KickStarter Kingdom Come: Deliverance Pre-Release Thread [RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Paul_cz]

With my childhood idol @ChrisAvellone



Hahaha

 

[34scell]

Karlovačko is awful

 

[cvv]

Wtf is Avellone doing in Croatia. Or Dan for that matter?

 

[Paul_cz]

Wtf is Avellone doing in Croatia. Or Dan for that matter?

Reboot digital

may this trio stay in business without getting corrupted for as long as possible

 

[cvv]

I don't suppose there's a video of that event?

Also how the fuck did Vavra barge in on a RPG veteran crowd like that? :D He's never done an RPG.

 

[Alienman]

Childhood idol? How old is Avellone? They look to be the same age?

 

[duanth123]

Spoiler

With my childhood idol @ChrisAvellone



Hahaha

Avellone loves to drink.

Childhood idol? How old is Avellone? They look to be the same age?

He's 40 and Avellone is 44, so...

 

[Paul_cz]

Childhood idol? How old is Avellone? They look to be the same age?

It's meant half tongue in cheek because they are similar age, but indeed Vavra's favourite games are Fallout 1/2/NV and Avellone was involved with two of those.

I don't suppose there's a video of that event?

Also how the fuck did Vavra barge in on a RPG veteran crowd like that? :D He's never done an RPG.

This seems to be their channel, no videos yet and no idea if there will be
https://www.youtube.com/user/rebootmag/videos

 

[Infinitron]

Writeup of Dan's talk: http://wordcowboy.com/reboot-develop-day-1-mafia-writer/

Dan (currently at the helm of Warhorse Studios) talked about the tool that they’d built to manage the insane amount of situational writing in their upcoming “real world” historic RPG. After expressing some annoyance with the show Vikings for sacrificing historical accuracy “just to be cooler” he’d mentioned that one of the top issues in RPGs for him was that the quests all more or less boiled down to what he described as the “Chicken & Cock” problem, which he described as follows (and I paraphrase):

Chicken needs a key to Open Door -> Chicken is told that the Cock has the key -> Chicken goes to the Cock for the key, the Cock tells it that it needs to bring the Cock some grain in exchange, and that the Cow has the grain -> Chicken goes to the Cow, Cow sends it to the Dog -> ad infinitum.

In Kingdom Come: Deliverance (link goes to the beta trailer), they decided against this approach in favor of non-linear quests. Dan used the example of a subquest in their game where the player character is asked by an NPC to poison a rival farmer’s cow. Should the NPC1 poison the cow, the NPC2 who owned the cow, if he doesn’t know it was you who did it might hire you to kill NPC1, or maybe you can get NPC1 and NPC2 to make up, or find a completely different solution.

Another key note about their approach to writing were SOULS and ROLES, where a ROLE (eg., an NPC saying good morning) would be connected to the SOUL (ie., a character) who would say it in a way unique to them, and them only, and would depend on other factors such as weather, if everyone in the village is dead (for example), the surroundings, relation to the player character and other NPCs, and so forth.

Another interesting feature that they’re adding into the quests for realism is the concept of time: if you were asked to meet an NPC tomorrow noon, but are late, the NPC might have been killed off, resulting in a twist in the quest arc; if you are early, perhaps you’ll have time to prepare for the meeting better, and so forth.

They are also adding a feature where, should you kill off a number of quest-giver NPCs, the cities and villages would later become populated with NPCs that have the same quests, but would look differently (as long as you haven’t started their quests). This is to avoid breaking the game should you decide to just murder everyone in your path.

Too keep this crazily-branching story under control, Dan said that the team had written a custom tool they’d called Skald (a Scandinavian word for “bard”). It took them a couple of years to polish the tool to the point where they were happy with it — Dan showed it to the audience, and boy, does it look good. It keeps track of story branches, quests, characters, translations, and everything else you might want to see in a video game writing tool. Interestingly enough, the dialogs aren’t made in form of dialog trees but, rather, of “topics” due to the extremely dynamic structure of the game’s narrative. It keeps track of NPCs shouts, social standing, barks, reactions, occupations, etc, etc, etc.

According to Dan, so far they have over 500,000 words in the script, out of which 300,000 words is pure dialog.

I, for one, am excited to greeting our new medieval RPG overlords when the game is finally done. “Game development is anarchy,” Mr. Vávra had said, and that was a notion that quite a few other speakers had seconded later during their talks. But I think that it’s the kind of anarchy that shapes rocks into castles if enough anarchists are enthusiastic enough.

 

[Prime Junta]

Niiiice. For a while now I've been worried that this is just a pretty HEMA simulator, but that sounds very promising indeed. Especially the bit about Skald.

 

[Starwars]

That does sound great. The beta still feels mostlly like a real pretty hitchiking simulator so it'll certainly be nice if they can manage to pack all that stuff in (and have it actually work) for the final release.

 

[Abhay]

Forget POE, Wasteland, DOS or any other RPG released in the past year, this is the RPG one should look forward to. I'm desperately waiting to grab the copy and start playing the game as early as possible.
Mafia still stands out as an outstanding game and one of my absolute favorites and without a shadow of doubt Dan Vavra will again pull of successfully fantastic gameplay experience with Kingdom.
The concept of Skald sounds really interesting. If I'm not wrong then Morrowind featured something similar by having a list of topics corresponding to various NPC dialogues, backstory and different quests.
I've complete faith in Dan Vavra.

