Victoria 3 has announced its first piece of gameplay-focused DLC, and it sounds radical. The Voice of the People immersion pack releases on May 22 alongside Vicky 3's 1.3 update, and adds a whole roster of historical troublemakers and rabble-rousers to the game in the form of agitators, "a new kind of character that rally your pops to support Political Movements that align with their Ideology".
A full Victoria 3 game runs from 1836 to 1936, so you can probably guess the kind of historical figures the Voice of the People pack is playing with. People like Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemberg will crop up, mobilising the unwashed masses against the benevolent rule of your empire's political elite. Or, if you genuinely want to change things up, you can invite them in yourself, putting your country on the road to revolution.
Marx, for example, will try to kick off a movement for a council republic, while your more demure, bourgeois Victor Hugo types will settle for a presidential system, and other figures of other political strains will have their own causes. I assume Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's win condition will be the construction of a society that guillotines him as a conservative.
You don't have to tolerate them, though. Like the real-life governments of 19th century Europe did to, uh, pretty much all of the people in this expansion, you can always exile them if they get too irritating. Let Switzerland figure out what to do with Lenin; I'm sure he'll never, ever, ever come back.
The whole pack has a French theme, which makes sense given France's admirable historical commitment to occasionally setting its entire ruling class on fire, and will introduce a few new events to spice up French playthroughs. The ones that have so far been mentioned are the Paris Commune of 1871, the Dreyfus Affair, and the coup of Louis Bonaparte in 1851. "With ample new Journal Entries and Events, playing as France will offer a much more immersive experience," boasts the announcement.
The DLC will also introduce "a totally new French-themed paper map of the world," featuring a dread beast the devs are referring to as the "Pacific Bread Centaur," which looks like some kind of furry, baguette-wielding Otto von Bismarck creature. I, for one, will be cursed by this image whenever I close my eyes.
That's all that's been revealed for now, but Paradox promises "even more to come in the dev diary on visual features in a few weeks' time". It'll cost £13/$15 when it releases, which might be a touch on the pricey side for an immersion pack rather than a full expansion, but I'll probably buy it anyway because it contains all my favourite historical lads. If you preorder it, you'll get three additional agitators: Jules Brunet, Georges Clemenceau, and Alexis de Tocqueville. If I had a time machine my first order of business would be telling these men they will one day be a preorder bonus.
We liked Victoria 3 here at PCG. In his Victoria 3 review, Jon Bolding scored the game 84%, noting that it might be "weak on the international stage," but "the internal life of your nation is rich". Perhaps with a few more updates (and a few more pricey DLCs), Vicky 3's foreign policy will become just as interesting as its domestic life.
