KickStarter Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Dan Vavra's medieval chad simulator

[jungl]

I have to go with evan for best protagonist of the year that boi pussy game is legendary, no homo. Everything else is too cliche.

 

[Quillon]

Regular bastard lol, like its common to be a bastard of some lord, how do you relate to this? Henry is pretty much TEH CHOSEN ONE who's infiltrating armies, monasteries, leading people in battle, curing plagues, solving issues no one else can solve, doing suicide missions etc but people can't see past his dull as fuckness to realize it. Wow, an RPG protag that's so boring which is never done before! SO COOL!

At least if he were a knight/someone important from the get go most of the things he does in the game could have been believable tho that's not the biggest issue; his character being boring, bland, dull etc is.

 

[mildTea]

IF normal does mean bland, then yes. Somehow I suspect there is a vast realm of opportunities for character development between being bland and being the chosen one. Henry is utterly boring. Do I want to be boring? no. Does it mean I have to be the chosen one? nope, no. Simple as that.

He is actually much more authentic and original than most videogame protagonists. Specially rpg protagonists. Unless off course you prefer the "chosen one"/"mary sue"/"overpowered chad" archetypes.

Henry is just a regular bastard on a mission and quite relatable. Last time I have seem a videogame protagonist getting his ass constantly kicked and developing as a character was... heck, I don't even know. You may argue that his progression from son of a blacksmith to competent soldier/adventurer is not very believable, but so is progression in any rpg I guess.

The last time I saw that was Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. Guess who made that.

 

[Yosharian]

I came back to the game after a long break nd I forgot how to play it =(

 

[Haba]

I came back to the game after a long break nd I forgot how to play it =(

You press a button and something awesome happens?

 

[mildTea]

1. The combat is not fun - It has a lot of detail under the hood but in terms of player input and what you actually have to do, it's very similar to morrowind combat, completely determined by stats and not skill. The only thing that involves player input and participation is the timed parrying, but the higher your stats go, the larger the parry window gets, so basically just hit Q whenever you see the enemy start to attack, get a successful parry. Everything else is purely stat driven. They have directional parrying but it doesnt affect anything, they have directional attacks, but they don't change anything beyond the animation, only the stats determine whether the attack is successful or not. Same for feints, no effect. Combos are pointless since they cannot be executed (always get interrupted). So essentially Morrowind combat wrapped in a lot of bullshit you never use.

I think the general consensus is that the middle third when your stats aren't maxed out and you don't own the best armor yet, the combat is fun. Around the time you find the german knight and have a fight with him it feels quite balanced. For the rest of the game it feels frustrating or too easy. Witcher 3 felt too easy for most of the game, despite me playing it on the second highest difficulty. After the prologue I switched to the highest one. It had this Diablo-esque feeling and that's not what I wanted to see in this game. If I wanted to have Diablo-esque combat experience, I'd pick up Path of Exile, not KCD.

2. The exploration is not fun - They went to a lot of trouble to do sattellite imagery of Bohemia, hired historians, etc, but ultimately, they went way too far overboard to historical realism, and created a faithful recreation of medieval Bohemia instead of an interesting game-world. You can ride through most of the gameworld and not encounter anything interesting, just some peasants doing peasant-like stuff, villages etc. The density of bandit encounters or enemy soldiers or dangerous wild animals (and obvisouly non-existent monsters since this is historical) is exceedingly low. This is realistic, because in RL you weren't getting jumped by bandits every 2 steps, but for a game, this makes for boring gameplay. Combine this with the lack of monster dens, fantasy-style ruins and other stuff of that nature, and you have a National Park hike instead of a game adventure.

That tells me, this level of realism probably isn't for you. I was satisfied with the compromises they made. They cut away lot's of areas with uninteresting stuff from the original geographical area and brought everything closer. The frequency of finding interesting things was fine with me. Somebody calculated that RDR2 presents you something new every 80 seconds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a20rYOIY0gk) which is way too high. I was delighted that I could travel through land which had some logical order to it and I wasn't getting jumped every 2 minutes by some random event. Yeah, I wouldn't mine a bit more encounter types than bandits, but I understand that they are not an AAA studio yet and for me the game is between AA – AAA.

