大家好！我是《十字军之王3》的游戏总监亚历山大·奥尔特纳。 又一年过去了，这款游戏也在不断发展壮大！在我们回顾2025年之前，请允许我先回顾一下2017年！在我加入Paradox仅仅两年后，我们为《十字军之王2》推出了《玉龙》扩展包——这是一个在添加亚洲内容与不添加亚洲内容之间做出某种妥协的扩展包。我记得当时设计了朝贡和威望系统，玩家可以从一个非实体的、地图之外的中国版本那里请求各种东西……还有“西方保护国”，以及一场非常人为的入侵中国的事件，作为玩家帝国达到鼎盛时期的一种终局 Boss。我们曾经考虑过在地图上添加亚洲，但由于性能等多种因素的担忧，最终未能实现——《十字军之王2》并非为如此大规模的扩展而设计。 但《十字军之王3》可以！ 让整个相互连接的中世纪旧世界都能游玩——从爱尔兰一路前往契丹——这是我以及许多从《十字军之王2》团队来到如今《十字军之王3》团队的成员（向@servancour致敬）的梦想！而现在，在2025年，这成为了现实。 我们为此付出了长期而艰苦的努力（事实上，这是我们开发过的耗时最长的扩展内容），以确保地图的完善能够无缝融入游戏，且不会对游戏产生负面影响。游戏内的时间流逝速度（即天数推进的快慢）需要保持大致不变，现有内容也需给人恰当的感觉，等等。这类维护工作的需求量极大，但我们清楚必须完成。社区中从不缺乏大家的讨论、反馈和提醒，我们收集了这些信息，进行了仔细权衡，并将其纳入我们的计划中。我们还继续发布早期且深入的开发者日志，以便能在还有时间的时候对内容进行修改和更新——事实证明，这种早期反馈循环在2025年和2024年一样具有不可估量的价值，我们也将继续尽早、尽可能公开地收集反馈。从广袤的草原，到中国的葱郁大地，再到日本及东南亚的岛国：如今，我们的玩家数量达到了前所未有的规模。是的，甚至比游戏刚发布时的玩家还要多，这简直令人难以置信。在游戏发布这么多年后，看到如此多的玩家仍在游玩并享受这款游戏，我们感到无比荣幸！而且，这其中不仅有新玩家，还有回归的老玩家——那些可能有段时间没玩的玩家。有一天，我们的活跃玩家数量甚至超过了《钢铁雄心4》！

