Victoria 3's first immersion pack called Voice of the People is out and it promises to not only change how you approach your internal politics by adding agitators and new laws, but also enrich the world with flavor that is specific to the glorious nation of France. I have played a lot with this new update of the game and I have also combed through the game files so that I can tell you everything that you need to know before you buy. Now as with all DLCs for grand strategy games, Voice of the People is accompanied by a free patch and as always, I will be evaluating both the free and the paid content. The big question of the day is whether Update 1.3 can keep its promises. So let's find some answers. Let's start with the new laws that come with the free patch. We have some excellent additions such as the long-sought-after Land Reform Law category. This category allows you to shift around who holds the most basic source of power in your country and pushing through changes here can legitimately feel as significant as abolishing the monarchy or changing to a council republic. Additionally, we have the new laws of technocracy and the single-party state. If nothing else, these laws do what they say on the tin and should at least enhance your late-game dictatorship playthroughs, so they too are valuable additions. State atheism is a good addition in general as well. While it has some bugs related to the devout interest group, this law adds a new level of interactivity to religion. The black sheep in the context of the new laws can be found in the industry-banned law. This law is conceptually incredibly weak and a mechanical disaster. Its conceptual flaws stem from the fact that this is nothing other than a ridiculous premise. While the game asserts that Industry Band was a desired state of affairs for the historical stream of the Luddites, this simply misunderstands what Luddites wanted, which is one of the more frequently applied misrepresentations of Luddites in pop culture. No, Luddites did not dream of honest labour and hated machines for being evil and soulless. They lost their jobs and were starving. They wanted to eat. Suggesting that luddites are these dedicated machine haters is just as bad a reading of the situation as saying that taxi drivers worldwide took action against rideshare companies because they disliked apps, the internet and phones. It just misses the forest for the trees. What industry banned, so essentially agrarianism on steroids, could have been is, for example, something like Jeffersonian agrarianism. Jeffersonian agrarianism could have been available as an extreme form of agrarianism in which building a high concentration of industry, more advanced primary production methods as well as concentrated ownership through the capitalist class would simply not be permitted, as Jefferson legitimately saw these things as threats to democracy. Industry Band on a conceptual level misrepresents its supposed ideology entirely and does nothing but spawn endless infantile Ted Kaczynski memes by people that have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Conceptual issues aside, on a mechanical level, industry band is a complete disaster. Any rebellion that spawns with it simply deletes all heavy industry buildings. Did the Rhineland rebel and you defeated it easily with the army of the remaining German Empire? Sorry, it's all gone. The instantaneous delivery of the already ridiculous premise makes this lore a complete failure that the player best engages with by not engaging with it at all. Not just that, but it also does not actually stop you from acquiring heavy industry by annexing other areas, as the law only dismantles these buildings the moment it is passed. Anyway, moving on, let's talk about a primary aspect of the new free patch. Agitators. Agitators are meant to represent the great political minds of this period that carry new and old ideology to the streets rather than to the halls of power. The general idea behind agitators is indeed quite great. They put a face to an issue and allow for more precise directions of your country's political movements. Sadly, agitators in patch 1.3 are unreasonably strong. Instead of bringing their issues to the streets and then seeing whether it vibes with your interest groups and the population, they on their own are often strong enough to instantly pass laws should you so desire. This effectively disables the role your population plays in passing laws as one or two very popular agitators will already be enough to get things done. Another central issue of agitators stems from the fact that losing track of them is really quite easy. Did you for example exile Bismarck? Are you wondering where he is now? Good luck finding answers. The lacklustre state of information surfacing in this regard makes it so that the world feels much less alive than it should. Lenin stoking the fires in France, Bismarck forming an empire in America, you won't know about it unless you consciously check for it. You also constantly have to scour the excelled agitator interface to not miss people that may be interesting and important to you. With all these things in mind, Agitators in 1.3 feel more like cheat codes to rush to whatever state of affairs you want in your country even if your interest groups and population are nowhere near ready for it. It ultimately weakens a core part of internal politics in Victoria 3 but has the potential to become a great feature after further revisions. Beyond this, the free patch also adds a variety of general gameplay improvements. These improvements, it must be said, are the strongest mechanical additions in this update. Firstly, we have the altered processes for revolutions and passing laws. While agitators trivialized this quite significantly, these mechanics are now significantly better than they were previously. Revolutions are more dynamic and passing laws feels much less frustrating. We also now have government petitions in which one of your government interest groups asks that you pass a law they like. This is fundamentally good, although some tweaking and balancing is doubtlessly still necessary. What makes this better in theory than it is in practice is the fact that the AI appears blissfully unaware of the petitions. They will simply just sit there and either get extremely lucky with their RNG and pass the law or pay the price of ignorance and get a massive malice for one of their government interest groups. Either way, the AI is not making a conscious decision here which means that they are effectively not interacting with this system. I am bringing that part up specifically because this update and the DLC have massive, massive issues as far as the capabilities of the AI to interact with the new features is concerned. Rather than the AI's lack of awareness of government petitions being an outlier, it appears to be the standard of this update. The unification mechanics for Germany were also reworked and are generally a good change. You now have journal entries that mimic the historical wars over Schleswig-Holstein and later the Brothers War. This is doubtlessly superior to the initial implementation of Prussia simply inhaling German miners. It must once more be said, however, that the German AIs more often than not struggle with completing these journals, ultimately ignoring them and simply forming Germany because everybody decided to vote for the same guy. The free patch has many other big and small changes, most of which are good. Better