Another Rant on the overall game

Interesting. I don’t use sword /axe/mace combo pts because I don’t see the point given how the NPCs fight, and with archery there aren’t any pts to spend

The perks/skills I care about are:
Rabbit strikes
Autobrewing (potions; because task gets tedious after while)
Fragrant boy, burgher boy, magistrate (whatever they’re called; so I can get a charisma boosts)
Drunk lockpicker (because some very hard locks are very difficult to impossible without it)
First aid (just because I’m vainglorious and want to be a field medic)
Mule (because I’m a pack rat)

The rest have some benefit but don’t lose sleep over not having them

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again:

The Witcher 3 is an unfair comparison.
W3 is the culmination of a decade worth of work in the Witcher franchise. The team is intimately familiar with the story, its characters, the world in which they live, and the software they are using to create all of that. CDPR, by this point, has multiple games under its collective belt, and years to iron out their bugfix process. They know their fans, they’ve heard what they wanted in a game before it even began to be created. They are familiar with the development process, and they know their limitations as a studio.

If you want a fair comparison, stack KCD against the first Witcher, from 2007. See how Warhorse, as a new studio, compares to the as-of-then largely unknown CDPR. Take a look at the bug list, the graphical glitches, the major crashes (a large portion of which still exist in the game to this day - link). Read about the planned expansions that never got developed, the console version that never happened. Compare Witcher’s 800k sold copies in the first 10 months to KCD’s 1 million+ in the first 4.

You might find, in the weighing of the two, that Warhorse isn’t doing so very bad after all.

4 Likes

That is also not a fair comparison, is it? You are discarding years of evolution in videogame development. It’s like comparing a new scientist making a major breakthrough in cancer research with a watson and creek who simply discovered the DNA confirmation. Collective knowledge is actually a thing. Warhorse could have drawn from that, and actually, witcher 3 is a few years older than KCD, and in that time, videogames evolved quite a bit.
It’s hard to have a decent discussion here, because it appears that there are a lot of fanboys that overlook the flaws of this game for no reason.

1 Like

Wrong, it’s hard to have a decent discussion here because the arguments are shallow and repetitive, with little willingness from anyone to see things from any perspective but their own. Reducing people to titles such as “troll” and “fanboy” is equally counterproductive to any sort of reasonable discussion.

By your logic, any video game already released is invalid by virtue of age. Also, consider that KCD has been in development for 10 years, 4 in the public eye.

However, Warhorse did draw inspiration from W3, they said as much several different times.

If you’d read my post a little more closely, you’d realize that the comparison I’m making isn’t from one game to another, it’s one young studio to another. The relative inexperience of those studios shows in the products they release and the errors they make—whether that’s the game itself, subsequent patches and updates, or unsavvy business decisions. That is why comparing W3 to KCD is unfair; you are looking at products backed and maintained by studios with vastly different levels of experience.

4 Likes

I would add that “experience” does not mean only programming experience in general, but especially the experience with the very product you are releasing. In Warhorse there are developers with lots of experience in general, but none of them ever did something like KCD. Drawback is that they may too often fall in a trap that more experienced RPG developer would avoid. Advantage is, that they can be more innovative, because they are ready to go into something new. I expect that KCD2 and possible following titles will be technically much better and without all that bugs, but they would also be without too many new innovative features relatively to KCD1. But c’est la vie.

1 Like

By accepting and defending the game as is, buggy, incomplete and underdeveloped in many aspects, you are not contributing for the improvement of it. The trend of releasing a game before finishing should not be supported, and I think it’s outrageous that months after launching, many issues of the game were not resolved, albeit there was time to release a new DLC. To me, this just shows the position of Warhorse, but please, keep buying this stuff if that makes you happy.

1 Like

There are experienced devs at Warhorse but many are noobs as WH has acknowledged. Prokop, the ashes lead, was an economics graduate student. So, for many, it’s not really that they didn’t have any past industry RPG work experience bias to curtail their innovation/creativity. They had no industry experiential bias at all. Enter Prokop and ashes

Prokop’s bias still seems to come through even if it isn’t industry RPG. The financial mgmt system aspect of ashes (ledger) appears to be something straight up out of the mind of an economist/accountant. Just to be clear, this isn’t a disparagement. I love the concept.

