Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Henry's coming to see us in 2024

[AwesomeButton]

You can see how well it works in Kingdom Come. The cutscenes feel like they are actually part of the game and experience.

Because besides the interactive movie part there is an inavoidable amount of "game-part" in KCD. The Mafia games stood only on good writing and good graphics for the period, especially the first Mafia.

 

[AwesomeButton]

So that's why it feels so strange. I'm playing it now, about 25 hours in, and couple of times I've felt huge dissonance between your player character liberty of taking action and a need of illustrating the story bits to a player. Someone gave a good example here - when you go back to your village to bury your parents there is a cutscene - suddenly you are at a destination, few kilometers away, just because. The game doesn't take into consideration that you tried to get there by a horse. Fuck the horse, you are pedestrian now. There were at least a dozen similar situations in my experience. This is a big problem in a game, that teaches you that you need to take care of your sleep, provisions and all the other everyday stuff before taking a trip and suddenly you are teleported at a destination. Don't get me wrong, I love this game for now on, but it feels strange in places.

What bugged me the most there was that Skalitz was a completely linear experience - you will be ambushed when getting the shovel - while the game had been teaching you all the time up to now, that the map is open.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The game doesn't really open up until you reach Rattay. It's not open world before that point, and trying to strike out of your own before then is likely going to break the game. Just don't bother, follow the scripted path, enjoy the cinematics, and just wait until the whole prologue part is done.

 

[Multidirectional]

Follow main mission until you get a horse at least, no point in doing any side stuff until then.

 

[thesecret1]

Follow main mission until you get a horse at least, no point in doing any side stuff until then.

IIRC you can get a horse prior to that if you set your mind to it. But you get it very early on in the main quest, so there's not much point forcing it

 

[Multidirectional]

Follow main mission until you get a horse at least, no point in doing any side stuff until then.

IIRC you can get a horse prior to that if you set your mind to it. But you get it very early on in the main quest, so there's not much point forcing it

Yes I did that once just to get that different cutscene in that mission. It's a waste of time really, you just slow yourself down for no good reason.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Just do what Henry would do. When Vavra's self-insert in the game tells you to take a break, use that as a cue to strike out on your own.

 

[Larianshill]

Most of the jank came from attempting things that were a bit too ambitious for a small studio, monastery quest is a good example.

Having just beaten the game for the second time, I've found the monastery quest less insufferable than on my first run, but it's so unbelievably janky.

1) Too much of the monastery quest consists of staring at the loading screens. Your every day at the monastery goes like this - you wake up, go to the mass, press "wait" and look at the loading screen. Go have breakfast, speak to the novices there (if you must), press wait, look at the loading screen. Go to the alchemy lab, make a potion, press "wait", look at the loading screen. Go to the library, watch the cutscene of Henry sitting down, translate the text, press "wait", look at the loading screen. Go to the mass, press "wait", look at the loading screen. Have dinner, press "wait", look at the loading screen. The night comes, you now have the opportunity to go about your business as you please, because the circators spend the entire night at drinking and gambling at the cellar, so nobody is actually patrolling the monastery to create the engaging stealth game experience.
Was this really the best way possible to design this quest's gameplay? Why not just make the mass a cutscene, and autoskip 2 hours after you finish your job at the alchemy lab and the library? The game clearly wants you to do all your dirty business at night, so it's not like there's incentive to skip mass, or play truant after finishing your potions for the day. Was staring at all those loading screens really necessary?

2) It's the first time stealth and lockpicking come into the focus and demand you to use them, and fuck you if you've been playing a good boy Henry who never stole or cheated in his life. Now that I think about it, I think there is actually a way to beat the quest without lockpicking (go to the cellar, see the circators drink, find out about Lucas' bullying, ask the circators to stop, find out from Lucas that Antonius is a fraud, confront Antonius, get out by buying the key from Cellarius with money you get from Jodok's stash), but that requires ridiculous level of precision - I never managed to trigger Lucas's quest in my first playthrough, because I think you need to ask Jodok about him after you're already buddies with the circators. It also may require finding the dagger you find in a locked chest. I'll test it around some in my free time.