balancing, bug fixes, changes to how content behaves when a revolution is successful and various other things are all welcome alterations. Still, many of the most glaring issues, such as the Great Xing joining the markets of great powers, the Arts Academy spam, the unprofitability of urban centres, the AI's tendency to declare completely nonsensical wars, the AI's tendency to declare completely nonsensical wars, the AI's inability to assign its troops properly to supposedly easily winnable frontlines and many others were not addressed and remained the way they were previously. All in all, the free patch has a variety of issues but does some good groundwork and is what I would consider the better part of this update. Now, let's move to the DLC content by mentioning the best part about it first. The art. The new map, the new event images and the new French city graphics are all great. They look nice and add to the flair of the game. With that out of the way, let's move to everything else. The three big additions coming with the DLC are historical agitators, French journal entries and coups. Let's evaluate them all one by one. The historical agitators added in the game are a nice idea. Seeing them around acts as an indirect impulse to spin your own stories. How did Lennon get here? What stories can Garibaldi tell? Where will Rosa Luxemburg go after she gets exiled? The problem is that the aforementioned information surfacing issue for agitators hits historical agitators specifically hard. What did Lennon do before you accepted him into your country? No idea. What wars did Garibaldi fight in previously? Who knows. And where did Rosa Luxemburg go after you exiled her? Absolutely no clue. Historical agitators add only as much immersion as they are visible to you. And they are simply too often invisible. The biggest degree of storytelling you can do with them is by making them the leader of your nation in funny ways and that is about it. The French journal entries are our next topic. They suck. They all suck from a variety of angles. They're meant to depict the troubled existence of post-Napoleonic France, the internal struggles between dynasties, the radical shifts between different forms of governance, the anti-Semitism within French society as well as an incredibly powerful and unsupervised military leadership. The conquest of Algeria and the return to European ambitions by claiming that France must extend to her natural borders at the Rhine with all the consequences that entails on the German side of things. The journal entries do none of these things well. The Algerian content all in all is the most inoffensive part of it as this content at least makes you utilize other mechanics. You must conquer Algeria, facilitate French migration and incorporate it. It falls apart once you realise that the AI is, just in general, incapable of incorporating states that are not homelands to one of their primary cultures. Which means the AI cannot possibly complete the journal entries. The biggest mistake any piece of content can make is forgetting that it would be pretty neat if the AI could also actually utilize it. Northern Lords for CK3 for example will impact your gameplay even if you hate playing as a Norse character as the Norse pillage, raid and migrate whether you are playing as one of them or not. France can't actually do this journal entry and you will never see an impact coming from it. The Rheing Crisis journal entry sucks because all it does is give France claims if you have a particularly jingoist government. You can't take back these ambitions later, as France did historically. The ambitions don't actually play a role in your internal politics, which they did historically, and the German states do not collectively get riled up either, which they did historically. The Rheing Crisis was a pivotal moment for German nationalism in real life, but here it does essentially nothing. The Dreyfus Affair is integrated slightly better as it impacts your interest group makeup and even has a historical agitator that can spawn in as a symbol of the antisemitism of the time. Even so, the way its content is designed focuses on you praying that you get the random events often enough to drive the case strength to the level you desire rather than you doing things that actually impact your society. The Paris Commune is a cumbersome journal entry that is effectively just a visual novel as it has very little to do with the state of affairs in Paris or the country. It also comes with a variety of bugs that can impact your enjoyment whether you are the French player or somebody interacting with France. All in all, the Paris Commune, a deeply, deeply societally involved event, is completely divorced from society. The divided monarchist journal entry is the worst of the bunch. Choosing different monarchist streams is as simple as a press of a button and waiting. You can have a coalition of people that hate Napoleon and want a republic but as long as any interest group in government has one leader that is a Bonapartist, Napoleon will come to power all the same. No matter what your choice is here, it's not like anything substantial changes either way. Interest groups don't join parties in different ways if they support different dynasties, and Napoleon's France won't differ whether it is player or AI-controlled from a France under the Legitimists or Oleonists. I was hoping we would even see, for example, AI considerations. Say, a Napoleonic France striving for supremacy on the European content much more than a Legitimist France. But no such thing actually occurs. As it is, this mechanic ought to depict a pivotal time in France, but completely ignores the population, economy, government makeup, external situation and… well, in short, it ignores anything except you having pressed a button, having a single interest group leader in government and having waited for long enough. The journal entries added in this DLC are all in all simply a disappointment. The last topic I want to cover here are coups. Coups in theory are a neat idea. They, much like petitions, allow for government interest groups to proactively do things instead of being entirely at the player's mercy. Their problems primarily stem from the AI lacking awareness and the coup direction sometimes being incredibly odd. I have seen the armed forces of Prussia couping the king and making Otto von Bismarck the Lord Protector of the New Republic one too many times. Coups, similar to the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus Affair, ultimately also just have you click through event choices to push a random progress bar into whatever direction you want, instead of requiring you to do certain things on a societal level. In conclusion, this update is not a good update. It struggles both because of fundamental design choices for new mechanics and journal entries, but also because of a feature implementation that simply is not robust enough to function consistently in an adequate fashion. I cannot recommend the DLC as the journal entries are largely inconsequential and ignore the game's mechanics in favour of clicking buttons or clicking whatever option brings the progress bar of a journal entry further into your favourite direction. All that I can hope now is that this update's missteps become lessons learned. I am One Proud Bavarian and I will see you later, Alligator. this update's missteps become lessons learned. I am One Proud Bavarian and I will see you later, alligator.