Victoria 3

Victoria 3 invites you to build your ideal society in the tumult of the exciting and transformative 19th century. Balance the competing interests in your society and earn your place in the sun. It is the most anticipated games in Paradox’s history. As one of two UX Designer on Paradox Interactive's latest Grand-Strategy game (GSG), Victoria 3, I am and have been responsible for the game's entire player experience.

The game had been in development for about 3 years when I came on board and the other UX designer was going on parental leave. Leaving me as the sole person to handle the UX a year before and up until release. Paradox Development Studio has been very new to the concept of what UX means and how to incorporate it into their processes. This is something I have been very much apart of defining and setting up, picking up where my fellow UX designer left off. A lot of things were on fire when I joined and the tempo was incredibly high, not allowing us time to put out all the fires, and instead we continued to build on top of them.

Coming in at such a tumultuous time, I had to develop and hone my skills incredibly fast and my personal development has been at a rocket speed ever since. I have now grown into an Experienced UX Designer in less than 2 years, where I have continued leading our effort of making Victoria 3 our most approachable and intuitive Grand-Strategy game, but let us talk a bit about my process and what I have actually done in the game.

The Process

First off, there is no UI or flow that I have not touched in this game, and since this game is extremely big, let me give you some of my best contributions. I designed and built UIs from the ground up, I have reworked existing ones, and I have ripped out and rearranged user flows as I see fit. In the early days I very much worked as the "expert", where I had to be the one setting the priority of what has the biggest positive impact on the player's experience. The role I had worked much like a unicorn position, where the demands are impossible to reach, but I had to make due with what time I had. The term of "good enough" was lowered to "it works" in many cases. A lot of designs ended up with large tech debts, but also huge UX complications and inconcistencies. Many of the game's intricate systems became completely neglected, leading to a lot of player confusion. During this time I worked very closely with our Game Director and our Producer to make UX part of the process in a much earlier stage, where it will have a much better impact/time ratio in the end. The end result is a process we started to apply the last year before release and is something that I believe is what made Victoria 3 actually come together in the end and become the most successful release of a GSG that Paradox has ever had.

A quick overview of this process goes something like this:

• First design on the feature - UX is taking part in all discussions
• UX Concept and Story - Sets up a first very high-level user flow of where this feature may be found in the game and answers the very high level question of: What are the most important things in this feature for the player?
• Sign off and approval from all leads - They base their decision on both the Design and the UX Concept
• Task breakdown
• A bunch of nitty gritty details where UX is taking on very distinct roles - Won't go into any more details here, just ask if you want to know more!

UX Pillars

One of our goals with Victoria 3 is to be the most intuitive and approchable Grand-Strategy game. In order to get there, we had and still have three UX Pillars:

• The right information at the right time
• Clear feedback about cause and effect
• Clearly separate Actions from Information

But I will not go into more details about them since we wrote a dev diary with the details right here: Victoria 3’s UX dev diary

The Tutorial

The amount of time it takes to learn one of our GSGs is probably the thing we struggle with the most when it comes to player retention. Therefore, designing the Tutorial has been one of my main focuses from the get go and it has proven very fruitful as Victoria 3 have been praised by many players to have the best tutorial of all our games. It started with a generic game system which we call "The Journal" that is our way of giving dynamic and optional content to the players. It is a very powerful system we had already put a lot of thought into, and I realized it was a perfect tool for the Tutorial to use as well. It was something already solid that would not take much code time to implement and mold for the Tutorial. Plus it also highlights the whole feature of the Journal to the player's attention, which by then tended to be missed by players according to our User Research.

We incorporated the Tutorial into our Journal system that can give contextual and dynamic "Journal Entries", as we call them. A Journal Entry can be a suggestion of something you could do in your country or simply be a matter of fact, a specific happening in your country that simply spawns events as long as it is active. However, for the Tutorial they would work more as direct "challenges" for the player to complete and here is where the real fun begins. It is a struggle to only in a few sentences try to explain concepts such as dividends taxes and how you as a government in Victoria 3 do not earn money directly, but instead earn it indirectly through how you tax your population when they work in buildings, and so on. I sat down and did a bunch of case studies on our previous titles as well as looking at scientific papers on human learning and attention spans in games. One study suggested that players are more keen on reading longer peragraphs of text after they have interacted with something, no matter what that interaction entails. It could be the simplest of actions, but no matter how mundane it was, they were now invested in that interaction and more keen on knowing what they did and why they did that. This lead me to try out a new way of presenting and interacting with the Tutorial Challenges. Dividing up the How and the Why.

You can read more about what I did in the Tutorial in the dev diary I wrote here.

There so much much more to talk about regarding the development of Vicky 3 so don't hesitate to reach out to me if you want to know more! Contact info at the bottom of the page.