[Celebratory image courtesy of @JonZone] And it’s not stopping; more and more of you are playing each day that passes. We hope that what we’ve made will continue to bring you joy throughout the winter and the holidays, all while we’re working on what’s coming next. Now, let’s recap the year in more detail! Chapter 4 Let’s go through the content in the order it was released! Realm Maintenance 2025 We started off the year with a big Realm Maintenance update, containing improved Combat AI, Automated armies, info on allied armies, an updated Interaction UI, a large update to Court Positions including Tasks and a new UI, as well as many, many other things. Essentially a mix of issues reported by you in the community, and projects from the Black Forge Jam. The Realm Maintenance team knocked it out of the park with this one, and on a surprising note we saw a very large number of players trying it out, causing a significant spike in player numbers! This is not very common, as free updates tend to receive much less attention than expansions (we have a lot of data from across all our games on this) - but this one broke the pattern, proving that it’s a valuable format, and one we should continue with! Thank you for this, as I myself always was a big proponent of having free updates, and this helps a lot. Next year we’ll put the Realm Maintenance team to work on another update (it’ll probably land sometime in the second quarter of the year this time), and without saying too much we’re looking into working together with a certain someone that many of you in the community know well… Khans of the Steppe The first project I worked on when joining Paradox back in 2015 was, interestingly enough, Horse Lords for Crusader Kings 2, a very fun expansion that allowed you to burn the world to the ground, but that didn’t really represent life on the steppe that well. I knew from the start that in CK3 we needed a grander focus on movement - through migrations, invasions, and sweeping seasonal changes. At the same time, not all nomads migrated all the time (most had summer/winter pastures, but few of the larger hordes abandoned their lands outright). Nomads were one of my favorite governments in CK2, so I really wanted to nail the feeling this time around! With that, we designed a system where smaller nomads tend to migrate around, finding the best spot to graze their herd and increase their strength to challenge larger nomads, eventually finding a place for their people to thrive… until the Havsarsan Zud comes along. Then the settled lands to the west and south might look more tempting than before. Instead of having their power tied to lands, Nomads have great Herds, which is both their livelihood and their military - meaning that any loss in combat is felt much harder than it would ever feel for one of those rich and content settled rulers. Nomads also use Herd to upgrade their Nomadic Capital, recruit Men-at-Arms, find good Courtiers, and enforce Obedience - basically every facet of nomadic life is tied to the size of their Herd. And if the Herd of one particular nomad grows large enough, they can claim the mantle of the Greatest of Khans, unless the world bands together to stop them, of course. We got a lot of great feedback for Khans of the Steppe ahead of its release, and that is because we decided to decouple our dev diaries from the marketing schedule - essentially skipping ahead and revealing what we were working on much earlier than planned. There are risks to this, as talking about something too early might have excitement for the project die down earlier than you want, but such was not the case here - instead we got a ton of feedback that we could comfortably fit into the development schedule, with the funny side effect of not being able to explicitly say what we were working on (But we still did it in a ‘wink wink nudge nudge’-kind of way of course! There was no one that didn’t know that we were working on a Nomad expansion after the first dev diary, hehe.) We’re going to keep having dev diaries as early as possible for our expansions going forward. Coronations This year's smaller update was Coronations, which added the Activity with the same name - a new, somewhat costly ordeal to cement the rule of a new ruler ascending to the throne, with the longer they put it off, the less legitimate they become. When the activity is held, there’s a lot of intents to choose from depending on how you want to start off your rule, and as a vassal or foreign guest you have the opportunity to support or disrupt the coronation, giving you reason to travel far to forge alliances or weaken your enemies… The Coronation activity is one of the most content-filled activities we’ve done, with about as much content as an Event Pack stuffed into one activity. Now, the launch didn’t go well, with a game-breaking bug and some severe balance issues hampering it. The issues boiled down to two things: we were changing things too recklessly late in development, and we didn’t play enough longer sessions towards the end of the cycle. We had assigned almost everyone on the team to All Under Heaven, which left Coronations with few people to ‘tie the bag together’, so to speak. This was unfair and unacceptable both to the team working on the project, and to you - but we’re taking learnings from what happened and applying them to everything we’re doing from now on out. For example, we’re having several developers constantly play longer sessions up until release, this way we minimize the risk of obvious gamebreaking bugs or balance issues slipping through. We started doing this already with All Under Heaven, where we had a constant stream of playlogs (essentially After Action Reports focusing on fun & stability) delivered every week, usually 3-5 of them or more, with dedicated meetings to process the feedback. We’re also likely to focus on our larger expansions in 2026, putting Event Packs on hold for next year. All Under Heaven The highlight of the year was All Under Heaven, which is the biggest expansion we’ve ever done, expanding the map more than ever before by including all of Asia! This expansion was a gargantuan effort by the team, and we knew we wanted to do each of the new areas justice from the very beginning. We divided the expansion into three main areas of focus, and the same with the team; China, Japan, and South-East Asia. There was also overlap with Khans of the Steppe, and several members of the team worked on features we knew that both expansions needed, such as Tributaries and Situations. We did a lot of research, consulted experts, and brought in a large group of new Beta program participants with a variety of backgrounds - all to make sure that the features we chose were accurate, fun, and interesting! For China we decided to model the Dynastic Cycle (a historical concept where dynasties rise and fall), for Japan we modeled the rise of the Soryo and fall of the Ritsuryo, and for South-East Asia we modeled the worship of God-kings and construction of great temple cities. Three very different ways to play the game, and three unique ways to represent these incredibly diverse areas! Still, it all fits together, and the world is interconnected, with things happening on one side of the map having ripple effects on the other, and vice versa. One fun tidbit from the development of All Under Heaven was that we wanted to ‘complete’ the map once and for all by adding all of the old world that was connected during the medieval era… but the map dimensions still couldn’t make room for Zanzibar! (which was an important trade hub during the middle ages). This led to endless jokes about Zanzibar within the team, until someone took it upon themselves to make sure that Zanzibar actually made it onto the map - yes, we had to quite severely distort the coast of east Africa to get it in, but now it’s there, and we have pretty much all of the important medieval lands on the map! Before we end this section, I have to give thanks to the many fantastic Beta program participants, new and old, who helped us out with insight, research, and feedback throughout the development cycle! A special thank you goes out to our participants from the region itself; without your insight and knowledge this would have been an impossible task!