3) Unfulfilled potential. Reporting the circators to the prior does nothing, reporting violations to the election guy does nothing, the election plotline goes nowhere.

 

[xuerebx]

I stopped playing at the Monastery, it was a fun ride until that point. Don't think I was even half way through the game at that point right?

 

[thesecret1]

Monastery is the jankiest quest by far. Super easy to break, even unintentionally. And the gameplay loop is indeed insufferable. On the other hand, the atmosphere is on point - you really feel like you've entered another world. Monk singing is great too. Shame they couldn't make the gameplay part better

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

This thread has lead me down a Razorfist path. I'm learning things about Ozzy I never knew. He's a fraud!

I always knew Dio was better.

 

[Quillon]

Follow main mission until you get a horse at least, no point in doing any side stuff until then.

IIRC you can get a horse prior to that if you set your mind to it. But you get it very early on in the main quest, so there's not much point forcing it

the shame of going hunting with hans without a horse

 

[AwesomeButton]

I saw that razorfist for the first time, saw him shitting on FNV in the most reddit way possible, wrote him off as an overrated memer with no taste for games.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

I saw that razorfist for the first time, saw him shitting on FNV in the most reddit way possible, wrote him off as an overrated memer with no taste for games.

He has taste, it's just spotty. I think he worships Thief 2 as the greatest thing ever made so according to Codex standards he's legit. And his music taste is mostly solid.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Thief 2 as the greatest thing ever made so according to Codex standards he's legit

Thief 2 was a step down from Thief TDP Gold. Not surprising.

I don't understand these people saying "#2 was better than the first" for games from those times where the sequels were released on the next year (like how they release 15 hrs of playtime minor dlcs nowadays). Fallout, Thief, were games which broke new ground for games, period. It was a 0-to-1 progress. "And God created a genre." How can someone say the second is better than the first? Sure QoL, sure, accessibility and polish, but which one was the breakthrough? Can you even seperate them?

 

[SlamDunk]

$10 says delayed until 2025.

I'll rise it to $14.03.

February 13, 2025, to be exact.

 

[Vulpes]

Razorfist is a thin-skinned bitch and also a HUGE Looking Glass fanboy. That faggot actually batted for Underworld Ascendant and treated it with kid gloves when it came out. He was more critical of good games like Dragon's Dogma 1 and New Vegas than he ever was towards that steaming pile of shit.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Thief 2 as the greatest thing ever made so according to Codex standards he's legit

Thief 2 was a step down from Thief TDP Gold. Not surprising.

Codex now is supposedly a step down from the old codex. Perfect match.

Razorfist is a thin-skinned bitch and also a HUGE Looking Glass fanboy. That faggot actually batted for Underworld Ascendant and treated it with kid gloves when it came out. He was more critical of good games like Dragon's Dogma 1 and New Vegas than he ever was towards that steaming pile of shit.

Sooooooooo... average codexer?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Thief 2 as the greatest thing ever made so according to Codex standards he's legit

Thief 2 was a step down from Thief TDP Gold. Not surprising.

Codex now is supposedly a step down from the old codex. Perfect match.

The state of the community reflects the state of the industry, and that of the internet. It's inevitable. Who made them so? I'd say corporations, business did.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Fuck New Vegas btw, and anything birthed from Beth's god awful engine LMAO

 

[AwesomeButton]

Fuck New Vegas btw, and anything birthed from Beth's god awful engine LMAO

Not surprised by that either.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

The state of the community reflects the state of the industry, and that of the internet. It's inevitable. Who made them so? I'd say corporations, business did.

What is your argument? You know better than every human on this rock?

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Argh mfer, I just noticed he's a bear fucker. IGNORED!

 

[AwesomeButton]

That's irony of course, about being a proud owner of BG3, but I understand it's too much for your alcohol-addled faculties.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Kingdom Come in the main suffers from having had two leads each of which had a completely different vision for the game. We have Vavra, who is big into cinematic narratives (and is surprisingly good at it), and then you have the Operation Flashpoint guy who is into simulation and being hard core and shit.

I don't know exactly how development went but it's obvious those guys each did their thing separately and there was some difficutly trying to put the two toghether. And that's pretty much it as far as i'm concerned.

Why/how is this a problem exactly?