Crusader Kings 3 will 'probably' happen, says outgoing Paradox CEO

The outgoing CEO of Paradox Interactive Fred Wester has said the publisher will "probably" make a sequel to sprawling grand strategy game Crusader Kings 2, which he feels is becoming too "crowded" for more expansions.

Paradox has released regular expansions for Crusader Kings 2 since it came out in 2012, and the next, Holy Fury, is due later this year. Wester—who will move to a different role at the publisher next week and be replaced by Ebba Ljungerud—says that the game is beginning to feel "heavy", and can't be expanded much more. Therefore, a sequel is likely, he says—but it doesn't sound like it's being worked on just yet.

"We will probably do it at some point," he explained to gameindustry.biz in a interview in May, which was published yesterday. "The reason for that is the technical depth that we have in Crusader Kings 2. We can't add much more to the game as it is now. The map is really big, there's so much content in there. It wasn't really built for all of the expansions we made.

"It's getting heavy. We might need to take the etch-a-sketch, shake it a little bit, and start over."

He also hinted that Paradox may take "a bigger stab at RPGs" going forward, potentially with the White Wolf, World of Darkness, and Vampire: The Masquerade licences it bought in 2015. A Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop RPG came out this week, and it sounds like we can expect more soon, with "a couple of projects that are at more than an experimental level right now".

"People ask us why it's taking such a long time to do anything with the White Wolf stuff. And, well, we want to do things the proper way this time," Wester said.

He added that the company will try to update its games more regularly with in-game events in future. "We need to be even better about working on a weekly basis—like, what's happening this week? Not necessarily something people pay for, but events within the week and things that have just happened in the game."

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.