Kingdom Come: Deliverance releases this month!!

Abomination

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I find there are a few quality of life changes the game needs. Things like there being no cross-hair in ranged combat or any indication as to the falloff to expect isn't "immersive". An archer has a good general idea where their shot would go. A better system would be a circle that gradually gets smaller to represent where the shot would probably go based on the skill of the player, draw power being used and the type of bow.

The fact there aren't crossbows in the game is a big concern as well. They would have been far more prominent in Bohemia than the longbows, composite bows and recurve bows on display.
 

TheFinish

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May 17, 2010
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I've been playing it for a while. It's a good game but deeply, deeply flawed. And I mean beyond the atrocious optimisation and QA.

I mean probably the best example is the save system. The game autosaves as you advance quests (mostly....sometimes it doesn't). You can save by sleeping, but there's no manual save unless you possess and consume a special potion (which is pretty expensive). This is an odd, unintuitive and rather idiotic design decision. It adds nothing to immersion and all it does is incovenience the player for no good reason.

So of course, it got modded out within a day. Hurray!

Aside from that, it's typical eurojank. Expect to be absolute tripe at everything until you put a good 10-12 hours, although if you're good you can still win fights you shouldn't. For example, I defeated a fully armored knight with nothing but an arming sword and my intimate knowledge of the combo system. And also stabbing.

Melee combat is pretty deep. You got a stamina bar, you got five directions of attack, you got combos (and you unlock more combos as your weapon skill advances), it's pretty neat. Armor matters, a lot, as do shields (although I'm going light-ish armor and no shield and doing fine so far.) Bows are absolute murder machines once you level them, but until you do, good luck hitting anything further than five feet away. Aside from swaying like you were drunk off yer arse, there's no crosshair. Well, not unless you use a console command, of course!

Four stats (Strength, Agility, Vitality, Speech) and loads and loads of skills. You level these up like in the Elder Scrolls, by using them. The difference is that, while there's a general level, you don't build towards that by levelling skills, only stats. In essence, you could theoretically be General Level 1, Sword 8, though it's practically impossible since stats (except speech) go up fastest in combat. It does however avoid the Skyrim conundrum of levelling smithing and then having to face OP enemies, although the game already avoids this by having no level scaling.

Overall, as said, flawed gem. Give it a couple of months for patches and it will be a classic. Even what is there now is impressive, considering Warhorse's size and budget.
 

Schadrach

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TheFinish said:
This is an odd, unintuitive and rather idiotic design decision. It adds nothing to immersion and all it does is incovenience the player for no good reason.

So of course, it got modded out within a day. Hurray!
I get the idea. The idea is to prevent save scumming so players are more likely to live with the fallout of their decisions. Don't know that it worked, but I get the reason for the design choice.

TheFinish said:
Aside from that, it's typical eurojank. Expect to be absolute tripe at everything until you put a good 10-12 hours, although if you're good you can still win fights you shouldn't. For example, I defeated a fully armored knight with nothing but an arming sword and my intimate knowledge of the combo system. And also stabbing.
I mean you are the son of a blacksmith, literally an illiterate peasant. Of course you're absolute tripe at most things to start with.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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Schadrach said:
I get the idea. The idea is to prevent save scumming so players are more likely to live with the fallout of their decisions. Don't know that it worked, but I get the reason for the design choice.
I do too, but the inclusion of an exit save would go a long way to making me consider this game. Just knowing that I can quickly save (even if it means I have to exit the game) when family life calls would make the whole system a lot easier on us.

Of course, the disaster of infrequent saves and crashes would remain, which is one of the reasons why auto-save systems should save early and often.

Schadrach said:
I mean you are the son of a blacksmith, literally an illiterate peasant. Of course you're absolute tripe at most things to start with.
Realism is one thing (though a game that lacks crossbows in 1403 does not get to use the realism card), but when it gets in the way of fun by forcing the player to play a gimped version of the game for a dozen hours it sure gets tedious. If you've got a deep combat system with combos, parries, ripostes and all, but it takes the player around 10 hours of dedicated sword murdering to get to that part, you're doing something wrong.

