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

[Starwars]

So how is the beta? Is it fun?

The beta is more like "beta demo", completely unfinished and hasn't been updated in a year. I only used it as a hiking sim, for any gameplay and judgement I am waiting for final version.

So I assume it is not the same beta as seen in this?

Question my seems stupid, but during this stream they many times say that they are playing beta and mentioning its features, like several quests and one battle, so it sounds like this is publicly available beta.

No, it's not the same. The beta available to backers is not the area shown at Gamescom and has not been updated for a long time. So it's definitely not ann accurate view of "where the game is at right now" so to speak.

 

[vortex]

What I missed in W3 and DA:I is good stealth system. I hope this will deliver.

 

[anus_pounder]

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/MSbxc0F.jpg
Which one of you is this?

 

[anvi]

Ugh I was trying to eat my breakfast.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Lmfao

 

[cvv]

It has promise but I think it's too rough to really gauge if the game is going to be good or not.

This. Some features are great, some are grating.

I've been saying for a year they shouldn't have released features that look obviously unfinished. The graphics, forests, music are great, some of the minigames are great. But when they add NPCs that are obvious placeholders, with terrible amateurish voiceovers, a lot of people would go WTF? Ditto the combat system, half-way finished and very crude.

First impressions are super important and they undermined them so much with all the placeholders and rough edges. Why not just release what's finihshed or looks great even unfinished, saying it's just a tech demo? Instead of talking up "beta" and still offering not much more than a tech demo.

 

[Great Deceiver]

New kickstarter update on the state of the game.

Vavra is wearing a Taake t-shirt. What a bro.

 

[Paul_cz]

It has promise but I think it's too rough to really gauge if the game is going to be good or not.

This. Some features are great, some are grating.

I've been saying for a year they shouldn't have released features that look obviously unfinished. The graphics, forests, music are great, some of the minigames are great. But when they add NPCs that are obvious placeholders, with terrible amateurish voiceovers, a lot of people would go WTF? Ditto the combat system, half-way finished and very crude.

First impressions are super important and they undermined them so much with all the placeholders and rough edges. Why not just release what's finihshed or looks great even unfinished, saying it's just a tech demo? Instead of talking up "beta" and still offering not much more than a tech demo.

The only saving grace here is that the game is not available on steam early access and the only way to get it was through their own side. But even then tons of youtube videos are released of course showing the in progress state, with tons of morons then bitching in comments that the game looks shit.
Then again, morons on youtube is inevitable anyway.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

It'll either be good, or not. No amount of anything before release will change the outcome.

 

[Alienman]

I bought the boxed version, I hope to god it will be good!

 

[anvi]

It'll either be good, or not.

Thanks Nostradumbass.

 

[abnaxus]

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-kingdom-come-deliverance-handles-choice-differently-from-other-rpgs/

How Kingdom Come: Deliverance handles choice differently from other RPGs
And why your insignificance to its wider world is a good thing.

Choice is one of the most coveted yet elusive aspects of modern game design—no matter how contrived its inclusion. Player agency—or, at the very least, the illusion of player agency—is often reduced to clearly framed, story-defining moments where the player's morals are frequently called into question. Warhorse Studios, developer of first-person historical RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, is approaching this design challenge from a different angle.

It works under the premise that within a 16 km² patch of sparsely populated 15th century Central European villages, countrysides and feudal keeps, your actions will inevitably have greater knock-on effects than they would in two cities on opposite sides of your typical open-world RPG continent. The compact map includes around 80 quests in total. By sacrificing the RPG sprawl focuses on offering a world where no action—whether it’s a casual haggle with a trader, a scrap with a pub patron, or sparing the lives of the men responsible for your father’s death—is without consequence.

In a hands-off preview, I was guided through the opening quest watching protagonist Henry (a pudding-faced derivative of Game of Thrones’ Ramsay Bolton) running errands for his blacksmith father. This involved picking up coal, grabbing him beers, and retrieving debts from the local tough Kunesh, among other things. At first these duties appear to be simple fetch quests, but rather than teaching you how to fight (not a requisite skill for a blacksmith’s boy at this point), they serve to outline the game’s systems.

Dilly-dally while delivering dad his cold beer, for example, and it’ll be tepid by the time he gets it—making him a little less fond of you in turn (adhering to the medieval Bohemian precept ‘three warm beers and you’re out in the pig pen for the night’). It’s a trivial task, but it illustrates the so-called ‘rotting’ mechanics in Kingdom Come: beer gets warm, food goes off, and quest leads disappear (or get murdered, as the case often may be). Events in the persistent world carrying on irrespective of your presence. Crucially, you need to adapt to this ongoing world before you can begin influencing it.

The idea that the world doesn’t revolve around you is surprisingly rare in RPGs, where most quests are quite literally waiting for you to undertake them. In this respect, Kingdom Come veers more towards Warren Spector’s One City Block game design philosophy, which eschews scope for a densely-packed world of emergent, consequential interactions. In Kingdom Come you might beat up a pub patron, only for him to go elsewhere for his next evening tipple; or you may commit murder after which the local sheriff will investigate the body, leaving his office free to break into and so on.

One instance of branching narrative that stands to mind involved collecting the aforementioned debt from Kunesh. There’s a good chance he’ll beat you up should you choose to approach him directly and while you could flat-out murder him when no one’s looking, this will lock you off from a specific scenario with him later in the game.

Alternatively, you may bump into a trio of pranksters who plan to pelt a disgruntled local's house with dung. Tag along and you'll wind up siding with them in a brawl with law enforcement—payment for which will see them teaching you how to pick locks. From there you're free to case Kunesh's house, and rob the whole place blind if you so choose—a rite of passage for any discerning RPG player. Most interestingly, this event plays out regardless of whether you join in or not, meaning you have a limited window of opportunity within which to engage.

