Ruling a kingdom is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard enough building your armies, gathering resources, and strategizing against rival kingdoms. The upcoming Crusader Kings III DLC adds to this pile the greatest challenge to overcome: drama. Friends & Foes will force you to focus on the home front by highlighting those closest to you and those who would see you dead. The DLC will be released on September 8, 2022, so the announcement trailer just came out. Check it out below!
The announcement trailer for the new Crusader Kings III DLC opens with a cryptic message that friends and enemies are merely two sides of the same coin. Because the Crusader Kings games are all about taking on the life of a medieval king, this new DLC is kind of brilliant on a conceptual level. You’ll have to deal with rival noble houses, childhood bullies, summer crushes, your spouse, and more.
In the game, you will be spending a lot of time reminiscing about your childhood and interacting with those people as an adult as well. You’ll have 100+ player-driven stories to live through, and your choices will determine who is a friend and who is a foe. Were you intentionally or unintentionally rude to someone as a teenager? They may be plotting your death now. Being an adult is basically just trying to recover from our childhoods, so this tracks.
As the title suggests, life isn’t all about the haters, though we do have to pay attention to them when they’re holding sharp objects. There are plenty of opportunities to make friends and lovers feel special in this DLC. Spoil your spouse with over-the-top gifts or check in with your friends to make sure they haven’t been turned against you. Your day-to-day experiences of ruling a kingdom will now be more complicated and full of the tricky navigation of people’s feelings.
The trailer lays out the drama nicely and shows us what the game will look like as we make choices and move through the stories. We’re especially amused by the timing of the quote, “watch as your loved ones and those out for your blood come alive in the most intimate detail.” As soon as the narrator says the word “intimate,” the first picture to pop up features two men with nothing on but well-placed grape leaves. That had to be on purpose! It was also the truth though. There isn’t a whole lot left to the imagination in that image.
Crusader Kings III: Friends and Foes will be available to download on Steam on September 8, 2022. That’s not a long wait, but if you are itching to jump into another medieval game right now, try one of these!