 

[Perkel]

Forget POE, Wasteland, DOS or any other RPG released in the past year, this is the RPG one should look forward to.

provided it will actually work like intended. There are like bilion systems in this game and every one of them them can fail massively. Game is soon to release and they are still testing and implementing new systems which screams that they may as well implode when it will release.

Love Vavra but i think they bite more than they can chew. And it is their first actual RPG.

 

[Abhay]

That's exactly why they created "Skald" to tackle the issues connected with such a complex system. Some more details would help further to understand it more clearly. The game isn't confirmed to release any time soon. Maybe another beta or two but it'll still take more time to get the final version ready with everything in place and working as intended.
Also, I don't think they are adding anything new they didn't plan all this while. Its obvious they are going to keep testing and bring changes/improvements, which is fine.
I don't think there's anything to worry about the game. Its in the hands of Dan Vavra known to have a different style of working than many other developers. He focuses a lot on getting the game polished to near perfection, and I'm sure the final game will turn out really great even if certain things were excluded due to time or development constraints.
There's also 2nd part which the team will only start working depending on the response to the 1st part.
Hoping for the best!!

 

[Perkel]

I don't think there's anything to worry about the game. Its in the hands of Dan Vavra known to have a different style of working than many other developers.

I like Vavra for his articles but you are nuts. You don't introduce completely new systems before the release. Last half year should be ideally about fiddling with those systems to reach polished state.

Them creating skald only proves that they have systems they thought will be cool to have but now they need to do something with them that will have arms and legs.

It will be lucky if it won't blow itself up when people will start to play it and record bugs on youtube.

This is their first bigger project (as a studio) and this is their first RPG (for Vavra too). There are many things that may blow up and frankly speaking beside some small parts of the game we still don't see most of stuff.

 

[Jrpgfan]

That's p. cool. I had my doubts but looks like these guys know a thing or two about cRPGs after all.

Let's hope they can pull it off and end up making a decent game atleast.

 

[Abhay]

I like Vavra for his articles but you are nuts. You don't introduce completely new systems before the release. Last half year should be ideally about fiddling with those systems to reach polished state.

Please read the blog again. Dan didn't say they are creating nor introducing Skald ..NOW!

Dan simply shared many interesting features to explain their "approach" with this game, doesn't mean they have just started working on introducing them from scratch.

Too keep this crazily-branching story under control, Dan said that the team HAD written a custom tool they’d called Skald (a Scandinavian word for “bard”). It took them a COUPLE OF YEARS to polish the tool to the point where they were happy with it — Dan showed it to the audience

That's all there's to it. Every feature that he explains using different examples were under testing already, so I don't understand where did you get the impression that they will "introduce completely new systems before the release" from reading the blog???
You should wait for them to show everything mentioned to the backers via next beta before jumping to any conclusion.
It really doesn't matter whether its their first RPG or not, what really should is the years of experience and talent of the team working on it.
Dan is clearly a very intelligent individual with no nonsense, no compromise approach and wouldn't share not reveal anything with the audience if he wasn't working on the features all this while. The real test will be getting those features working as intended which they have been already testing in house and improving it further.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I wish Warhorse the best of luck, and am a big fanboy of KCD, but even so, I can only say objectively, we will have to wait until it comes and see. We have no idea right now how it will turn out, and there are a lot of promises made of very cool stuff, and it's a genre that's littered with overly ambitious games that came out with very mixed results.

With that said, KCD has most of my hopes for the future of the sandbox subgenre, as Bethesda is going to Bethesda, and The Witcher people seem to nail writing and absolutely nothing else.

 

[valcik]

That's exactly why they created "Skald" to tackle the issues connected with such a complex system. Some more details would help further to understand it more clearly.

He talks it in more detail here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emH7N-g33qQ&t=32m55s

 

[abnaxus]

:mrpresident:

 

[Jrpgfan]

Time did some serious damage to him, dang.

 

[Havoc]

It's called the slavic look.

 

[Bubbles]

You don't introduce completely new systems before the release. Last half year should be ideally about fiddling with those systems to reach polished state.

Well, apparently they're not in the last half year just yet:

Originally scheduled to release in Q4 2015, the game was first pushed to Summer 2016 on April 2, 2015. The beta version was released for backers on March 3, 2016, but at the same time Warhorse Studios confirmed to Polygon that the game would be delayed on PC in order to release it alongside PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, though they still confided to release within the year.

However, we’ve recently talked with a Warhorse spokesperson and got confirmation that Kingdom Come: Deliverance won’t be launched this year. An official announcement regarding the definitive release date can be expected between E3 and Gamescom, given that a Community Manager said on April 17 that it won’t be much longer until there’s an official release date.

http://wccftech.com/realistic-medieval-rpg-kingdom-deliverance-postponed-2017/#ixzz49UqZJ7Cn

 

[Alienman]

Didn't know it was coming out for console... thought the scope of the game was way too big for that.

 

[Starwars]

Not really surprising but a bit disappointing that it won't be this year at all. Hopefully it'll mean that the game won't be a complete broken mess though.

Also, if they would update the fucking beta sometime, that'd be great. It's been a while now.