Yet another interview about Kingdom Come with Mr. Vávra.
Highlights:
Some in-game items will be based on the collections of the Czech Museum of Silver in Kutná hora
The game compromises on scale, both in time and space. The map is compressed and things are happening much faster and everything is more frantic than in reality. Similar to contemporary crime stories (solving crime in a few days).
1403 is advantageous because 1) there is a good material for sequel 2) the story is intriguing, easy to grasp and relate to and also short; it did not drag for 20 years as history sometimes does 3) it is not a well known story, not even in the Czech Republic.
The game hopes to capture the zeitgeist and provide experiences comparable to an open-air medieval museum.
There were ideas to use the game assets for illustrating history books and virtual castle tours. It was put on halt to keep focused on finishing the actual game first.
Kingdom Come is an unusual game, which does not always work well with gamers, who want to always get something new, but it must not be too new as to be unfamiliar.
Vavra hopes that the game will through its setting appeal to casual gamers and people who usually don’t play games the way Mafia did it couple of years back.
The last paragraph of the interview calls the game a Medieval simulator.
It’s a difficult balance. I enjoy a good story far more than the setting, regardless of how luscious it may be.
On the other hand, a static story loses impact after the initial play-through, after which the content experience and game-play had better be something significant in order to present something worthwhile.
A great job with the translation! I just read that article today and I even started thinking about translating it myslef eventually anytime soon, if no one else does it… well, not necessary anymore.
They opened up a number of interesting topics there, it sheds a bit of new light and further clarification on many things that are still being discussed and quarreled about in here a lot.
Like the actual degrees of realistic approach and authenticity, etc.
We strive for the realization of the dream every historian or fan of history has, we want to make some sort of living encyclopaedia.
Thumbs up for that!
And one sidenote: If I remember correctly (I was there on the lecture), that line in the presentation actually represented one of the model ideas from the gaming industry which Dan Vávra was trying to question a bit.
Personally i like to explore the game world while enjoy a good story.
But if i must choose, story for me is more important. In my opinion, every game has a message of some sort in it and teach us something and this is the heart of the opera because has influence on the people who play it.
So i expect much on that side.
never cared much for story. there are games like euro truck simulator or dcs that don’t even have a story, just a rough background for context.
besides, the story approach has been exhausted by games like call of duty, they’ve become just like playable action b-movies.
but i do understand how political intrigue cannot just be left open to random events, it has to be shaped by the story writer. i think what vavra means is that without the gameplay elements in place, having a great story doesn’t mean anything. because it’s still a game, not a movie, book, or an opera.
This is a very difficult topic. For me the story is really very important. In this regard Mass Effect 1 was so bad, that I did not get parts 2 and 3. But Experience and gameplay have to be good enough to make one want to play a game, if they don’t work then the story becomes irrelevant.
I would say either of the three can make or break a game.
With a bit of talent its easy enough to tell an interesting story, so I can imagine that Dan might not be aware of how deep the impact of a really bad story can go.
That’s the worst offense to an RPG. Call it simulator or open-world sandbox game then but please not RPG.
AC Black Flag made exactly the same mistake, putting setting above story (although it’s of course not an RPG, but a story-based game). The result was a disaster for me, resulting in a nice game “as a toy” but not in an impressive experience. But that’s of course just my opinion.
I agree that the most fun I have had in games (just personally) is those where experiences have emerged from the world and the characters/creatures in it. Prescribed experiences have their place, but my preference is for games that are an “open platform for fun”.
That said, I agree with Lord Crash that story is essential to an RPG. However, I think there is room for a good balance of both. I apologize for a reference that is fairly far afield of KC, but Grand Theft Auto is, I think, a good example of a game where I could choose between simply playing the story line or running around having fun “doing whatever”. As it turned out, I think I had equal measures of fun doing both in GTA. An example where story “ruins” the gameplay (for me, personally) are some of the more recent Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games (again, sorry for the genre mixing). Those games were supposed to be all about experience, but were so heavily theme-parked in order to serve the story that you had a heavily prescribed experience.
I have faith that Warhorse will do a good job of balancing the two in KC.
I’d say there are two parts to this question. First, whether experience and gameplay is more important than story. Second, whether during the development process, the story should be written first and the game developed later to fit it or vice versa.
Regarding the first question, I acknowledge that experience and gameplay itself can make a good game. Consider all the MMO RPGs which don’t look so great, the quests tend to be silly, … but the RPG gameplay consisting of collecting XP and progressing up in levels combined with the social experience aspects is enough to keep people playing. Or classic Nintendo Games like Mario, Zelda or Donky Kong which have almost no story to speak of.
As to the second question, Warhorse apparently prefers the second route: gameplay first and story later. If you would be interested in helping me translate that interview where they discuss this, just PM me. @PhanTom_CZ , or anybody else.
What they essentially say is that that rules first story later approach is traditional in the RPG genre the original tabletop pen,paper,rulebook,dice games like Dungeons&Dragons. My guess is also that if you start with story, you run into the risk of creating an interactive experience instead of a game. So you may well end up with a movie interleaved with game segments or something like that.
There is a nice video on my favorite Extra Credits YouTube channel about a definition of a game. What they say is that a game is an interactive experience. I think that such definition is too broad, it can actually cover the real life (your life surely is an interactive experience). Game should also be more than a playable story. Because as a playable story you can call even a movie on a DVD.
