Holy Moly, Crusader Kings 3 Will Let You Play as a Pope

Crusader Kings 3 is getting a new core expansion, By God Alone, and it’s going to add playable popes to the Paradox strategy game alongside other new gameplay mechanics to let players influence the church.

“For the first time in the Crusader Kings franchise, we’re also introducing playable theocracies, allowing you to rise to the power of the Pope himself,” said Mikael Andersson, lead designer on the expansion. “By God Alone extends your options of how to engage with your Christian faith and the church behind it. It gives you more strategic options for how to deal with this institution, as well as dealing with other rulers of the same faith as you.”

By God Alone will arrive in Q3 of this year as a paid expansion, so you’ve plenty of time to figure out how to wield the word of god to your strategic advantage.

“In this core expansion, we’re fleshing out the Christian church to make the institution itself feel like a living entity,” Andersson said during a video reveal for the expansion. “We’re revising the way the church collects taxes to make it more obvious how taxation from temple holdings are being collected and allow the player to direct it to some extent. During the time span of Crusader Kings 3, the Christian faith went through a lot of upheaval. To represent this, we’re introducing rites, local variations of practice that the player can interact with.”

The reveal video also talked about another core expansion, Silk & Silver, which will allow players to live that Middle Ages merchant life, establishing trade routes and undercutting their business rivals. There’s also a free update dropping today, which adds “age-related ailments” for older characters and a new system for personal character-bound Stories within the game.

Crusader Kings 3 is a strategy game where you play through whole dynasties with plenty of drama, marriages, and feuds. Both expansions will add yet more depth to an already rich set of mechanics in the game that IGN’s review called “a new king of historical strategy” when it was released in 2022.

Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.