - the economic one, thus I won't be going into detail on them. Suffice it to say that you can't be successful in either of those if your country doesn't produce goods and create population wealth on par with the countries you want to compete against.
All of this is well and fine, and as an economics model it's a plausible and complex one for a videogame. What I can't abide by, and what ultimately makes me overall ill-disposed towards Victoria 3, is that telling the story of the economic boom of the XIX century is telling less than half the story of the success of the West in the given timeframe. Furthermore, it is putting the cart in front of the horse, because much of the advancements in industry were born out of, and gave birth to, social perceptions which drove political action.
Just two small examples - slavery and child labor were not abolished because of economic efficiency concerns, but because they became morally unacceptable. A major factor for France going on to conquer Tunisia was that it was roundly beaten by Prussia a few years prior, and it needed a boost in "national pride" - admitted by politicians at that time. But you wouldn't get a feel of those things from playing Victoria 3 in its current state. Victoria 3 won't guide you through the story of how and why child labor became unacceptable why the German states decided to unite.
It is these processes which Victoria 3 seems to be more or less uninterested in modelling or providing for. The only motivating force for your actions as a player ends up being having more profitable buildings working under your market. I understand that the development team recognizes the lack of flavor and individuality as one of the big areas for improvement, but this recognition can't make a review of the present state of the game any more positive.
I am certain that a few years down the road Victoria 3 will be a much more complete experience, with a proper feeling for the player of the country he is playing with.
However, past experience shows that by that time the game will have overgrown with DLCs so much that even at a discount, it will cost way above what a full priced base game does now.
Since to me it's not justifiable to buy an incomplete product on the promise that "it will get good eventually", and then have its price balloon through addons, I can't recommend Victoria 3 to you!
That is, unless you are willing to settle for a generic simulation of country X's industrialization and its effects on demographics, which is decidedly far from the full tale of what the Victorian age or the "long XIX century" was about. Then you keep playing the "incomplete" version you have now, and after some hundreds of hours you think to yourself "why not give them a few dollars more for an expansion, it has paid for itself already".
I'm writing this review after 110 hours and 3 full campaigns, as Sweden, Prussia and France. Although I'm well aware of the roadmap for development and the features of the upcoming "Sphere of Influence" DLC, I still don't think Victoria 3 is worth buying in its current state, and from my perspective, won't be worth buying in 2024.
