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

[deuxhero]

Cryengine supports animation joints, so they can't do worse than Bethesda.

 

[Jaesun]

It is truly sad that Dan Vavra was trolled off these forums.

Good job codex.

 

[Suchy]

But was he? Seemed badass enough not to give a flying fuck about codexian edgy kids.

 

[Lancehead]

I don't think he was trolled off. He probably just realised the "what is an RPG?" debates are always fruitless.

 

[Oesophagus]

Dan seems like a bro, but I think he didn't spend enought time on the codex to learn that there will always be a dumbfuck who hates everything you hold dear.

 

[GarfunkeL]

To be fair, his view that TB RPG's were a relic of the past, that only happened because technology was holding developers back, is ridiculous and it was justly debunked.

 

[Smejki]

I hope those combat animations are a WIP. They're okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

Dan said the animations were mocapped by pro fencers. Still might be in rough state though. All they did until now was for sake of making vertical slice for pitches so it is way far from finished. They were on Pitch-Tour de USA few weeks ago. Dan said that everybody loved it but there is no final agreement so far.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Fingers crossed that they can get a good deal and not get shafted.

 

[Gord]

Dan seems like a bro, but I think he didn't spend enought time on the codex to learn that there will always be a dumbfuck who hates everything you hold dear.

Yes, although some of his views were bound to encounter some resistance from more than the usual cranky codexers.
Still, every dev should probably read at least quickly through the W2 and PE threads to get a feeling for what to expect from this place even when you are filling more-the-less exactly the Codex' favourite niche...

 

[kazgar]

It is truly sad that Dan Vavra was trolled off these forums.

Good job codex.

He's popped up 2 hours ago with a link to the movie and more arguing with Grunker, so can't be all bad.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Dan Vavra believes an RPG is a game where you play a role, and that console controls are better than PCs because they are harder hence closer to actual fencing. Yea, good riddance.

 

[Snikt]

I might have gotten really excited by that teaser if I were still 14 years old.

 

[Jaesun]

Try harder.

 

[Metro]

It is truly sad that Dan Vavra was trolled off these forums.

Good job codex.

The guy's making GTA Renaissance Fair -- we're not talking Fargo or MCA here. Besides we trolled Brad Wardell off the strategy forum.

 

[JarlFrank]

Dan's still posting, and he seems to have a thick enough skin, so I expect him to be more active on the 'dex once some actual information about the game is out.

 

[Jaesun]

He seems to be taking it well.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

Well it certainly looks pretty. Didn't see any signs of magic, which could make for a nice change of pace. It will be interesting to see what balance they decide to strike between realism/gamey elements with a high end engine like that. I think Dark Messiah worked partly because it embraced the gamey (fun!) aspect of its combat over realism, even though it resulted in some janky derps.

 

[Average Manatee]

The trailer looks good, but any marketing team can make a trailer that looks good.

 

[Spectacle]

With kickstarter taking care of the actual RPGs, there's nothing wrong with a bit of first-person hack'n slash with skills and exploration. I hope the combat will play smoothly, this could be a winner.

 

[The Great Deceiver]

With kickstarter taking care of the actual RPGs, there's nothing wrong with a bit of first-person hack'n slash with skills and exploration. I hope the combat will play smoothly, this could be a winner.

Indeed, we could've very well been disappointed with the direction this game has taken if it wasn't for the Incline on the horizon; as if we even had time to pollute ourselves with a first-person hack'n slash.



On a more serious note - there's also the interesting (as I understand it, quasi-Darklands) setting.

 

[Suchy]

New blog entry from Daniel Varva
http://warhorsestudios.cz/index.php?page=blog&entry=blog_021

LOOKING BACK

Filed in Developers' diary by Dan @ 4:30 pm UTC Jun 24, 2013

Real screenshot from our game
Long time no see! We’ve been silent for five long months, and you’re sure to wonder why. What was going on here? Why this long pause? To put it simply: we’ve been quite busy. We were finalizing the game prototype for a Publisher pitch that our future basically hinged on, so we were focusing on that and blogs unfortunately had to be sidelined. Besides, we didn’t want to publish too much information at that important moment as it’s certainly better when your potential partner learns the salient facts from you directly and doesn’t have to hunt for them on social media. Now we finally have some time so I’ll try to catch up and write an account of what was going on here.

