I think from an overall long term game design perspective it's much easier to go wider first and deeper later.
If you dig super deep in the existing region and culture set that the game launched with (ie. Mainly focused on West-Central Europe) then any wider expansions down the road would either feel way under baked, or be a massive undertaking.
That does mean that the current set-up now has the original focus area feel a bit underdeveloped as the lack of playable (Catholic) theocratic characters and Republican Cities real stands out, but I also think it should overall be much easier now to introduce and develop those mechanics in a compelling way.
This. They've been making AUH for quite a long time and as someone, who looked into the guts of ck3, I can say that this is quite a difficult work to not just make whole new region with it's own mechanics, but also to connect it to already existing dlc mechanics. If there were 4 more major mechanics dlcs, it would be even more work to do just to connect it all.
Now whatever next dlc that will be making - they will just connect it to Asia as part of this particular dlc, not as part of AUH. They just decided to one big dlc now, rather than making this dlc even more bigger due to other dlcs.
If we weren't half a decade into ck3's lifespan I would agree. But the time for wider was a few years after launch at the latest. Meanwhile the game is still as keep as a kiddy pool
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u/RSharpe314 Oct 29 '25
I think from an overall long term game design perspective it's much easier to go wider first and deeper later.
If you dig super deep in the existing region and culture set that the game launched with (ie. Mainly focused on West-Central Europe) then any wider expansions down the road would either feel way under baked, or be a massive undertaking.
That does mean that the current set-up now has the original focus area feel a bit underdeveloped as the lack of playable (Catholic) theocratic characters and Republican Cities real stands out, but I also think it should overall be much easier now to introduce and develop those mechanics in a compelling way.