3. The writing/storylines/dialogue are not fun - Where do I even start? The main character is a village yokel. The overarching storyline is about a war between various factions in Bohemia/Holy Roman Empire but it's all so shades-of-gray and underwhelming that there is barely any motivation to care. The dialogue in general is not bad, especially by video game standards, but again, since your character is a yokel, his lines are always not fun.

I agree on the main storyline, which is dull and doesn't even get a good resolution. I was thoroughly disappointed with the ending. But it had so many memorable quests (priest Goodwin, horse slaughter and cuman camp investigation, Merhojed village illnes), that I'm willing to forgive there a bit. At the same time it had probably the most frustrating quest that I've ever seen in an RPG – the monastery quest. The last time I felt so frustrated was when I got lost in the Fell Wood in IWD 2. Given the resources that went into making the location it was a real shame.

As for the character, Henry is above average level when compared to other RPGs. Again, it's refreshing that they tried for some character development in a world where other studios just give up straight on. It wasn't perfect. For example, after finishing the last main quest, the first thing I did was to run to Tereza to see if she will react to what I accomplished and what I learned. Nah... she didn't. (Smejki, I have some hope this could get rectified in the DLC Woman's Lot).

Now to your comparison with TW3, DS and Elex. Firstly, I don't know why you compare Dark Souls to KCD. It's two different genres and I'd hate to see DS combat in a game like KCD. It's designed around perma-death and learning bosses fight routines. I'd find it hard to combine these with a historical no-fantasy RPG with focus on story.

I didn't play Elex but TW3 is a fair comparison. For me it goes like this: I liked the overall story of TW3 better than KCD, but I think KCD had more interesting quests with better design (no need to press button to highlight eveidence in the surroundings). Both had suffered from the CSI cringeness though (main chars always commenting on their detective work), KCD a bit less than TW3. TW3 had probably a better world design, but it's understandable given the amount of resources they could spend on it. TW3 also benefits greatly from better NPC character as they are drawn from a published series of book, so there is more depth to them. Despite KCD's flawed combat, I had more fun fighting knights and thugs, than hundreds of Drowners (Topielec)

Both TW3 and KCD are great games and I'd recommend buying both on release. KCD is not quite there in the AAA class, but it's definitely punching above its AA weight (music, world building). I hope as Warhorse grows bigger and more established, it won't lose its willingness to experiment and try out new things. The seriously deserve lots of appreciation for this. I'm looking forward to the GOTY edition being released so I can replay it with all the DLCs. I didn't give it a completionist run yet on purpose.

 

[Infinitron]

Worth quoting here:

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is worth playing, but it’s a mixed bag. The game has a lot to recommend it early on if you’re okay with loads of cinematic cutscenes (to be fair, the cutscenes have some quality content), but the power curve is way too steep. By the time you’re 30 odd hours in, you’re basically invincible and you still have half the game or more to finish. I told Infinitron I would write a review six months ago because no one else was offering, but I can’t make myself finish the game as it loses even the illusion of challenge at higher levels. They added a hardcore mode over the summer that removes quest markers and fast travel—gives it more of a Gothic feel—and also forces you to start the game with a bunch of permanent debuffs. But while that makes for a better experience, it only delays the progression problem.

Great storytelling, some of the funniest moments I can recall in any video game, intriguing ARPG combat system (even though it seems like it was scaled back/dumbed down to make the game more accessible) that’s a lot of fun at lower levels but breaks down when your stats get too high. Every action RPG walks a tightrope trying to find the right balance between player skill and character skill. Kingdom Come ends up giving far too much weight to the latter. At times I felt it would be a better game if they stripped out many of the RPG mechanics, but really it just needs (much) better balancing and more high level enemies.

Much like the communist regime Dan Vavra grew up under, many of Kingdom Come’s systems sound good in theory, but don’t really work in practice.

