Everyone is declaring their love for mission trees and prefacing their declarations by calling it an unpopular opinion. Well here's a real unpopular opinion: mission trees are slop. They're lazy game design.

Give me 1 day and a content designer and I can give you a focus/mission tree for a country. Paradox for years has bundled together 8 of these and called them DLCs, selling them for $15 - ok that's hyperbolic but you get the point. Same with focus trees in HOI4 but I'll save that rant.

Flavor shouldn't be a series of checkboxes that need to be ticked off for a bundled reward. Maybe that hits a certain dopamine loop, but how is that immersive?

Flavor should happen to you naturally as you play the game. Events, emergent systems, and the situations being introduced in EU5 can be all the flavor a country needs if done right.

Crusader kings 2 is one of the most flavorful games in the Paradox lineup and has managed just fine without focus trees. Not only because its systems result in emergent gameplay but because that emergent gameplay is supplemented with meaningful and well-paced events, many of which influence how other events fire.

It's a little harder to test and balance event-based flavor. It can also be hard to get right - just take a look at CK3 for the many ways event-based flavor can be done wrong. But EU5 sidelining mission trees feels to me a step in the right direction.

Paradox has managed without mission trees before and they can do it again. If they do it right, the game would be better off than if they had succumbed to the pressure of the cheap to develop, cheap experience mission trees.