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

[cvv]

snip

Great writeup. As I said, larping something like Skyrim or Witcher is just sad. NOT larping KCD is missing the entire point.

Also not playing on HC. This game needs to be played without fast travel and with most of the negative perks on.

 

[Paul_cz]

Did u even bother asking the monk about what's wrong with the patients or you just look them over and decided Henry's commentary is a sufficient diagnosis?
There's definitely a time limit to saving the sick.

It is not me playing, but thanks for info.

no idea. i know this quest is kinda messy, sorry. if you give a save shortly before this state or right after, I can at least have a look at it.

I will ask for the save and PM it to you if provided. Thanks bunches

 

[cvv]

When it comes to writing videogame reviews GameBanshee will NOT be rushed.

http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/123497-gb-feature-kingdom-come-deliverance-review.html

And on top of that, the game’s quests are very flexible. Here’s just one example. Having followed the game’s reception I knew that some people didn’t particularly enjoy the monastery quest line. Were they right? I have no idea. When I started that quest, I was on a bit of a crime spree and was already wearing my dark and silent gear. I also knew that quest markers were merely suggestions, so instead of following them, I listened to the quest-giver NPC, snuck into the monastery at night, puzzled out what I had to do there, and got out in roughly five minutes. This meant that I technically failed the monastery quest that wanted me to sign up as an acolyte, but still advanced the story in the process.

The author loves it. He QQs about the save system which is disappointing but overall he did a good job.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

GameBanshee will NOT be rushed.

Damn even we got a review out before this.

 

[Quillon]

Restarted da game. Theresa's part of women's lot was cool; doing chores with her > doing stuff with dull Henry.

Mutt's whole purpose in the game seems to be hare genocide when he's not getting in the way.

 

[moleman]

Mutt's whole purpose in the game seems to be hare genocide when he's not getting in the way.

The doggo? I found him very helpful in killing Cumans in the Woman's Lot. Doggo distracts Cuman, Theresa whacks them to death from behind with an axe.

 

[Quillon]

Yeah he makes it piss easy killing enemies when he's not under my feet or chasing hares.

Haven't encountered any bugs so far but unattended horses are bugging me, most of Bernard's company's horses are still in front of Neuhoff stables, Kobyla's horse is standing between Neuhoff and crossroad's inn. Haven't seen yet but I'm sure Olenna/the horse we optionally steal from Talmberg is at the quarry as per prev. playthroughs.

 

[Jenkem]

what are warhorse even doing now? their twitter is just lets plays and kcd memes

 

[Tytus]

what are warhorse even doing now? their twitter is just lets plays and kcd memes

KCD sequel set around 100 years later.

 

[Quillon]

what are warhorse even doing now? their twitter is just lets plays and kcd memes

KCD sequel set around 100 years later.

Excellent news! Henry will be long dead by then!

 

[Wunderbar]

what are warhorse even doing now? their twitter is just lets plays and kcd memes

KCD sequel set around 100 years later.

Excellent news! Henry will be long dead by then!

fake news. "KCD 1506" was just a bugtracker ticket.

 

[Jimmious]

I would like them to do a fantasy RPG using KCD technology etc. Just saying

 

[Quillon]

fake news.

Excellent fake news! Henry woulda been dead by then! :D

 

[Paul_cz]

what are warhorse even doing now? their twitter is just lets plays and kcd memes

Dan is about to run for president so Kingdom Come II: Retribution is going to be spearheaded by Smejki

(this post is a joke)

(probably)

 

[Quillon]

They shoulda hired at least 1 experienced RPG designer, or consulted one...

Playing the game again atm, I take this back. If they had "experienced RPG devs" quests might not have been so rigid and with a lot of pitfalls but on the flip side neither they'd been so interesting and maybe they wouldn't even have attempted to make half of them cos this hypothetical experienced dev(who lost his ambition and better GTFO of RPG biz) advising against complicated/too much work quests

 

[SlamDunk]

what are warhorse even doing now? their twitter is just lets plays and kcd memes

Working their asses off. The team is bigger than ever.

Just be patient.

 

[Quillon]

Riding horses in a group needs equal trotting speed, its driving me crazy trying to match up with others just to hear what they are saying. Speed shoulda only effected galloping, hopefully in the sequel...

 

[cvv]

Yo Smejki now that we're all gonna die you can spill the beans - were you planning an announcement at E3, yes or no?

 

[Tigranes]

Finally finished the game. Turns out that when I first played, I basically finished all of the Monastery part twice over before getting stuck on scripting bugs. So this time I just skipped it, though I did enjoy it previously.

I think this is common sense now but KCD is definitely a fantastic game with several notable issues. And one of those issues is actually the pacing. This is a story-driven game, but the story gets bogged down a lot after Runt.