• As you level up your sword skill, you learn new combos like in Gothic 2. However, you need to land several hits in succession to execute those combos and by the time you finish, most enemies are already dead.
• Warhorse clearly wanted to give you the talker/fighter/thief troika of possible character builds, but like any open world game with a learn by doing system, you end up becoming great at everything.
• Very simulationist at some points, very gamified at others. Brewing potions is a complicated process with lots of realism that gets very tedious very fast. They have a perk that lets you autobrew eventually so on some level they knew this was not fun. Sharpening your sword on a grindstone is a lot less satisfying when you can accomplish the same thing by clicking on a weapon repair kit in your inventory.
• The unconventional save system—only save when you sleep in your own bed/an inn or with particular quicksave potion—is a great way to make you own your mistakes early on. But like so much else, it stops being relevant at higher levels. The potions are pretty cheap compared to the amount of loot you’ll quickly start hauling around and the ingredients to brew them are plentiful once you find the recipe.
• The combat system is not built to handle large numbers of opponents and there are a some larger battles where things get pretty clunky.
• Master strikes: time your parry correctly and you get a free attack that always connects, and these are very hard to miss because the game goes into slow motion when someone’s swinging at you.
• Long ass load times even with good hardware.

All that said, there’s also a lot to like.

• They went to great lengths to recreate a sliver of rural Bohemia in 1403 and it shows. I can’t recall another open world RPG where the setting felt so coherent. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall anything feeling out of place. Kingdom Come has a sense of coherence that’s rare in an open world game, except maybe Gothic 1. Maybe Warhorse was working with a stacked deck here because they didn’t need to make anything up, but who cares? The result is incredibly immersive.
• Some people will shit all over anything with a fixed protagonist, but unlike The Witcher 3 where you’re not really invested in the epic world-changing events going on in the background, in Kingdom Come you’re very much a part of the war. That gives the story a lot more narrative punch. While this naturally comes at the expense of role playing options—you can’t join the invaders who killed your family—I think it’s more than worth the trade off. They end up telling an epic story while keeping the protagonist’s role in it fairly down to earth.
• Tons of clothing/armor related reactivity. Dress like peasant, get treated like a peasant. Dress like a lord, get treated like a lord. Come into a village covered in blood with your armor all banged up and people will react with shock or concern. Dress like a Hungarian bandit and you can sneak into the bandits’ camp, although you may get caught if you haven’t interrogated a bunch of Hungarian prisoners and picked up some of their language. I was a sucker for this stuff in New Vegas and Kingdom Come takes it to a whole new level.
• Combat is very engaging and tense at low to mid levels as you go from being a wimp to a halfway competent warrior.
• Archery—there’s no reticle, so you need to eyeball every shot while correctly timing your draw. This is frustrating at first but it becomes very satisfying when you get the hang of it.
• Sometimes the simulationist approach really pays off, like the many moments where you’re stumbling around in a drunken haze after plot or sidequest related carousing. Or books being illegible until you learn how to read.
• Many timed quests, which, in my opinion, are a great way of adding an additional strategic layer to a game. Kingdom Come is at its best when you feel like you’re racing against the clock.
• Many quests with multiple solutions, although there are plenty of fedex quests, too.
• Some meaningful small scale C&C and not just in dialogue.
• This one’s subjective: lots of great characters, many of whom are very funny. Every quest with Hans Capon or Father Godwin is worth doing just for the pleasure of their company.
• I liked the stealth mechanics, but I’m not a big stealth guy so your mileage may vary.

tl;dr Kingdom Come has great atmosphere, an immersive setting, an entertaining story and some very engaging characters. Combat is fun at first but quickly becomes trivially easy. There are tons of cutscenes. Decent reactivity. Most of the C&C is small stuff and will not effect the fairly linear main story.

I would recommend the first 30-40 hours to anyone who likes ARPGs, but after that the story is the only reason to keep playing.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Dark Souls sure has a more enjoyable combat, I excluded it from quote because it's not an RPG so whatever. Absolutely cannot agree about W3 or Elex having better combat though, I found it to be tedious shit in both, much more so than in KCD.