So the innovation factor, if it exists, may be more a function of non-traditional backgrounds than industry-but-not-full-on-RPG experience

2 Likes

I have neither accepted nor defended the bugs in this game, which you would know if you’ve read anything I’ve posted. I have, however, tried to weigh in on discussions in an effort to bring additional perspective to an otherwise biased argument.

The trend of releasing incomplete games, while distasteful, is also a normal industry practice currently. That is not a statement of support nor excuse, mind you…merely an observation of fact. Because of this, I have not found the development process as outrageous or surprising as many others apparently have. (Is that a factor of background? Of experience with small development teams working ambitious projects? Platform bias? I’d wager a combination of all, and more. But user expectations and the reasons for them is a different discussion entirely.)

As far as bugfix vs. DLC release, I would just point out that a production studio is not a homogeneous beast. Work continues in other departments, regardless of the workload in the rest. Does it make the studio look bad? Sure, which means a failure on the PR group’s part to anticipate this problem and take steps toward damage control.

Regardless, I and others will doubtless continue to buy this “stuff” for the very reason that we like what they’re making, and we want them to keep making it. And, God willing, making it better.

3 Likes

Definitely agree up to a point. That point is that some mistakes weren’t from inexperience. One might not even call them mistakes as much as consequences of business decisions. The decisions by DS that forced WH’s hand. And, the executive decisions by Daniel and Martin that we don’t have direct visibility to but might be able to infer (QA approach during post production releases)

3 Likes

Very true. Many factors contributed to the final product…financial needs, contractual obligations, software limitations, inexperience, personal bias in leadership, project creep, general fatigue, etc. It is difficult to capture entirely all the data from ten years worth of work from a group…at least in a small enough post that people would bother reading it!

1 Like

@Keegan Did WH ever have a post-production reach out with you and the other backers? If they haven’t, would be a nice touch. Script going something like the following: You helped make this possible/happen. Thanks. As a sign of our respect, we want to talk with you, learn from you and share our vision going forward.

1 Like

Post-production? Nothing so formal, that I can recall. During production, they frequently thanked the backers for their support.

did WH webcast during development? i was thinking something like what Tobi and Prokop did with ashes but the audience would be backers and topics/discussion points as i mentioned above. i get the feel i’m persona non grata so the recommendation may fall on deaf ears if it comes from me

It was. You can definitively stop following the main quest and immerse youself in this beautifull world when you arrive at the Rattay mill, which is the end of the introduction.

It seems that you played the game for 2 hours max. Keep playing until you find that you was wrong about what you said. You definitively can roleplay a rogue or a ranger, a cavalry warrior (shoot from your horse for example) and/or a charismatic noble, or all at the same time, or not.
There is even an achievement to be a pacifist ; you have to kill only one guy in the whole game to do so.

1 Like

I did feel the same that if I followed the main story in a realistic way, I would have no time developing my skills enough for a battle against Runt. I had only mail armor when facing Runt’s army in my first playthrough, and did not manage to sabotage anything beforehand. It was tough for me, especially the archer part. As for Runt, he is a boss so that I expected to die a lot. Fortunately I got an autosave just before the battle.

To be honest, I felt the same for many games. In my very first Baldur’s Gate playthrough, when I reached the final battle, my hightest-level character was Imeon, at merely level 7. All the other members are level 6 or less. My entire squad was nearly wiped out by a single cloudkill spell, which has a chance to instantly kill any character that are equal or less than level 6.

But on the other hand, when I found my Henry can heal himself in a night’s sleep, I told myself, ‘well, this game is realistic, but still a game, afterall.’ And later I discovered that, Henry is even able to heal with the marigold potion, which is easy to made, with marigold being everywhere and cheap, and the it takes effect in a matter of munites.

As a result, in my second playthourgh, I played KCD more like a regular game. Though in hardcore mode I got penalties in serveral aspects, the overall difficultiy dropped dramatically. A lot of players call the ‘softcore’ version already hardcore for a reason. My point being, a hardcore video game has to find a balance between hardcore and fun.