The key issue is that the early story is so good because it is so attentive to the intricacies of medieval politics, hierarchy, and decorum. Radzig upbraiding you about running off to Skalitz also educates the player about who you are and where you lie in the feudal system (even as the game has to give you a special chosen one ticket for gameplay purposes). You might have a special agent role but you do feel like you are part of a medieval social order, and you hear more and more about the wider political concerns re. Wenceslaus and Sigismund. But after Runt, it's all basically gone. You basically forget about Wenceslaus so that it's super weird to hear about him again at the very end. Sigismund becomes the monster under the bed who never does a thing or shows up. Divish, Hanush, Radzig just become interchangeable allies against the one bad guy. And everything you find out about his operations after Runt is more of the same. Oh, it's Pribyslatz, but just bigger, etc. Not much happens. THe individual quests are interesting (e.g. counterfeiters) but you feel like you're running on a treadmill rather than getting somewhere.

The endgame was nice on this level, because it went back to showing you how a medieval conflict & siege is not a Hollywood affair. In a local conflict you are not fighting with a 50,000 army and it changes all your logistical considerations. Laying siege to anything is a costly, risky and perilous endeavour. Building a single siege weapon is a complicated task. Things can go wrong from the simplest of errors. You have to take care of food, drink, morale, and not just the fighting. Sadly, I found the actual gameplay of those endgame battles pretty awful - I like KCD combat for what it is, but it really shines in duel situations when you can focus on the enemy and observe their movements. Not in a 10v10 brawl where your targeting is haywire and the AI too. I was basically stabbing people in the back all day long while the game would lag from all the corpses.

Anyway, the game is fucking good and always has been all round. It is just incredible how evocative it is of the historical era in so many ways, and in a way that puts KCD above 99% of other games out there like AOD does with C&C.

 

[SlamDunk]

 

[HoboForEternity]

good luck and be safe Smejki

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I finally played it. And I just want to brag for one second to people who understand:

On my second playthrough, I got to Pribyslavitz. I put on all my heaviest armor (I had been playing as a stealth archer, but kept some repaired heavy armor on my horse just in case), drank all my potions, picked up a halberd from a dude I shot, and then massacred the entire garrison while high on artemisia. I wish I had more opportunities to do that. I'll have to try doing it again when I get to Vranik.

My not so deep observations:

• Halberds are awesome. I wish there were an easier way to keep one with you. I try bringing one along whenever I find one, but then I need to use a bow or something, and I drop the halberd and eventually it despawns before I can find it again.
• Play with wh_pl_showfirecursor 1 set. Archery is just impossible and frustrating without it. Seriously, during my first playthrough, I couldn't shoot a rabbit from six feet away. But I won the hunting competition against Capon anyway because I killed a poacher and took his rabbits.
• Stealth archery is a fun alternative approach to combat. With the Forester perk and a lot of black clothing, you can get your sound down to 1 and your visibility to 0. Enemies will run right past me. You can shoot from outside the enemies' vision radius, and if you draw attention to yourself, just move to a new position before they find you. This is really only possible with the showfirecursor command.
• Alchemy isn't exciting, and I'm not sure that it needs to be. I collected thousands of herbs largely for the XP and the Leg Day perk. And then I brewed a hundred potions, sold them to the alchemist, and bought another recipe, and made hundred of that potion. It's RPG grinding, and I'm OK with that.
• Money becomes meaningless pretty quickly. During my first playthrough, I didn't really know how everything worked, and I kind of enjoyed wondering where my next meal was coming from at the start of the game (and then I learned you can just eat everyone's stew, and hunger is no longer an issue). During my second playthrough, I learned to read, started alchemy, made a couple thousand groschen selling potions in Rattay, bought a horse, and with the horse I started carrying back hundreds of pounds of deer meat. And pretty soon I was stealth-killing bandit camps and selling all of their armor. Pretty much as soon as you're capable of doing that, then money becomes mostly meaningless. I don't even bother looting anything that is under 100 groschen per pound. And after you buy your tier-5 horse and all the best equipment, you don't really need money any more. And then there's very little time in the mid-tiers of equipment, and then it's mostly limited by your strength and agility and not your purse. I wish there was more stuff to buy.
• I very rarely pull off combo attacks. I mean, I know how to do them. But it seems that I can only do three or more attacks in a row on an enemy who is too tired to fight back, and then he's going to die in a moment anyway whether I hit him with a combo or not.
• I am looking forward to KCD 2. I would be fine with the same engine, same assets, same everything, just in a new location. I would like to see Henry complete his story, kill everyone who needs killing, and get his father's sword. But I don't think you could start the next game with Henry because he's nearly invulnerable by the end of KCD.
• And it's not cool that he starts calling Radzig "Father." Not cool at all.

