I don't recall which volume it was, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere in Capital it's written that industrial capitalism came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with rhythm and beats". Evidently, no one is more aware of that than the folks at Paradox, who have seen fit to bless us with "Victoria 3: LoFi VicHop—tracks to chill or industrialise to" ahead of tomorrow's release of Victoria 3.
It's a riff on the world-historical Lofi Girl video, and exists mostly as another means of showcasing the (really rather good) 20-song soundtrack for Victoria 3 that you can already find on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. The advantage of this particular video, though, is that the tracks are accompanied by the visual of a studious suffragette occasionally glancing up from a notebook to the forest of smokestacks outside her window.
Someone at Paradox must be really into this style of video, because it was just last month that the company put out "Crusader Kings III: LoFi Queen—tracks to chill or conquer by". That one was slightly less wholesome: it featured a queen in a brazier-lit room scribbling a list of everyone she plans to murder, which was certainly very CK3.
Then again, the girl in the Victoria 3 video could very well be penning missives to a cadre of Nechaevist radicals set on overturning the new social order with blood and gunpowder. It's rare that anyone in a Paradox game just chills out, regardless of era.
We rather liked the ambitious societal simulator of Victoria 3 when we got our hands on it, praising its "breathtakingly ambitious simulation" of the political-economic struggles of the 19th century. As someone who has poured far too much of his life into Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, I'm eager to finally get a chance to guide my people away from feudal parochialism and into the sunlit, soot-blackened uplands of capitalist modernity: a process which, historically, went very smoothly indeed, and caused no problems for anyone.
Victoria 3 releases tomorrow, October 25, on Steam.