Think of it this way, the first time around we can all push through the boring "being shit" segment because we are caught up trying to learn the game, figuring out the world and just generally admiring the work that's gone into the game. So when the novelty wears off some 15-20 hours in, my character is good enough that I can keep enjoying the combat system.
But if I want to do a second playthrough? If I want to see some of all those other decisions and outcomes that this game brags about? What if I want to remain an illiterate brute instead of the refined, omniglot smooth talker my first playthrough was? Yeah, I just have to endure 10 hours of simplified combat, restrictive quest resolving due to lack of skills and generally just playing a much more gimped version of the game, because it is realistic (but still no crossbows)...
 

hanselthecaretaker

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Schadrach said:
TheFinish said:
This is an odd, unintuitive and rather idiotic design decision. It adds nothing to immersion and all it does is incovenience the player for no good reason.

So of course, it got modded out within a day. Hurray!
I get the idea. The idea is to prevent save scumming so players are more likely to live with the fallout of their decisions. Don't know that it worked, but I get the reason for the design choice.

TheFinish said:
Aside from that, it's typical eurojank. Expect to be absolute tripe at everything until you put a good 10-12 hours, although if you're good you can still win fights you shouldn't. For example, I defeated a fully armored knight with nothing but an arming sword and my intimate knowledge of the combo system. And also stabbing.
I mean you are the son of a blacksmith, literally an illiterate peasant. Of course you're absolute tripe at most things to start with.

The save solution would?ve been to have the game automatically save whenever you do anything significant, via Souls and Darkest Dungeon. It?s like save scumming without a safety net!
 

Bombiz

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BreakfastMan said:
hanselthecaretaker said:
One of the things that sets Kingdom Come apart from its contemporaries is its combat system. It uses a combination of physics and stat-based aspects to simulate what combat was like in the Middle Ages. You can't just flail a sword around, hold down a button to block, or shoot a bow with 100% accuracy through crosshairs.

Striking and defending in Kingdom Come is a very time-based ordeal. Your stamina plays a vital part in your combat capabilities. Strike too many times with a sword, and you'll find yourself out of breath. Let an enemy pummel your shield, and you'll see yourself reeling from their attacks. You have to time your strikes and defense if you hope to survive, and early on it's a difficult affair.

When using a sword, ax, or mace, you'll get the option to swing from five different directions or thrust the weapon forward. To get past your enemy's defense, you'll have to pick the direction furthest away from their weapon or shield and try to hit their weak spot. Enemies have the same stamina system you do, so combat is often a matter of attrition. You have to wear a foe down and hope they leave themselves open so you can slip in a thrust or a slash. As time goes on, you'll learn combos from a trainer which help you push your enemy off guard, allowing you to stun them or causing a bit of damage. Perfect blocks, timed to an icon on-screen will allow you to negate the stamina drain from blocking, and when you raise your skill and learn the ability, allow you to counter an enemy in the same move.

However, if you're using the wrong weapon type, it can take forever to take down a foe, even if you're slipping past their guard. In 15th century Bohemia there are several kinds of armor you'll encounter, and each of them is strong against a certain weapons type. Your run of the mill bandits will often have leather armor, and thick cloth for protection, which can be penetrated by any of your weapons. However, when you start facing chain and plate mail, you'll find your sword glancing off, and you'll need a mace so you can bash the armor in. There are 14 different slots just for armor in Kingdom Come, and finding the combination that gives you the most protection from enemies is a big part of the drive to gather loot in the game.



Read more at http://www.gamerevolution.com/review/368221-kingdom-come-deliverance-review-hardcore-henry#QITVLjpjr3Kg5iEe.99h

To me that sounds awesome. How many other games have this level of detail and strategy? Of course, it?s impossible to actually know what it?s like to play if you?re just watching someone else. Also, considering they had a fraction of the budget of an Elder Scrolls game, and developed a far more detailed combat system behind them, I?m far more inclined to forgive Warhorse for their animation shortcomings than Bethesda.
That sounds basically like the exact same melee combat system that was in Morrowind, but with more directions (Morrowind had 3).
Wait doesn't Morrowind have an attack roll system? Like you make an attack roll to see if you hit or not?
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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Bombiz said:
Wait doesn't Morrowind have an attack roll system? Like you make an attack roll to see if you hit or not?
It does, the choice of attack motion also only determines the number of damage done and has no other impact, so a spear is always better to thrust with, for example. There are only a few weapons where the choice of attack motion is meaningful (higher minimum damage on some attacks, but higher max on others which means you should switch up depending on if you are charging your attacks or just spamming as fast as possible). So no, the two are not very similar.