Edit: Apparently if you put a colon next to a capital D, it turns into a smiley face. So how are you supposed to abbreviate Kingdom-Come-Colon-Deliverance? I guess I could just write KCD, but I don't like the aesthetics of that C next to the D. It looks like KOD.

Edit 2: I don't want KCD 2 to star Henry because he'll start the game too powerful. But how did they do the Witcher games? I haven't played those, but they all star Geralt, right? How do they explain him starting at level 1 each time?

 

[Tigranes]

Play with wh_pl_showfirecursor 1 set. Archery is just impossible and frustrating without it. Seriously, during my first playthrough, I couldn't shoot a rabbit from six feet away. But I won the hunting competition against Capon anyway because I killed a poacher and took his rabbits.

It feels that way when you start, but I can give you at least my data point: on my recent playthrough (years after my v1.0 playthrough, so not much memory retention there), I was able to work it out. Not just archery ranges but I could even win two rounds of the river log game, and regularly catch hares - sometimes even one-shotting them. And it felt really great.

It's a huge pleasure when you work it out, because again KCD makes you engage with your bow like an actual medieval weapon held by a half-trained lout, rather than some automatic assault rifle. I would really recommend sticking with the zero-crosshair design, and only turn the cursor on if it really isn't working for you after a few hours and it's a big source of frustration.

Re. money, yeah - I don't really think you ever need to buy any piece of weapon/armour, and money quickly becomes pointless. I just bought stuff for dress-up.

 

[Black Angel]

• Alchemy isn't exciting, and I'm not sure that it needs to be. I collected thousands of herbs largely for the XP and the Leg Day perk. And then I brewed a hundred potions, sold them to the alchemist, and bought another recipe, and made hundred of that potion. It's RPG grinding, and I'm OK with that.

It's not exciting, but to me it's one of, if not the only minigame in RPGs done right. I really love the whole process of reading the book (obviously you need to learn how to read first), see what ingredients you need, bring them up on the shelves, then go back and forth between reading the book and doing the next steps while carefully counting the seconds in your head to pull it off.

Though, I have my bias as a chemistry graduate. The whole process reminds me of lab practices during college.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

It's not exciting, but to me it's one of, if not the only minigame in RPGs done right. I really love the whole process of reading the book (obviously you need to learn how to read first), see what ingredients you need, bring them up on the shelves, then go back and forth between reading the book and doing the next steps while carefully counting the seconds in your head to pull it off.

Though, I have my bias as a chemistry graduate. The whole process reminds me of lab practices during college.

I actually liked KCD's alchemy a lot more than the menu-based crafting you see in most games. I wish that there was more crafting in the game. I came across a butcher table that had a "use" tooltip when I looked at it. I thought I had found the place where I could turn raw meat into dried meat, but no. I think it was just a bug... or maybe part of a quest I'm not on? (The butcher table is in the Talmberg baths if anyone wants to take a look.)

Speaking of butcher tables though, has anyone else noticed all the hints at cannibals living in the woods? Several camps and cabins out in the woods have human remains in the oven, or in the stew pot, or on the cutting table. I think it's just there for atmosphere and telling the player that the woods aren't safe, because I never came across a quest that had me hunting cannibals.

It feels that way when you start, but I can give you at least my data point: on my recent playthrough (years after my v1.0 playthrough, so not much memory retention there), I was able to work it out. Not just archery ranges but I could even win two rounds of the river log game, and regularly catch hares - sometimes even one-shotting them. And it felt really great.

It's a huge pleasure when you work it out, because again KCD makes you engage with your bow like an actual medieval weapon held by a half-trained lout, rather than some automatic assault rifle. I would really recommend sticking with the zero-crosshair design, and only turn the cursor on if it really isn't working for you after a few hours and it's a big source of frustration.

I can see what you mean. But it feels like archery in the game is 10 times harder to learn than sword fighting. In a couple of months, Henry can become a master sword fighter while controlled by a mediocre player. But without the crosshair, he can only become halfway decent with a bow if controlled by a hardcore player. I feel like if you earned bow XP for target practice the way you earn sword or mace XP sparring with Bernard, then maybe it would be more fair, and you would get the zoom-in ability, and the bow would sway less. You could level-up the character, and archery would get easier, at the same time the player develops skill. But I think the way the game intends you to get bow XP is by hunting rabbits, and you only get XP when you hit them. You can hunt for hours of real-world time and maybe shoot a dozen rabbits if you can find them, getting you a couple of bow levels. The same amount of time spent sparring could probably get you to level 10 in a melee weapon. You see what I mean?