It's a bold vision and all these branching opportunities and tie-ins to later plot events stem from the seemingly trivial opening quest. It’s impressive stuff, though maintaining such interconnectedness throughout the remaining 79 quests is still at this stage ambitious. It’s nothing new for RPGs to talk about how your choices matter, but here the flexible quest structure has the potential to deliver on those promises. Kingdom Come’s success will largely depend on how successfully this system is executed.

Imbuing your decision-making with gravitas is the unique save system, whereby Henry has a swig of Slivovica (a strong plum brandy that I can confirm mixes well with a cup of tea) each time you save manually. Overdo it, and Henry’s stats will take a hit as the 70% abv fluid atrophies his body and senses. A bit heavy-handed, maybe, but a signal of intent nonetheless that Warhorse wants you to think twice before making the big decisions rather than blithely approaching each one in a trial-and-error manner.

Kingdom Come is a game with big ambitions, then, though it’s worth mentioning that some of its constituent parts still seem a little feudal. It looks as much a work-in-progress in the latest preview as it did when I last played it back in March (albeit now with added polearms). Little has changed in the way of animations and writing, which both remain rudimentary (though the latter isn’t helped by the placeholder voice-acting), and the much-touted combat system is yet to overcome that inherent first-person perspective problem of feeling synthetic and hitboxy.

That, along with the uncanny way combatants moonwalk across the ground as they strafe around you, gives the game moments of looking dated and a bit too Oblivion-esque for this day and age (an impression bolstered by the decidedly Obliviony UI). With no release date set, there’s plenty of time to fix the niggles. That said, a few aesthetic similarities to Bethesda's enduring RPGs shouldn’t overshadow this one's many differences. Much like its opening quest, Kingdom Come may seem familiar, but its ambitious underlying systems reveal it’s anything but.

 

[HoboForEternity]

 

[cvv]

This game is chock full of shit that has never been attempted - realistic melee, advanced NPC AI, living world, realtime non-linear quests, 100% fantasy-free...I just don't see how it's not gonna completely flop

But if it doesn't it's gonna be an instant legend.

 

[Quillon]

I tried the alpha or beta or whatever it was back in January or so. One thing that bugged me the most was the convo system; no animations, no camera work, unresponsive and placeholder VO and clothing clipping didn't help neither. Now almost a year later this preview says the same things... faith in Warhorse decreased 25%. But the dudes are industry vets, they just might know what they are doing/when do implement what

Strangely combat seemed feasible. A bit more refinement and it might just work.

 

[anvi]

 

[Ezeekiel]

Vavra dumped all his points in charisma and none in programming if the beta/alpha thing is any indication. I wish him only success anyhow.
Somehow. Please.

 

[Merlkir]

Vávra is not a programmer though. Since Mafia he's been the writer, designer and director, but not a programmer I believe.
A lot of people making impressions from the beta have little experience with game development and make the wrong conclusions, so I would really wait for the final release.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's an Alpha/beta. Of course there are few or even no animations in conversations, let alone voice acting (because, you know, at this stage of development actual text can still change). Of course there are still some issues and not everything is smooth yet.

First you implement the systems, then you polish that shit.

There's a reason why he's posting a pic of his face getting tracked now, and not 5 months ago. That's the stuff you do when the basics are implemented.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Vávra is not a programmer though. Since Mafia he's been the writer, designer and director, but not a programmer I believe.
A lot of people making impressions from the beta have little experience with game development and make the wrong conclusions, so I would really wait for the final release.

Good point on Vavra. If it sucks, it won't be his fault if the game is horrible and I can still think of him as a bro. A bro stabbed in the back by useless programmers. No seriously though, I hope it'll be great.

The beta I played was ancient but... Them putting that up for folks to play in that state was a little strange. First impressions and all, then add all the AAA unpleasantness over the last decade or so...
Then again, the combat seems to have changed a bunch over time and now we even got the polearms Vavra once said couldn't be put in after all... Hope springs eternal.

Not too many games I'm really looking forward to and this is definitely one of them.

 

[Ezeekiel]

It's an Alpha/beta. Of course there are few or even no animations in conversations, let alone voice acting (because, you know, at this stage of development actual text can still change). Of course there are still some issues and not everything is smooth yet.

One man's alpha is Ubisoft's final release...

 

[Merlkir]

The opening of alpha and beta versions is made necessary by the kickstarter model. People just expect it and they see it as a way of monitoring the development progress.
It also gives you some feedback which has potential to be very valuable, if you're careful.

 

[Paul_cz]

Vávra studied art school and started at Illusion as graphic artist. Only became writer and director of Mafia because he had the idea and nobody had a better one at the time. I doubt he knows how to code Hello World.
But Warhorse do have some good programmers, I think their lead worked on engines of Mafia 1 and 2, then worked on Forza Horizon games before coming back to Prague.

 

[Azrael the cat]

German media reported some detail on the quick save functionality - at first it reads like a joke. To use quick save, you have to drink a shot of Slivowitz ("Savowitz"), which gives you a slight stat boost. But if you quick save too often ("before every dialogue or before every lock"), you get reduced stats from constantly drinking. You can also become an alcoholic and have to cure this by sleeping or potions.

Wow, they really are going hard on the Polish authenticity, aren't they. I don't get the reduced stats thing, though. Surely, if it's set in Poland, it should be a steady continuum of 'absolutely no fucking effect', followed by 'passed out drunk for a week'. I'm not saying that the Polish have any greater or lesser alcohol tolerance than the rest of us. They seem to end up in the same place at the end of it all. They just seem to skip all the intermediary steps of 'tipsy, then happy-talkative, then happy-dancing, then sort-of-lecherous, then downbeat, then crying on your friend's shoulder' in the middle.