A better comparison is Mount & Blade, which is the obvious inspiration for KC:D.
 

TheFinish

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May 17, 2010
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Schadrach said:
TheFinish said:
This is an odd, unintuitive and rather idiotic design decision. It adds nothing to immersion and all it does is incovenience the player for no good reason.

So of course, it got modded out within a day. Hurray!
I get the idea. The idea is to prevent save scumming so players are more likely to live with the fallout of their decisions. Don't know that it worked, but I get the reason for the design choice.

TheFinish said:
Aside from that, it's typical eurojank. Expect to be absolute tripe at everything until you put a good 10-12 hours, although if you're good you can still win fights you shouldn't. For example, I defeated a fully armored knight with nothing but an arming sword and my intimate knowledge of the combo system. And also stabbing.
I mean you are the son of a blacksmith, literally an illiterate peasant. Of course you're absolute tripe at most things to start with.
I, too, get their intent, but it's tremendously dumb intent. For one, you can still save-scum around choices just by having the potion. For two, most of the choices take hours to come to fruition, so even if you did want to save scum you'll lose a lot of progress. So all this does is make it really annoying to explore the world, you know, one of the biggest draws of an open world rpg?

To say nothing of losing progress due to crashes. Because the game is terribly unstable still.

As for the second point, I'd grant it to you, except I get nothing for being a blacksmith's son either. I mean, it's pretty obvious I helped dad at the forge, so why don't I start with some points in Maintenance, to represent I can take care of weapons? It's also implied I got into trouble with the mates, so why isn't my Unarmed a bit better?

I mean, I get what they're going for, but if you want to give me a character with some history, give me skills that make sense.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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So, the game's been out for a while and I picked it up a week ago. My general impression is that KC:D is a decent enough RPG, it feels more like Oblivion than Skyrim (mostly due to jank and half-baked mechanics) but provides at least a good 20 hours of entertainment. The combat system is pretty deep, but the sad truth is that it very rarely shows that, as you only get to get really engaged with it when you're facing really good combatants like Knights and Cuman officers. Most of the fights I've been in during some 20 hours of playing have been against bandits, who are so terrible at fighting that you can quickly brute force them just by learning the basics of chaining strikes and hitting until their blocks break and they die from a few sword slashes. Even the first boss fight was sort of anti-climactic as he lacked a helmet, which allowed me to stab him in the face and win the battle very easily. Add to that that the moment you get plate armor (which can be done pretty quick in my experience) you can tank the blows of lesser foes like a God of Murder and most fights in the game feel more like busywork, because they can't really hurt you and you don't need to do much more than spam attacks to win.

That being said, fighting a good opponent is legitimately engaging. Several of the quests are pretty cool (though some are also total duds) and the quests are generally quite reactive. When they are, they are really cool. You can sweet talk information out of people, you can beat it out of them, you can shadow them or just get lucky and stumble upon your goal. You can lie about completing objectives or you can just go and buy stuff instead of stealing them or procuring them the way the quest intended (no way I was getting them antlers from an actual deer, I just found a huntsman to buy them from).

However, my main gripe is that every now and then the game decides that this usual reactivity is not what the developers wanted. In those cases you are locked into doing things a particular way, often a way that isn't always obvious or hinted at, with the game doing its' darndest to make sure you stay on track. The worst offender of this so far was the Talmberg Race, where you are supposed to race to three pre-determined points and back. But 1) the game refuses to actually mark those locations for you in any way (this is a game that often relies on quest markers to tell you where to go) and 2) they only tell you where you are headed once you reached the prior location. This effectively means that the player, unless they've absolutely scoured the area around Talmberg, has to break out their map in the middle of the race to figure out where "the dead tree in Ushnitz" is, race there, break out the map again, figure out where the "Merjohed mill" is, race there and then break out the map to figure out how to get to the "Talmberg Quarry". This while the race is in progress. It is not clever design, it is just frustrating.

That along with the silly amounts of busywork the game throws at you (got hit during a fight? Bring out your armoring kit, cobblers kit and tailors kit to repair all the pieces of armor that were damaged, then eat an apple because you are probably getting hungry) and the many occurrences of fake difficulty (the targeting dot disappearing during archery, the stupid save system) makes KC:D a frustrating experience more often then I'd like. If you're on PC, getting mods to remove the worst frustrations (ie. getting the unlimited saves mod) is highly recommended.