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

While you're here:

1) any details on how fast travel works? Only hotspot-to-hotspot? Or from anywhere to a hotspot? Are hotspots only towns or some markers in the countryside?

2) Vavra talked about saving through "charges" you'd find in the world - shots of brandy iirc - so you can't save every two seconds plus saving makes you less effective in combat so you have to think twice before you save before every fight. Is that still a thing? I personally like the sound of it but I remember people were bitching about it. Muh quick saves and so on.

3) The intro that's currently attached to the beta is final? Do you plan to use this technique, these quazi-moving still images, in other places in the game?

Reveal what you can, if you can't don't worry about it.

 

That is simply not true. You are conveniently excluding large part of of the catalogue, focusing mainly on CoD (and equivalents), sports and boom-y bang-y exclusives. Yes, such people exist (my cousin for example, plays only NHL, FIFA and Uncharted) but they are very unlikely to become engaged by all the gold PC scene offers. The are not even getting engaged by all the GOOD consoles offer. And those who do, from my experience, very likely also own a gaming PC already.

Otherwise we don't really have to argue about this matter since we're on the same boat already.
And those who aren't.... that their loss. We shouldn't be pissed or scornful because there are exclusive FIFA players who are not appreciating our beloved olden Fallouts.

 

From anywhere to any discovered "hotspot". And it's based on the long lost art of simulating the journey. No magical teleport + time shift.
Moreover you will see the calculated path beforehand and then can choose not to fast-travel through that dangerous forest.

Still in place. It's a potion and repeated usage indeed makes you dizzy.
However there will be permanent and carousel autosaves (3 or 5) at numerous important points.

We are reusing parts of it. That's as much as i can say.

 

They say they aim to do it, but do you believe it's possible to pull off NPCs behaving realistically in an open world beyond basic schedules, and not look like dumb androids? Come on, we've already lived through the "Radiant AI" hype once, it was 6-7 years ago.

 

I guess there will be a lot of complaints about this after release.

 

FFS, I was making a video comparing the AI with G3, recorded G3 footage too, it's still rendering in premiere.

I hope you guys don't release any video showing improved AI until I am done uploading my video. I have 8 subs, and I will unleash them upon thee.


On the side note, how "open world" is this game? Will the game let us go wherever and complete side-quests without forcing us to play the main quest? I have not played open world RPG for a while now (that is why excited for ELEX) and dying to get that sweet Gothic experience all over again.

 

Confused, are you laughing because of the way it is worded, or because you don't think the AI your guys developed is not advanced?

 

I like the hype-y wording of it.
Yes, we're developing an AI tech of its own kind. And as it usually happens it comes with many challenges.
It makes some things way smarter or it allows us to do things easier. I wouldn't be surprised if our AI acted dumber in some aspect than some other game's seem (the Gothic 3 example here is a good one, although we're fixing that issue). For instance, unlike others, we are really spreading the information about crime throughout the system. Moreover information about crime and information about perpetrator are separate. And yet we've run into so many super stupid scenarios with the guards and eacting civilians. Beth-radiantAI-esda went with magic-switch "whoop, everybody knows now" and was done with it. And it felt stupid. Predictable but stupid. Compared to that, we are superadvanced. Yet, when unpolished it also often felt stupid.

I'd call it superadvanced if, for example, every NPC could make real sense of it's surroundings (wouldn't require navmesh and other helpers) and could generate their own animations or dialogues. For start, there's not enough computational power to do that for a single NPC, let alone hundreds.

 

Of course it all depends on your definition of "make real sense of," but for reasonable values it wouldn't be all that computationally expensive, certainly not compared to the graphical, sound, and physics magic that we take for granted these days.

Example: Dwarf Fortress. Its NPCs have highly sophisticated emergent behaviours, including dialogue, based entirely on making sense of their surroundings, history, relationships, preferences, moods, and motivations.

(Sometimes this leads to highly amusing bugs. One famous one early on involved fire. If a dwarf caught fire for whatever reason, it would take burn damage and realise that it's hurt. Hurt dwarves know that they have to rest to get better, so the dwarf would find the nearest bed and lie down on it. The bed was most likely wood, so it too would catch fire. Eventually the dwarf would die and its body be consumed, which would leave the bed -- still on fire -- vacant. Whereupon another tired dwarf would use it to rest, and catch fire. While he was resting, the bed would burn down, leaving the tired and burning dwarf without a bed, so he would move to the next one. Which would catch on fire. And so on.)

 

yeah, grid-based games have much simpler definition of "surroundings"

 

How would, say, "if hurt, then find nearest free bed, move to it, and rest" be any more computationally expensive in a full 3D world than a grid-based one? (Assuming here that the "bed" object has been correctly flagged as such. Of course if you're thinking of the AI parsing out a "bed" from any untagged model that a human would recognise as a bed, that's a whole 'nuther ball game, but why would you do that since you can just tag everything you've put into the world?)

Edit: /me re-reads

You did specify "without a navmesh or other helpers." Yeah that would be super-advanced, but from where I'm at, also pointless. The hard problem is having your NPC parse out the objects it can interact with from its surroundings, while the part that the player would actually notice is how it chooses to interact with them, and you can entirely bypass the hard part, so why bother? It'd make as much sense as having NPCs use speech-to-text to parse what other NPCs are saying, when the lines they're speaking are already available as text. I mean, you could, but why would you?

If KCD has AI comparable to Dwarf Fortress's, colour me impressed -- and that's not technologically exotic at all, it just has lots of clauses and lots of data, something that few games bother even attempting.

 

You should steal a feature from My Summer Car, "saving" the game too much should teleport your character to a random location where you wake up after some time has passed.

