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Is Dan Vavra popamole?

Pentium

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If he happens to like games like Oblivion/Skyrim on the side, so what? It doesn't seem to influence his own design decisions.
I'm not sure about his tastes but perhaps you remember his legendary essay "100 resons why I hate Skyrim". Of course the most notable reason being the absence of crappers, hence those beautifully detailed castle privies and latrines in KCD. So perhaps games like Skyrim in fact did influence his design decisions - for the better?

Don't call your action game an RPG because "b-but you play a role!", and you won't be called popamole.
Omg I hear people using that definition to date, like...Super Mario Bros is an RPG - you play the role of a plumber!
 

RobotSquirrel

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Best melee combat since DMoM&M.
I don't know about that. What KCD taught me was that using a Lock on system in a first person game is a really terrible idea. Especially when it takes camera controls away from the player.
Mount and Blade's systems where the head is independent of the body tends to work better in my eyes even though it is less complex. Controlling your attacks with positioning and movement I feel is a lot better.

DMoM&M however is the example to go by for First Person medieval melee because its more about the physics and movement.
 
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normie

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he was maxing the industry insider solidarity event and popping it when the deluge of criticism directed towards Cybershit was most intense, that's just smart play
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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A lot of people have trouble drawing a line between what is being consumed and what is being produced.

The former doesn't matter if the latter is good and contributes something to the medium. Sometimes dumpster diving in the worst games of all time or playing unrelated stuff can give interesting ideas on how to improve the game you're working on.

If the latter is terrible, even the most patrician taste in gaming won't mean shit -- it only shows that you're unable to learn from the best or look at the worst stuff and understand why they failed to reach their goals.
 

Lyric Suite

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he was maxing the industry insider solidarity event and popping it when the deluge of criticism directed towards Cybershit was most intense, that's just smart play

Very rare to see a developer shit on another game. That he is critical of a few is unusual.
 

DJOGamer PT

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He is convinced the future of RPGs lies in an immersive simulationist and story driven approach

The problem here is the fact his story driven approach is as cookie-cutter as they come
Instead of progressing the story mostly through gameplay like Deus Ex or more recently Pathologic 2 did, for him story is mostly told and decided through dialogue trees and cutscenes
Which is the most lazy and boring way possible for storytelling to flow through a non-linear game
So much ambition in gameplay and worldbuilding, but get to the part he supposedly cares the most and there's no effort at all
And the fact he thinks CP2077 is also a great example of storytelling in videogames, pretty much confirms he doesn't see anything wrong with this approach...
 

Lyric Suite

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It's because he thinks video games should be like movies when it comes to stories. He wants to make the Godfather of games.

I also prefer the Deus Ex approach (and for some bizzarre reason i thought Cyberpunk was going to be that. Don't ask where i got this strange delusion), but i honestly don't have a problem with games like that existing, as long as they are good for what they are, and between Mafia and Kingcome Come one can say Vavra more or less succeded in that doing what he set out himself to do.

I think this whole controversy is immaterial in the sense Codexers are looking at it from the perspective of the "best approach" instead of just conceding that there's room for more than one way of doing things and what matters in the end is if the result is good according to what it is supposed to be.

I will say though his heavy cinematic approach is probably what hurt Kingdom Come's chances with the Oblivion/Skyrim crowd. The Bethesda formula is ironically closer to the Deus Ex way of doing things except it is more fluff than actual substance, a distinction however normie gamers aren't capable of understanding. Most of them only see the "large as an ocean" part, they can't see that this ocean is as deep as a puddle. Vavra however is in another world altoghether. There's not a lot of LARPing going on in Kingcome Come. You are essentially stuck with Henri and i can already image normie Skyrim fags thought that meant the game was as "complex" as Bethesda's offerings. I remember some Bethesda retards trying to argue Fallout 3 was better than New Vegas because of that very reason lmao.
 

normie

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DJOGamer PT

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I think this whole controversy is immaterial in the sense Codexers are looking at it from the perspective of the "best approach" instead of just conceding that there's room for more than one way of doing things and what matters in the end is if the result is good according to what it is supposed to be.

