It’s tough to find someone who can actually explain how the economy works in Victoria 2. Paradox’s 2010 Victorian-era grand strategy game and government simulation is imposingly complex, even by Paradox’s own standards, a decade later. Fortunately, the studio says the upcoming sequel, Victoria 3, will be much easier to learn – you won’t need an economics degree to start playing.
The latest Victoria 3 dev diary show off some of the work the team has been doing on the in-game UI; mainly menu boxes, text, and other elements of the interface. It’s taking quite a few cues from Crusader Kings III, which made several transformative updates to the way it displays information over its predecessor. Among the most notable changes was its nested tooltip system – and that’s something Victoria 3 will be using as well.
If you hover over any highlighted text in the game, a tooltip will fly out from your mouse, providing more information about whatever you’re looking at. Within that text, you’ll see more highlighted terms, which will in turn lead to more tooltip flyouts if you hover over them. You can keep digging through the game’s knowledgebase indefinitely this way – it’s basically like having the game’s official wiki sitting right alongside your mouse pointer.
This includes big ideas, Paradox says – foundational concepts like pops, dividends taxes, or market price. Each of those will be displayed in text that you can hover over and learn more about, using highlighted text to explore more about each concept.
Paradox also says it’s working hard on the tutorial for Victoria 3, too. “Our intention is still to allow you to learn even the most advanced concepts the game is based on as you play,” the developers write. “One aspect of this is the tutorial, which we are putting more focus onto than ever before.” More information on this will be provided in a future diary entry.
We still don’t have a firm Victoria 3 release date yet, but we reckon it’ll be out sometime this year.