Probably naked and covered in manure.

 

uhm... getting drunk (save potion is a strong alcohol) too much indeed does that. Or it was a proposed feature. I'm not sure if we implemented it.

 

I've been seeing a lot of fancy AIs being advertised over the last while.

 

-Schedules
-Propagation of player reputation
-Reactions to player activity - stealing, unsheathing weapon, violence
-Reactions to player gear/clothing - I suppose this doesn't apply to every nameless villager though?

Am I missing anything?

 

Reactions to player's decisions in narrative

 

Getting drunk if you save too much

 

I hope they react too if you walk around naked.

 

You cannot strip yourself completely naked and our basic clothing is nothing to bark about. However it does affect greetings and perceived reputation when you talk to them.
Being "naked" is not a big deal in medieval society, after all. Being in shiny armor or expensive Adidas jacket though? Yeah, they do react to that, even outside dialogs. Except for your equals of course.

 

Please make it an easter egg.

Also curious....did you guys find it hard to balance the economy? I don't think I can recall an RPG that got the economy right and I've been playing RPGs since the early 1990s. Usually from mid-game on you're so rich you could buy all the land on the world map with half your gold.

 

That and squatting.

 

If you can answer these 3 questions I'd appreciate it much and if you can't I'll understand.

1. Some time ago (also during Kickstarter - seems like eternity ago now) there was talk, by Vavra among others, that your original scope for the game was so big that it simply couldn't be fited into single game and thus you split the game into 3 acts. This was supposed to be act 1. Allegedly you could play any of the acts separately or if you own all 3 of them then combined they would make one huge game and would be interconnected. Also every act would be in different location and cover different part of Hussite wars, introduce new features etc. Best comparison would be new Total war: Warhammer titles which more or less function in exact same manner. What happend with that format, were there any changes to it? Will there be dlcs for Kingdom Come and what size we could expect? I know it's still too early to talk about these things and that it depends on customers' reaction aka how well it sells but what insight you could give us for now...

2. How you personally and how Vavra sees the importance of rpg mechanics in your games? Is your ultimate goal to move to General gaming subforum and join Bethesda (soon), Rockstar, Ubisoft and like when it comes to their games (though Ubishit strangely enough wants to label their games now as 'rpgs' and migrate here, NO! back to General gaming) or are you more comfortable providing us with amount of stats and rpg mechanics present in I dunno perhaps Oblivion or Morrowind but surely better used and displayed then in Oblivion. Is your team's goal to eventually join the numberless, geometric cult Tim Cain seems to be founding or you're happy with some compromise and keeping numbers? I think that there is enough space and room for mainstream (2-7 million units) 1st person or/and eventually 3ed person rpgs with more rpg mechanics than Skyrim and less then I dunno Daggerfall in the market and you could fill it.

3. Would you ever like to pursue in the future Morrowind or Daggerfall kind of rpg game? What I mean by it is rpgs in new and weird settings. Or 1st/3ed person Arcanum like. Or rpg set in some other historical era with or without any fantastical twist to it (Wild West or Weird Wild West etc.)? I know this is even more uncertain then dlc plans for Kingdom Come let alone anything else but at least could you tell us what you personally (no obligations, just your opinion) would like to make in the future? What kind of game setting and mechanics (this is rpg site, how much rpg elements would it have) would you prefer or perhaps Vavra likes to talk about in hallways, meetings or in dreams perhaps?

To summarize it all, would you call yourself RPG company like Bethesda nowadays calls itself (Todd, nobody believes it, not even casuals, only Pete Hines and that's cause he has to convince himself into lie before lying other like any other good liar PR) or RPG company like Troika or Obsidian calls itself or something in between. If you understand me. Sorry for the wall of text. I like to build walls, text ones is only one kind of them. So, not really sorry then.

 

So I'm not missing anything too significant. The reaction to clothing/gear is a great addition, hopefully it will have enough depth and will be used in quests often enough. It's not something that hasn't been done in other RPGs but it's more of an exception.

This reminded me about the demo with the infiltration of the Kuman camp. Which takes me to the stealth mechanics and AI. Why are you (Warhorse) not making more use of this for marketing? Your stealth mechanics use hearing, the player makes a varying amount of noise depending on surface (I think?) and armor equipped? These two alone make your stealth mechanics better than those of that Dishonored misunderstanding. Based on the Kuman camp demo, I'm much more excited about these parts of the gameplay.

 

Yes, it's extremely hard but I can't say where we are for 2 reasons. (a) I honestly don't know because my focus is elsewhere and (b) game economy is being balanced until the last minute so it's a subject to change. And since the complexity is almost impossible to model you usually have to use more random approaches which in turn eliminate any stronger sensation of convergence with any "ideal".
The other big trouble is with open-world games which feature any kind of perpetual respawn because it means there's a constant inflow of new valuables, be it XPs (for kills) or items to sell. These games allow for farming to completely fuck up any balance in the economy. So what counts as a game with well balanced economy in such cases? Usually the player rarely has to spend any money except when there's a useful but costly money sink.

I can recall 2 games with sorta well tuned economy
Gothic 2
Fallout: New Vegas
Gothic 2 held well enough for about 70% of the playtime even when you tried to minmax the game. Gothic 2 was so well balanced for the very fact it had no respawn. All the amount of money and XP in the world was finite and they balanced the economy around that fact. It's also one o the rare cases of games where I've ever bought a weapon from a vendor.
FNV isn't nearly as good but it worked well if you didn't minmax because it had a big money sink in the form of repairing (the rarer the weapon the more you had to use the expensive NPC services). I remember struggling with resources even considerably late in the game. Balance of the survival mode was a joke though. And RPG balance was all over the place.