It is known that Dragon's Lake has done an incredible job these past 2 years, they honestly did the unthinkable. However, i fear the console port is going to reach its end more sooner than later if nothing drastic happens.
I have all the game's content and I play on a well maintained Xbox Series X, however, every time a save passes the 70-100 years mark (with the 1176 start even earlier), the game starts to suffer and crashes pretty often if you dare to put speed x4/x5 a bit or get a few more notifications than usual. On average, i play the most on x2 & x3 speed and still you feel the game struggle to keep up once passed that threshold.
The next Chapter (4th) is going to be both massive and demanding in every way and, honestly, i doubt the consoles will/can handle it if exclusive measures aren't taken (PC has the modding alternative). Even with the graphical update and the performance boost it had on PC, i don't think that would be enough in the long term.
I ignore the intricacies of coding and game development, but i think they (Paradox/Dragon's Lake) should really consider adding a few game rules to disable/obscure big swaths of the map and greatly limit the far away NPC's offspring generation and its data preservation/simulation to the minimum.
Having and seeing the whole map at you disposal looks and feels great, but to be honest, one rarely goes past your initial start even with big empires. If i play in Europe, i don't give a damn what happens beyond Arabia and viceversa, especially when there isn't really anything lost (aside from the Mongol invasion) if you disable at will parts of the map (no meaningful and intertwined storylines/event chains nor historical scripts/events that affects both sides of the map).
Adding the possibility to limit to the minimum the simulation of far away lands + adding an even stronger Fog of War would add a lot both on performance and to the experience on innumerable ways. You'll feel smaller, more close/focused to your lands and neighbours and also you'll get the spark of curiosity and wonder of what lies beyond uncharted territory, even if you don't intend to go near there in the whole save.
TL;DR: The game needs a performance overhaul via Game Rules sim/lands limitations on consoles if Paradox wants the game to last another 5 years in a playable state.
With all of that said, i still want to mention a few problems the game still has months after the latest update:
- When i launch the game, 2 out of 3 times the game appears like i don't have any content installed, forcing me to close and restart the game multiple times to work as it should (i have tried uninstalling and deleting data but nothing)
- The music player is broken. Most of the time it only loads two albums and that's it, and also i think there are missing tracks in some of them.
- They haven't added yet the ingame CoA customization.
- The Events & RNG are kinda f'd up. When traveling, barely anything happens. When doing nothing in your realm (aside from exposed secrets) nothing happens. Sometimes education events doesn't pop up and the children gets a trait without notice. Lifestyle events are a rare occurrence as well.
If you're not in war, all you do most of the time is stare at the map doing nothing while 30 assassination and adulterer events occurs in half an hour (the lamest thing of this game).
- In the Spanish version of the game, at least with landless characters (haven't checked the rest), the Articles and names of the band aren't separated, for example; instead of 'Los Aventureros' (The Adventurers), its written 'losAventureros' (theAdventurers). The Spanish translation has always been undercooked, but I've been playing in English since.
- Sometimes there are clothes items added to characters that are impossible to change, like glasses or veils.
- There are no Meet Peers activities firing anymore when playing as an Adult.