While neither of those two games have a great combat system, I again claim that both have a much superior system to KCD. In W3, you had relatively challenging timing to nail the dodge or parry (you had to hit it quickly when the enemy attacked, with a small window), and you also had to manage multiple attackers at once. In KCD, the window for Q parry is very large and goes up with higher stats, and heavier armor makes multiple attacks irrelevant. In ELEX, you had to manage defensive moves (again with tighter timing than in KCD) with combos and your stamina pool, whereas in KCD, it's just literally mindless Q > Attack > Q > Attack spam.

KCD wins easily over W3 in explorefaggotry in my opinion, though it could still definitely be improved. I distinctly remember one quest where I had to follow a blood trail that was actually sensibly placed and visible, unlike in W3 which fuckton of quests where I had to follow either blood or footsteps that were completely invisible unless I used the magic vision. Shit like this alone put exploration in KCD way above W3.

Exploration in W3 did suck because of quest markers, cookie trails, etc, but it's not any better in KCD. There is almost nothing to find, so by default the exploration is pointless.

KCD has by far the most reactive world ever made in terms of NPCs. Nobody has even attempted what Warhorse did, the closest case is Bethesda's Radiant AI which is next to KCD like a toy rocket next to a space shuttle. If you play with your eyes open you notice that characters give off a solid illusion of actual people living their life. Also the crime and reputation systems are very advanced (tho both were buggy when I last played a few months ago).

Debatable. What does KCD do in terms of NPC behavior that Ultima VII: TBG didn't do in 1992? Or Gothic 1/2 in early 2000s? Many games have had detailed NPC schedules by now.

You said shades of grey, underwhelming events and bland characters were the reason for low motivations. At the end bland characters and cartoonish bad guys are the only reasons since a story about mafia families fighting each other worked very well.

It's completely different. The characters in The Godfather were very colorful and interesting. Obviously Vito, Michael, Sonny, etc, but even the bad guys were interesting. Solozzo, whom you mentioned, wasn't some cartoon bad guy, he was a very interesting personality in the book. In KCD, it's all really bland, boring stuff, some ho-hum back and forth between some gray characters.

I think the general consensus is that the middle third when your stats aren't maxed out and you don't own the best armor yet, the combat is fun. Around the time you find the german knight and have a fight with him it feels quite balanced. For the rest of the game it feels frustrating or too easy. Witcher 3 felt too easy for most of the game, despite me playing it on the second highest difficulty. After the prologue I switched to the highest one. It had this Diablo-esque feeling and that's not what I wanted to see in this game. If I wanted to have Diablo-esque combat experience, I'd pick up Path of Exile, not KCD.

I don't know whose consensus that is, but I didn't find the combat fun at any point after the first several hours. You see, in the very beginning, the combat in KCD "feels" like fun, because you don't know how it works yet. You see all the legit authentic stuff like directional attack, feints, combos, directional parrying, and you think, wow this system is really deep and cool! But what you don't realize yet is that none of it matters in the least. Directional parries make the parrying window slightly larger, but it's so generous to begin with, that in practical terms, this is completely irrelevant. Directional attacks don't matter because the success of the attack (whether or not it gets parried or not) depends only on your and enemy stats, not the direction. Feints don't matter for the same reason. Combos don't matter because they always get parried in the middle. So once you realize it's only the super wide Q which you cannot fail, and the stats, it hits you: this is Morrowind combat.

That tells me, this level of realism probably isn't for you. I was satisfied with the compromises they made. They cut away lot's of areas with uninteresting stuff from the original geographical area and brought everything closer. The frequency of finding interesting things was fine with me. Somebody calculated that RDR2 presents you something new every 80 seconds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a20rYOIY0gk) which is way too high. I was delighted that I could travel through land which had some logical order to it and I wasn't getting jumped every 2 minutes by some random event. Yeah, I wouldn't mine a bit more encounter types than bandits, but I understand that they are not an AAA studio yet and for me the game is between AA – AAA.

I literally rode from the south of the map to the north at one point, and did not encounter a single thing of interest. If that's ok for you guys, ok...

As for the character, Henry is above average level when compared to other RPGs.