Yes
But the problem is this

1) while people like to compare games to movies since they're both visual mediums, the truth is games are actually closer to books in terms of plot density and story length, since even linear action games take far longer to complete than any movie, game writers aren't under the same constraints movie writers are

2) this one being the most important, is the fact that games due to their intrinsic qualities (i.e. interactivity and reactivity), games are a unique medium for storytelling, wildly different than any other medium and trying to structure it like the others can only come at the rejection of those qualities


Which is the irony here
Devs that try to model games to be more like movies/books, do it under the pretense that they trying to "legitimize" games as an artform
But in fact they are rejecting the very qualities that make games special to begin with, and could make their work possessing of actual artistic merit
And the problem here is that the industry and audiences at large have accepted this lie, and that's why year after year we have to gobble up shit like TLoU2 and Disco Elysium, but worls like Pathologic 2 are left in the dirt


If Vavra wants to make cinematic games, so be it
Like you said very well what matters is whetever or not the devs achieved their vision and the quality of said experience
And in fact as far as these cinematic experiences go KCD is actually good
So congratulations to the old chap and the team at Warhorse

But please, if you won't acknowledge that there is a better way to do things at least don't try to sell this as the "correct" and "artistic" method to non-linear storytelling in games
Which is what I think grated people here to his remarks
 
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Paul_cz

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KCD almost perfectly blends 3D cinematic RPG with systems driven RPG. Better than any game I have seen yet.
 

RobotSquirrel

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1) while people like to compare games to movies since they're both visual mediums, the truth is games are actually closer to books in terms of plot density and story length, since even linear action games take far longer to complete than any movie, game writers aren't under the same constraints movie writers are

Its a little more complex than that even. Games tend to take more from choose your own adventure style books especially with regards to deadend game overs and non-linearity. But I think games are capable of narrative systems that extend well beyond this even its just that the industry gave up trying. Deus Ex sort of established the idea with how it handled Paul Denton for example but it never took it anywhere beyond a cosmetic change versus the stay at UNATCO story that was eventually cut gave me the impression they were really going to try for it and build a system that was far more reactive. You can see with Invisible War they did try to do shifting narratives however your choices didn't matter at all which was a blatant copout but I did appreciate the inter connectivity of who you worked for and how that impacted the way the story was told even if it ended up being just cosmetic.

Compare this to KCD it makes no difference how you play it the story is gonna play out the same way a lot of its choice is made mostly out of the gameplay side of things the narrative doesn't really acknowledge it and its passed off as your dad is cool so no one cares. I was surprised by Theresa's possible branching consequences based on if Henry was a coward or if he tried to help her but again it doesn't have that big an impact. That's generally how I felt most of KCD went that not a lot of what I was doing was having any dent what so ever on the world or the people. The term themepark is thrown around a lot and it sort of felt like that a bit where I didn't feel so much that I was participating as it was more everyone was waiting for me to do something because my dad's cool. I don't have an issue with KCD I think its great for what it is and I go back to it often but its certainly is a very safe game as far as pushing boundaries are concerned. If anything be thankful the game was made and came out as good as it did because it could've gone a lot worse.

My design philosophy is treat your characters less as vehicles for dialogue and narrative where most people just use them to offload information to the player instead treat your characters as systems in their own right using their interactions as a means of expanding that character further.
You can tell if a game is done poorly by the fact that a character loses interactivity once their main dialogue is spent. This would be where I'd offer a solution but I'm still working on one and probably won't be done anytime soon. The reason is because I want to try and fix Deus Ex's repeating dialogue issue where characters just repeat the same lines over and over.
 

Wunderbar

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I wouldn't say that KCD blends cinematic approach with systems-driven RPG all that well.

The main campaign is painfully linear until you reach the Neuhof stables part (which is like 20 hrs in), and until then the gameplay part feels like a hindrance - you can easily fail the main mission if you go away to explore (not as bad as in recent rockstar game, but still quite bad) and you can't really fight until you go through mandatory training with Bernard. Those early missions themselves are strictly linear and interruption usually leads to "quest failed" or "game over" screens.

Not a single main character reacts to Henry being a criminal. You can do all kind of heinous shit while in a free roam mode, but the "main story Henry" remains a nice dude.

No one helps Henry if he's wounded - like, you end your mission with 10% HP, cutscene starts where your Henry acts all nonchalantly, talks to NPCs about a finished quest, travels through world on a horseback, participates in a war room post-mission discussion with Hanush, etc, but as soon as a cutscene ends you're back to a blood-smeared screen and 10% healthbar.

My Henry looked very out of place in every cutscene, because he was the only one with a bruised face and shit-stained tattered clothing. Player's character looking like a clown during cutscenes is a normal thing in RPGs, but in KCD it looks especially jarring because of its cinematic approach and a focus on realism.
 

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