【抱拳礼——“覆拳”问候——一种代表尊重、谦逊与平衡的手势】 第四章的收尾与下架 我们即将下架第四章，之后其内容将如常整合至合集包中。独立扩展包也将如常单独发售。我们还在研究添加订阅服务，类似于其他Paradox游戏的做法，后续会有更多相关信息。如果您想以当前折扣购买该章节，建议尽快行动！ 购买第四章的最后日期为1月14日！ 2026年展望 让我们先预览一下明年的计划！第五章 按照惯例，我们将推出新的章节。这次我们的重心会略有调整——如果说2025年是拓展版图的一年（游牧民族、整个亚洲），那么2026年将是深耕内容的一年。我们会回过头重新打磨游戏的部分内容，以深化整体游戏体验。正如“权力之路”为“天下一家”奠定了基础，“天下一家”扩展包也在为未来的内容铺路。游戏中有一些核心领域是我们长久以来一直渴望改进的——我相信那些老玩家们应该能猜到下一个大型扩展包的主题很可能是什么……

以下是明年内容的预告。这更多是其中一个扩展包的线索，而非另一个；但相信只要动动脑筋，你们一定能把两个都猜出来…… 创作者包 2026年，我们将继续与才华横溢的模组制作者合作，为游戏开发新内容！能这样直接与社区合作总是很棒的，而且我个人非常喜欢这种方式，让我们能够拓展那些工作室原本不太可能专注的领域。从模组制作者那里获取创意提案和建议真的是很棒的体验，因为你永远不知道会收到什么样的想法！拥有如此富有创造力且愿意与我们合作的社区，实在是一种幸运。我要感谢所有模组制作者，感谢你们倾注了如此多的热爱和努力，为这款游戏创造了新的体验！ 2026年领域维护 我们在2025年初推出了“领域维护”更新，由于该更新非常成功，我们计划在明年再次推出类似的更新！这次更新可能会在明年第二季度初发布，在此之前，我们将安排团队人员负责修复和改进工作。本次更新将重点关注三个主要方面：修复漏洞（优先处理社区最希望修复的问题）、与上述“神秘嘉宾”合作对游戏进行改进，以及完善今年黑炉创意大赛中的部分项目！今年的一个Jam项目与社区最常要求的改进之一有关：荣誉系统！我们希望消除选择荣誉继任者的繁琐过程，让拥有荣誉成为更有回报的体验。荣誉骑士现在将始终由一名侍从自动继任，侍从的品质取决于该骑士在其生涯中的表现。我们还希望提高属性的清晰度，使其更具互动性，并增加获得所需属性的更多自主性。荣耀值将进行一些调整，因此骑士在战斗中牺牲时不会再失去荣耀值（毕竟这是他们的职责，在这个时代，战死沙场也可以是相当光荣的……）。这是我们承诺在2026年完成的项目之一。我们仍在优化该功能的用户界面和呈现效果，请注意最终完成时它的外观会有所不同。

我们还制作了一些符合不同文化的新成就相关插图，如下所示：

在游戏开发期间，我们改进的另一项系统可能是模组制作者们比较熟悉的，它是控制和整合各类内容的优秀方式：故事循环。故事循环在游戏内将被称为“故事”，现在可以可视化了！要访问它们，你可以前往《天下一家》中新增的“情境”标签页。我们认为这样设置是合理的，因为故事在某种程度上就是一种个人情境。 你们大多数人可能都养过宠物猫或宠物狗。在游戏中，除了一些零散的事件和角色界面中的单个属性外，它们基本是不可见的，但实际上有很多关于它们的信息，比如毛色、年龄等。这些信息一直都存在，只是未显示出来——不过现在情况不同了！

这只特别的猫是以我们一位制作人的猫命名的。 故事循环的可视化非常灵活，你可以连接决策、修正器、角色、标题、道具，将变量显示为进度条等等。这意味着每个故事都能突出其最重要的部分，而且大多数故事循环看起来都会截然不同。以下是更多示例：

以下是一个看起来更简洁的故事示例。【征服者】故事现在展示了其他地方无法呈现的信息：它可能如何结束。以前这会是一个令人不快的意外，但现在已清晰写明。

对于其他剧情，它能让我们提醒玩家他们正在做什么、进展如何以及为谁而做。例如，【熙德之歌】会记录你对非正式君主桑乔二世的忠诚度。

游戏中还有许多你从未真正注意到的循环机制；或许你曾快速点击跳过某个事件，或者它看起来毫无异常，不会引起怀疑……但现在这些都被可视化了，你可以追踪重要的部分。在上述例子中，你不会再跟丢你的分身，因为他们的头像会与故事相连，旁边还会显示一些不祥的信息。 结语 今年又是非常精彩的一年；我们前所未有地扩展了游戏内容（从非常直观的意义上来说！），新增了亚洲地区以及多种全新的游玩风格！再次，我要向社区中所有一直在讨论希望从游戏中看到什么内容的各位致以最诚挚的感谢，尤其是《天下》能有今天的成就，离不开你们的反馈！ 我们现在已进入2026年，正在根据你们的反馈和讨论开发新的扩展内容——请继续分享你们的想法和愿望，以便我们在未来的开发中加以考虑！ 今年的内容到此结束！很快我们会再次见面，在明年“领域维护”更新发布前的某个时间，我们将推出关于该更新的开发日志。现在，祝大家冬日愉快，节日快乐，圣诞快乐！