Because while they’ve both been quite clear in their intention not to pull punches in presenting the reality of 19th century imperialism, they also realise the challenge of making this playable with good taste. Nevertheless, after speaking recently with game director Martin Anward and game designer Mikael Andersson, I'm feeling hopeful. But it also means rapacious national expansion, colonialism, and slavery - issues on which the public conversation has advanced a lot since Victoria 2 came out in 2010. That means industrialisation, massive social upheaval, and a thousand other fascinations. Victoria 3, the next grand strategy project from Paradox, will see players take the reins of nations on the global stage of the 19th century. Time, also, has a strange capacity to dilute grimness - whether rightly or wrongly, the more ancient a game’s setting, the more carefree we tend to be about burning farming settlements to the ground for the sake of expansion.īut if developers want to make games about real history, especially stuff which has happened within a generation or two of living memory, things become a lot more stark.

Abstraction can do a lot to sidestep this, of course: many games feature real historical cultures, but pit them against each other in virtual petri dishes which might as well be fantasy worlds. There’s an inherent awkwardness in historical strategy games as entertainment, which is just how much of history is made up of stacked atrocities.

Victoria 2 how to colonize