As you may know, we are a startup financed by a private angel investor. We received funding for development of a prototype to demonstrate to Publishers. If they’re interested, (i.e. willing to finance at least some of the development and publish the game), we move from prototype development to full production and you’ll get your game. If they’re not interested, we don’t move anywhere and you’ll get nothing and we’re out of business. Of course, there are other alternatives, like Kickstarter, but this is not what we’re focusing on right now.
The last few months were the period when we were finishing the prototype and then we went on a ‘world tour’ of Publishers’ offices, so as you can imagine we were quite occupied! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now we want to talk about the process of finishing the prototype and the report from our tour will be on the menu for next time.
OUR MASTERPLAN
Our original plan was to develop the prototype in 15 months, and given our original commencement day this was supposed to fall on September/October 2012. Unfortunately, there were some delays when starting the company, and the deadline shifted to Christmas 2012 and we didn’t realize at first that you can’t actually sell anything but trees, turkeys and trinkets at this time of the year. We shifted our deadline to February and that gave us space to improve the thing (and it also cost us some extra money).
And what are we calling a prototype? What have we been doing for the past year and a half? We managed to do quite a lot and surprisingly (this being a game project) we even surpassed our original plan in some respects.
Our approach was different from the common practice of creating a fake Potemkin village to show to publishers, only to be thrown away when the actual work starts. Most things actually work and will be used in the final game. Actually, it’s quite difficult to create a fake playable slice of an open-world RPG as this genre is a confluence of many different mechanics. While in a shooter game one nice looking level where you can shoot at things (shooting is moreover included in CryEngine by default, so it’s very easy to do) will show everybody what you have in mind and can look highly polished, for an open-world RPG you have to show much more and the result can still be a bit unpersuasive. Imagine playing just one of the Skyrim dungeons as an archer. You can hardly envisage how the complete game feels when you are playing outside as a Mage.
We preferred to create a substantial part of the world (about one square mile) that includes a town with various buildings, some of them including interiors, and the first quest with all the basic game mechanics fully functional: dialogue, cut scenes, controls, combat system, GUI, in-game map, shops, AI… We have also created our own tools for game production and wrote most of the design. We can show you something that looks like a complete game and it will take you a while to find out that you cannot do everything you should be able to do. We did this in order to make sure that we would be able to create a game like this, give us a feel for what is the best way of doing it and how long it is going to take. We’ll not have to throw anything away and we have a very solid demo that any right-minded Publisher should be able to appreciate. The drawback to this approach is that we have no ‘wow’ moment, a.k.a. crumbling skyscraper. Such moments are not common in RPGs, but all the same, our prototype lacks something conspicuous (even though it looks very good overall) that would sear itself into a publishers’ memory. We calculated that the success of Skyrim would teach Publishers what RPGs are about and they would be more interested in proof that we can do a game like this rather than in a cool scripted tunnel like Call of Duty (next time I’m going to tell you how this theory worked out for us).
Moving the presentation till after Christmas gave us more time to improve the planned features and add some extras. We created more cut scenes and dialogues than we originally planned, we had a completely functional GUI and map, and we even had details like accurate item pick up: the character will actually correctly grab the item it’s picking up. I was really proud about our final build because it contained almost 100% of what planned for it, looked very good and didn’t crash (almost).
After Christmas our agents started to set up meetings with Publishers. Visiting twenty different offices on two continents in three weeks is not trivial. And we were bringing more materials with us to the meetings, but this is something we’ll be discussing next time, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Dan Vavra, Creative Director

 

[Morgoth]

Hope everything turns out well with the publisher. This is something I'm a lot more interested in than Twitcher 3, Cyberpunk, Lords of the Fallen or any other overhyped Potato nonsense.

 

[evdk]

Hope everything turns out well with the publisher. This is something I'm a lot more interested in than Twitcher 3, Cyberpunk, Lords of the Fallen or any other overhyped Potato nonsense.

Of course, the overhyped potato nonsense has a much bigger chance of ever seeing completion.

 

[abnaxus]

In before Deep Silver named as publisher.

 

[evdk]

Then it would be time for another defenestration.