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

[SlamDunk]

Yup... using treasure maps until there's nothing else better to do in the game is a great way to balance it a bit, indeed.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It's one of the best written games i've played in ages, and i regret not having been able to finish it.

Granted, the writing is still not all that compared to a great book or movie but is among the best i've seen in a video game in a long while, for whatever that's worth, and i say that despite the game favoring a somewhat "decadent" point of view (which is reinforced by the game having very solid and fun stealth and thieving mechanics. Playing a morally upright charater makes you lose out on a lot of fun content, thievery in particular being the highlight).

Campaign has no real "balance" since you can fuck up the progression just by striking out on your own for any reason, DLCs or not. Main story line is incredibly lock step. Too much probably since in order to play through the story "naturally" you'll likely end up missing out on some side quests (which in some cases isn't necessarely a bad thing as the quality of the writing tends to drop sharply at the periphery all though there are good written side quests as well). There are situations where you can put the main story line on freeze to pursue side content, but only from a mechanical point of view. If you are trying to roleplay it's really hard to justify doing side shit when the main plot is so damn pressing and important, at least if you are putting yourself in the shoes of Henry. Even when you are flat out told to take a break it's hard to justify taking more than a few days off (this is where learning how to do sleepless nights come in handy).

As for exploration, this game has the best hand placed content i've seen in a game. There's no randomly generated caves or loot or any of that stupid shit. All the stuff you find is carefully placed there, visually unique even when it's just different variations of potions hidden under some tree or random shit like that.

BTW, what i'm talking about here is entirely about the story line. I wouldn't worry about messing up the "balance" of the combat because you gonna break that one way or another. While the fighting system is actually very good as far as first person melee combat goes, it still lacks balance, requires a couple mods not to becomed ruined by a couple of hairbrained mechanics (master strikes) and while 1vs1 feels great fighting multiple enemies is janky as shit (and the AI is Bethesda levels retarded at times, with truly "radiant" moments like guards accusing you of murder after you save them from bandits). In fact, best way to maintain "balance" is to avoid fighting if you can help it. If you start killing every Cuman or bandit you meet you'll max out your combat stats prematurely and you'll get so rich so quickly as to make the process of buying or finding gear pointless.

 

[VerSacrum]

Exploration ruins the balance. Even if you don't use the treasure maps, you're still likely to find some OP gear if you explore.
Game is still great though imo, and the sooner combat becomes easy/irrelevant, the better the game becomes.
It's one of those games where the world is the highlight, and the systems just don't get in the way.

Yeah, feels similar to finding ebony or daedric weapons back in your first playthrough of Morrowind. But the weapons tend to have some high str/dex requirements iirc. Greatly prefer this approach to levelled/random loot or shitting out a crafted weapon via menu prompts.

 

[Carrion]

From the Ashes ruins in-game economy by essentially giving you infinite amounts of cash. Then again, in pretty much every game the economy will break at some point, and until you're finished with the DLC it will be more of a money sink than a money faucet.

 

[Lyric Suite]

You can do a lot of that stuff after the main story line though, right?

In fact, i wonder how much side content you are truly going to miss out if you beeline through the main plot.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Exploration ruins the balance. Even if you don't use the treasure maps, you're still likely to find some OP gear if you explore.
Game is still great though imo, and the sooner combat becomes easy/irrelevant, the better the game becomes.
It's one of those games where the world is the highlight, and the systems just don't get in the way.

Yeah, feels similar to finding ebony or daedric weapons back in your first playthrough of Morrowind. But the weapons tend to have some high str/dex requirements iirc. Greatly prefer this approach to levelled/random loot or shitting out a crafted weapon via menu prompts.

It's actually easier to get those weapons by robbing a store than following a map if you don't mind gridning your thieving skills.

This is one of those games where you have to intentionally discipline yourself not to break it as its easy to do if you are autistic enough.

When i replay it one mod i'd like to try is one that reduces xp gain. Couldn't find one on Nexus but maybe i didn't look hard enough.

BTW, i forgot to mention: do yourself a favous and play hard core. I never even tried normal but i saw lets plays on youtube and it's ridicolous. Fast travel? Fuck that shit lmao.

 

[SlamDunk]

Anything worth mentioning about in this video?

 

[agris]

When i replay it one mod i'd like to try is one that reduces xp gain. Couldn't find one on Nexus but maybe i didn't look hard enough.

https://www.nexusmods.com/kingdomcomedeliverance/mods/1482?tab=description

you want half xp, vanilla speech.

