It has done its homework, and it wants you to know that history was really nasty, and certainly never fair, and definitely didn’t match up with what you need it to be. If you want full plate and roads that work, aren’t too worried if all the horses are the same size, and don’t consider fleas and open sewers an essential part of your fantasy world, you have zero business crying historical accuracy when a girl gets a sword.Īlas: I have had no ladypopes yet in CK2.īut Crusader Kings plays Connie Willis to the Tolkien of fantasy-medieval games. In very loose, fantastic treatments like (say) Skyrim, there’s no very good reason for women not to have roles in governance and war that are more in line with modern values after all, these interpretations are perfectly happy to soft-pedal serfdom, vagrancy laws and smallpox for the comfort and fun of its players. Much of the appeal of Crusader Kings is that its treatment of the medieval period hews much closer to real history than is normal in videogames.
(It took longer than I expected, largely because CK2 updates faster than I can play it.)
Some years back I wrote about how bizarrely, buggily horrible it was to try and play a non-Virgin Queen woman in Crusader Kings. A lot changed between the original Crusader Kings and its sequel, so I figured it was time for an update.
