Crusader Kings 3 team says addressing feedback backlogs is like 'playing darts'

As the strategy behemoth continues to grow, developer PDS Black adjusts its internal processes after every release.

Diego Argüello , Contributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com

October 23, 2025

5 Min Read

Three characters in medieval dress

Via Paradox

Crusader Kings 3, the grand strategy medieval RPG released in 2020, continues to grow via DLC. PDS Black, one of the development teams under the Paradox umbrella, has a rigorous system in place to address feedback and provide post-release support. Deciding when to move on and allocate resources into the next thing, however, continues to be tricky.

"It has to happen," Crusader Kings 3 producer Maria-Lucia Dzediti told Game Developer during an interview at Tokyo Game Show. "Sometimes it’s circumstances that decide it rather than us wanting to. You have a super creative and passionate team, they would love to keep working on the same thing for three years if it meant having a perfect, flawless experience. But it’s about prioritizing."

When it comes to game breaking bugs, the team seeks to address them as soon as possible. As for "nice to have’s" suggested by players, the team usually considers them for future work plans, including free patches, since they are committed to releasing at least one free patch for every paid release. These patches address, among other things, past community concerns.

"We basically keep a backlog and our community team is super good at finding that on the forums, prioritizing it, keeping an active backlog and then updating with every release," Dzediti said. "We have a collection of these. And then, I don't know, it's like playing darts, you just shoot. We have an internal process where we prioritize these and see what works best with the staffing we have for a particular release at a certain point in time, and try to put them in there."

There are always things to tweak in a huge, complex game

But as QA manager Riad Deneche told Game Developer, the team reviews this internal process after every release, as there are "always things to tweak." This is due to the fact that the team considers the DLC support of Crusader Kings 3 to be live service, which constitutes different development considerations from making the base game. Every DLC brings an opportunity to learn and bring in, as Deneche said, new ways of working that are more focused and efficient.

Back on September 9, PDS Black released Coronations, adding to the extensive DLC for Crusader Kings 3. Players quickly scrutinized it, however, primarily due to a bug that caused a problem with oaths. The developer issued a fix to address this and other issues within 24 hours of release, while also including an apology.

"Coronations was not up to the standard you deserve, and that’s on me," reads a post penned by Deneche in the Paradox forums . "As the QA manager for the studio, it is my job to ensure that our releases meet the QA vision we have set out. It is clear we didn’t give the project the resources and attention it needed, and the result was a release that let you down."

When asked about what said standard constitutes, the QA manager said that it’s important for the team to keep a "certain stance of quality that people expect from our games." This stance includes the technical standard of a game running well and not having any major issues, as well as the fun factor. QA, for example, doesn’t just test functionality but also fantasies, as it’s fundamental for a game like Crusader Kings 3 to ensure that historical niches work properly.

"[The players are] very dedicated people, they can’t expect any less than us also being dedicated [to] the game itself," Deneche said.

Working in parallel with several DLCs at the same time has taught the team many lessons throughout the years. One of them has been to not focus too narrowly, to look at the big picture, deciding on different priorities based on the scope of each release, considering the testing involved. This is important considering that everything added to Crusader Kings 3 intertwines with a myriad of existing and forthcoming DLC.

"Once you keep adding content to the game, you have to make sure it works with what you already have in the game, and the thing you'll be adding in five years from now," Dzediti said. "The team that was there when we released the live game, you don't know when you're going to release a game that this is what keeping it alive five years into is going to look like."

"But it's what we're learning and what we're trying to do. And I think a lot of it we're doing by listening to the community because they play it more than we do, honestly."

Committing to the dev diary

One of the ways in which the team has been listening to the community more closely is with dev diaries, which started with the Roads to Power DLC back in September 2024. This has allowed PDS Black to share materials and ideas with the community early on in development and ask them for feedback, which in turns lets developers observe how players react to possible fantasies or different ways of expanding the map, for example.

"The earlier we do it, the more sort of creative freedom we have to create the freedom in time, because the reality of game development is you have to do it in a short time, and that's the challenge," Dzediti said. "I think both us here and the whole team back home wish we could take all that feedback and turn it into something, you know, concrete within the time we have, but sadly, it doesn't always work out."

About the Author

Diego Argüello

Contributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist and critic from Argentina. Video games helped him to learn English, so now he covers them for places like The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and more. He also runs Into the Spine, a site dedicated to fostering and supporting new writers, and co-hosted Turnabout Breakdown, a podcast about the Ace Attorney series. He’s most likely playing a rhythm game as you read this.

See more from Diego Argüello

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