 

[Lyric Suite]

When i replay it one mod i'd like to try is one that reduces xp gain. Couldn't find one on Nexus but maybe i didn't look hard enough.

https://www.nexusmods.com/kingdomcomedeliverance/mods/1482?tab=description

you want half xp, vanilla speech.

Lmao, NOW somebody makes this mod.

I'm going to download it and install it now so next time i try the game i'll have it all ready to go.

 

[moon knight]

Playing it on PC, with a 5600x and an RTX 3060ti (after almost finishing it on PS4) and I've go to say.... the CryEngine is really a steaming pile of shit. And Rattay is optimized worse that Starfield.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The good thing is that the visuals of this game are amazing on any setting (well, some of the animations are janky as shit but that's neither here nor there).

The bad thing is that even on the lowest setting you don't gain much in performance lmao.

Actually, it seems there's like a couple of specific sliders that have a massive impact on performance (shaders and shadows respectively), while everything else doesn't do a whole lot either for better or for worse (performance wise). So what i did was put the game on very high and then manually lower shaders and shadows to medium and called it a day.

Also, riding on a horse will take out at least 20 FPS don't ask me why. On Rattay, i defaulted in just trotting slowly or going on foot (for the "realism" lmao) because riding around on full speed murdered the frame rate (also, i kept bumping into people so i had to give it up. One time i actually managed to kill a guard by just riding into him at fuill speed, had to reload).

 

[Modron]

Playing it on PC, with a 5600x and an RTX 3060ti (after almost finishing it on PS4) and I've go to say.... the CryEngine is really a steaming pile of shit. And Rattay is optimized worse that Starfield.

KCD ran fine on my previous gpu a 750 ti that was very long in the tooth.

 

[agris]

I think in retrospect, the cryengine required more engineering support from warhorse to extract meaningful performance differences across hardware configs.

There are two mods, flowgraph and optimized graphics presets (OGP), that change the graphics options and presets such that hardware of all types can play KCD without it looking like dogshit. The mod author went full modder and deleted their stuff, but anons have links: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O0msKX1raoBhhuHtIJhevGOZmYdl3ke9/view

Load these mods first in your mod list, flowgraph first followed by ogp. You’ll see new / different graphics options and presets. You can toggle between vanilla and the new ogp presets within the ui, no console fuckery required.

One thing I really like is that the new presets and graphics options let old hardware play it well, while even on low settings there is a lot less popin and LODing. The new “low” grass setting for instance still renders grass far away, it just disables grass shadows and swaying with the wind. So users with old hardware don’t have horrible grass popin on the new low, compared to vanilla low.

It’s a big upgrade and shows what the engine could do, if tuned correctly by WH.

 

[V17]

Playing it on PC, with a 5600x and an RTX 3060ti (after almost finishing it on PS4) and I've go to say.... the CryEngine is really a steaming pile of shit. And Rattay is optimized worse that Starfield.

The good thing is that the visuals of this game are amazing on any setting (well, some of the animations are janky as shit but that's neither here nor there).

The bad thing is that even on the lowest setting you don't gain much in performance lmao.

Actually, it seems there's like a couple of specific sliders that have a massive impact on performance (shaders and shadows respectively), while everything else doesn't do a whole lot either for better or for worse (performance wise). So what i did was put the game on very high and then manually lower shaders and shadows to medium and called it a day.

Also, riding on a horse will take out at least 20 FPS don't ask me why. On Rattay, i defaulted in just trotting slowly or going on foot (for the "realism" lmao) because riding around on full speed murdered the frame rate (also, i kept bumping into people so i had to give it up. One time i actually managed to kill a guard by just riding into him at fuill speed, had to reload).

From what I understand from watching some lecture by one of the lead devs years ago and from my experience playing it on an incredibly shitty Celeron CPU, KCD performance is mostly CPU bound and the biggest problem is simulating many NPC actors at once, plus on slower CPUs loading assets (which I assume have to be unpacked and processed by the CPU, because switching to NVMe did not help). Cry Engine wasn't made for this, but also simulating many NPCs at once on the level that KCD does it (even if it seems simple on the outside) is technically surprisingly complex.

