The strategy epic Crusader Kings 3 is an incredibly complex mix of strategy, simulation, and role-playing: You take on the role of a ruler in the Middle Ages and guide your dynasty through centuries. On March 29, the strategy monster is set to join Xbox Game Pass and is really dressing up for it by hiring rapper and Twitch streamer T-Pain for YouTube spots.
This is the problem:
- The games from Swedish developer “Paradox Interactive” are complexity monsters. They attempt to depict situations from history with endlessly many interlocking systems. They are “typical” PC games that require hours of dedication to immerse oneself into. Crusader Kings 3 is primarily a game for “history” and “strategy” nerds.
- The Xbox Game Pass reaches a huge audience of players on PC and Xbox. Because the games are offered in a “flat-rate” model, shooter players, strategy fans, or role-playing junkies also try a game that they would never buy. However, a large part of these players screams in terror during the tutorial of a Paradox game because even the basic concepts are so foreign that even someone who knows “Civilization 6” or “Age of Empires” stands there cluelessly.
- So how do you make Crusader Kings 3 appealing to as wide an audience as possible? How can you convey the fascination? How can you get genre outsiders to at least give it a try?
Strategy giant hires rapper and Twitch streamer
This is the solution: Xbox and Paradox have hired Faheem “T-Pain” Najm for YouTube trailers, he is an American rapper and Twitch streamer. T-Pain has about 800,000 followers on Twitch, but primarily streams shooters like Warzone, Fortnite, or the racing game Forza Horizon. So he doesn’t necessarily have much to do with strategy games.
In two commercials, he plays Crusader Kings 3 and shows the fascination of the game.
In one spot, he wants to rule the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as a “good, peaceful ruler” but immediately faces assassination attempts on his life and rebellions.
Just a few hours later, he is a medieval despot, marrying his children to the last troll for alliances, squeezing his population with high taxes, and waging war across Europe.
In another video, the holy T-Pain founds a religion to get a divorce from his wife and basks in how incredibly clever and holy he is, but overlooks the consequence of such behavior.
This is what it is about: The games from Paradox mainly take place in the minds of the players – the game allows you to implement your own plans with mechanics, whether you want to conquer Great England as a small count in Ireland, take on the role of an Italian Renaissance prince, or experience what it’s like to live as a raiding Viking: In Crusader Kings 3, all of this is possible.
The representation of T-Pain reflects the thoughts of the player and the development these thoughts go through during the game.
T-Pain wonderfully illustrates the conflicts and dilemmas that Crusader Kings 3 keeps presenting: The games are designed so that “efficiency” and sheer survival clash with the willingness to “do good and do the right thing.”
You start off wanting to be a wise and benevolent ruler, and a few hours later, you find yourself right in the middle of breeding the “Overman”:
If you play Crusader Kings 3 correctly, you breed the “Overman”