I read a lot of medieval fiction (e.g. Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, H Rider Haggard, Frans Bengtson, etc) and I have never seen a main character as dull as Henry. A village yokel who runs around as an errandboy for equally dull nobles. This is literally like someone making a story about people's 9 to 5 workdays and setting it in medieval times.

 

[SlamDunk]

Warhorse's own "making of" documentary seemingly coming soon.

 

[Paul_cz]

Doing my patriotic duty and voted KCD as GOTY in steam awards.
Not like there's anything better to vote for, until fuckheads at rockstar release PC version of RDR.

 

[cvv]

Same. Tho the categories seem particularly retarded this time. I mean best landscape? Best alternate history? Fucking hell.

 

[The Wall]

Same. Tho the categories seem particularly retarded this time. I mean best landscape? Best alternate history? Fucking hell.

Some of them sound tailor made for some games so that they could win an award without anyone questioning its legitimacy.

Like for example Underworld Ascendant has monopoly this year on "Biggest fucking dissapointment since E.T." award or Bard's Tale IV on "Most true to franchise's spirit since Fallout 3". Though some would say that there's cross competition for these two titles between these two Decline's Titans...

Best of luck to Kingdom Come and may it win main prize in this Lord Steam's tournament!

 

[Baardhaas]

Tho the categories seem particularly retarded this time.

Yeah,they didn't think it through. I'd give KC: D game of the year and best environments but had to choose between those two since a game can only be nominated once. On the other hand, you can nominate a game from 2011 as game of the year of 2018.

 

[Smejki]

Best alternate history?

 

[cvv]

Whaa? How is KCD alternative? I wanted to nominate assassin's creed Odyssey teeming as it is with female soldiers and mercenaries.

 

[Wunderbar]

Whaa? How is KCD alternative? I wanted to nominate assassin's creed Odyssey teeming as it is with female soldiers and mercenaries.

what's best about that?

 

[Funposter]

Whaa? How is KCD alternative? I wanted to nominate assassin's creed Odyssey teeming as it is with female soldiers and mercenaries.

what's best about that?

it's the most alternate

 

[Jenkem]

I voted KCD for best environment

 

[SlamDunk]

I voted KCD for best environment

I really wanted to because Warhorse certainly deserves the recognition, but ultimately didn't because Game of the Year is a more important choice. I don't think KCD has a chance to score a GOTY award, though, but at least I did my duty

 

[cvv]

I have no idea how they will evaluate the results. For example the system gave me absolutely no trouble when I nominated Gothic 1 for GOTY 2018. You can also apparently nominate anything you want for Best VR game, including Wolfenstein 3D. And so on.

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

I voted KCD for best environment

I really wanted to because Warhorse certainly deserves the recognition, but ultimately didn't because Game of the Year is a more important choice. I don't think KCD has a chance to score a GOTY award, though, but at least I did my duty

It sure as hell is my game of the year.

 

[Smejki]

I have no idea how they will evaluate the results. For example the system gave me absolutely no trouble when I nominated Gothic 1 for GOTY 2018. You can also apparently nominate anything you want for Best VR game, including Wolfenstein 3D. And so on.

It's a well designed system

 

[Paul_cz]

Yeah even god damn awards Valve can't do properly. What a shame.

 

[Paul_cz]

Whaa? How is KCD alternative? I wanted to nominate assassin's creed Odyssey teeming as it is with female soldiers and mercenaries.

Smejki is trolling

I did vote Odyssey for alternate, eventhough I like the game quite a bit
Would vote for BFV if it was on steam

 

[SlamDunk]

I voted KCD for best environment

I really wanted to because Warhorse certainly deserves the recognition, but ultimately didn't because Game of the Year is a more important choice. I don't think KCD has a chance to score a GOTY award, though, but at least I did my duty

It sure as hell is my game of the year.

Oh, don't get me wrong as it's also my GOTY.

Truth be told, I only play on PC and have really bought almost nothing else this year because honestly there hasn't been anything remotely as interesting for sale. Just the usual dull and unambitious publishers-playing-it-safe AAA crap and close-but-no-cigar indie efforts.