Neither of those things is really helped by lowering the graphics settings. In fact paradoxically I had a gain of a few FPS when I switched to the highest texture quality - I guess that with lower quality settings the textures get downscaled first, which slows down loading. With that Celeron CPU the royal edition of the game was so fucked that when I rode a horse across the land, the game couldn't catch up loading new assets and gradually stopped loading sounds until it became silent altogether and crashed.

Switching to a CPU with 8x higher cpu benchmark score literally made my FPS 8x higher. Switching from GTX970 to GTX1060 6GB (so about 20% faster and 2x the VRAM I think) helped me use better shader and lighting settings, but the FPS in Rattay and Sasau stayed about the same.

 

[Melcar]

I was able to play the game on a Ryzen 1700 (overclocked to 3.7GHz all core) and a RX480 on medium 1440p, 50 to 70 fps in most situations, under Windows 10. Same config under WINE ran like dogshit however as for some reason the game there turned into a massive CPU hog. It wasn't until I upgraded to a Ryzen 5800X that I could play the game properly again.

 

[agris]

Core i5-2500k with amd r290 and I’m playing at 2560x1600 on mostly ogp medium with ~40 fps, but I use the texture streaming fix and triple buffering in lieu of vsync

 

[Paul_cz]

I had 2500K when it came out and in villages the 40fps annoyed me, so I waited until I had Ryzen 2700X and on that it ran at 60fps even in Rattay as long as I was not galloping on a horse through there. And now with 5800X3D it is smooth sailing no matter what.

That said I am not using shadows on ultra because those are just broken, very high is enough.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I gained about 20 FPS from going from a 2600x to a 5600x, no changes in graphic card, so i can confirm as well.

 

[Multidirectional]

After switching from GTX 1060 to RTX 3060 Rattay performance is about the same shit. At least I can finally use Lighting above Medium without shadows from torches making FPS drop below 30 at night. Looks like it will take a massive CPU upgrade from my i5-8400 until I can play finally this game comfortably.

 

[soulburner]

I remember vividly how changing my slightly overclocked i5-2500K to a brand new at the time Ryzen 3600 made most tasks, including games, so fast it was almost hard to believe - and I kept the same GPU, R9 290. Some games, to this day, are CPU intensive, there's nothing you can do about it but upgrade (overclocking is now a thing of the past, there never will be a performance jump like setting a Pentium 133 at 166 MHz, not even mentioning such epic things like a Celeron 300A). Recently I've heard people who upgraded from their Ryzen 3000/5000 series GPUs to a 7000 series and claim they have a similar performance jump.

For as long as I remember, CryEngine was considered a very CPU-heavy engine when compared with Unreal and others - which sounds about right, because after testing Star Citizen a few weeks ago when they had a free week or something like that I barely hit 30 fps with ~60% GPU usage (RTX 3060). Changing detail settings barely had an effect.

 

[agris]

I believe it, although my point is aimed towards the poor quality of the shipped graphics presets. The optimized presets both speed up the game and make it look better, which was my point.

One day the old 2500k will be put out to pasture, but not today.

 

[Multidirectional]

Heh, I'm still looking forward to the day I have CPU with fast enough single core performance to run Crysis 1 without drops below 60 at the settings I want. That mission where you're a flying a VTOL with tornadoes around still runs like shit. Cryengine and CPU performance, old topic for me.

 

[Melcar]

Heh, I'm still looking forward to the day I have CPU with fast enough single core performance to run Crysis 1 without drops below 60 at the settings I want. That mission where you're a flying a VTOL with tornadoes around still runs like shit. Cryengine and CPU performance, old topic for me.

Original Crysis or NuCrysis? Mods? A 5800X can run that game (original unmoded) no problems. Paired with a 6750XT and I'm getting +70fps at 1440p with max settings and 4XAA. Any CPU of that level should be able to make short work of the game.

 

[Multidirectional]

Original C1 with texture mod and I'm talking settings way above what in game menu allows. My draw distance tweaks alone make a massive difference. And 4x in game MSAA not enough for me, I gotta have at least 4x SGSSAA, which is something that kills aliasing way better than regular 2x2 Supersampling. Though that is GPU department. It's the physics and my LOD tweaks that kill CPU in C1.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Heh, I'm still looking forward to the day I have CPU with fast enough single core performance to run Crysis 1 without drops below 60 at the settings I want. That mission where you're a flying a VTOL with tornadoes around still runs like shit. Cryengine and CPU performance, old topic for me.

Arma 3 is another game that relies heavily on single core CPU performance.