Is is really something that goes against each other and needs balancing? Why we cannot have both?
A video game IS an interactive experience and vice versa. Sure, video games started as digital toys but they soon evolved to more sophisticated experiences.
But I think the whole discussion is pointless. You missed the basic point of the Extra Credits’ video. It wasn’t their intention to define games as interactive experiences. What they wanted to say is that gamers should embrace all kinds of interactive experiences, not matter if you personally call them games or not. That’s just totally unimportant. The very basic reason to make a video game is to make something which entertains other people. You have to ask yourself what to incluce in a game and how to make it, of course. But only dogmatic people would argue that you have to make your games this or that way just to be actually able to call it “video game” in the end. That doesn’t serve any other purpose than making some dogmatic people happy who think that only one certain way of video game entertainment experiences should be allowed. I also don’t get that hatred against movies or “movie kind experiences”. Sorry, but personally I like many different media and exeperiences, books, movies and video games and I guess most video gamers feel the same. So why shouldn’t it be possible to make cross-over products which take the strenghts from different media and put them into one combined experience? Yeah, there is NO reason other than people disliking certain forms of video games or interactive experiences and trying to objectize their subjective tastes by some crude definitions about what video games should be…
There are different approaches how to make a video game and what to favor in them. It’s up to the developers to decide on that and nobody else. But putting gameplay and setting above story is something I personally don’t like in RPGs and story-intensive video games. So personally, I’m deeply worried what that means for KCD…
I’m just completely overwhelmed by what I’ve read the first time now.
For me KDC was just a very nice looking medieval game with a somewhat higher demand regarding authenticity.
Now I’ve read “realistic medieval simulator”, “open-air museum” and “ideas to use the game assets for Illustrating history books and virtual castle tours” and that changed things a lot.
Creating, or even playing such a game, is an old dream for me as historian reenactor.
But this is a very VERY ambitious goal!
Now I really feel COMPELLED to help making it more authentic!
I was nearly driven away by the hate from those “authenticity is unimportant and also a very bad word” -gamers… but now I have this vision in my mind of thousands of school children who are learning on the basis of KDC, how medieval REALLY was… I don’t want to badmouth everything, but there is still a lot of work before this vision will turn to be a good vision for me.
“Relax, it’s just a game” is not working for me anymore.
But we don’t know how medieval life really was. Only those who lived during those times truly knew. We can only guess based on the biased views of those who have studied the biased views of those who wrote their biased views who lived during the time.
I am being ridiculous of course, but only to point out that the pursuit of authenticity should not sacrifice fun. Fun is subjective, certainly, but I’m betting that the producers of the film Braveheart would have fared far worse at the box office if they had instead made a purely factual documentary. Sure, there’s an audience for that, but like it or not, the audience looking for pure entertainment (accuracy be damned) is far larger in most cases.
I guess the question is, where is the line drawn? I don’t want to play a game where my character eats root soup, drinks dirty water, never leaves his hut with the leaky roof, is sick for most of his life, and dies before he turns 25. He can never hope to own a horse, must walk everywhere he goes (which is fine because he almost never goes anywhere). Point is, a game ought to have some level of adventure. I’m betting that most people who lived during medieval times rarely experienced anything that those of us alive today would consider an adventure.
Hardcore flight simulators are great because of the exacting detail in which they recreate various aircraft and the dynamics of flight. But they also appeal to a relatively small audience because they often require too much “work” to play. If warhorse is going to create an educational tool to give students a glimpse of what life might possibly have been like, according to some people we trust have studied this sort of thing, that’s their choice. If that turns out to be the case, I’ll cheer you for getting the interactive encyclopedia software you’re hoping for and respectfully request a refund from Warhorse - because I want a game.
A point they were making very strongly in the video was essentially saying “We should stop making definitions because the definitions then limit our creativity”. Which is a pretty stupid idea by itself and I strongly disagree with it. First, constraints can aid a creative process as much as hinder it. And more importantly, being able to share a common terminology is an essential prerequisite for any effective communication. Dispensing with definitions is a terrible idea in that respect.
I think what the video should’ve been instead about is that commonly used terms which are meaningful to a large group of people tend to lose precise meaning during frequent use and become nebulous. Especially if the group of people who use the term is quickly expanding or changing in some other way. Adding to it that the spectrum of available games is wide and ever changing, so that no single person can play all of it, we necessarily get a “fragmentation”. Different people play different games and therefore have a different ideas what “being a game” means.
“Not a game” is just a shortcut for saying that “this interactive experience does not have the qualities I got used to expect and that I am seeking”.
Using the term interactive experience is nothing but an attempt to drop an old discredited term that became extremely nebulous as to be meaningless and also very contentious because of all of those hot internet flame wars and replace it with something even more nebulous*, but without the scent of the past flames. Something akin to calling Gypsies Romas. Which interestingly seems to me to be an European thing. Americans apparently do not have problems with using the first term.
*) because even real life is an interactive experience
I feel the opposite way. I am glad that from the beginning Mr. Vavra decided to make a RPG game and the story only came later. Imagine if he started with the premise of telling the story of Henry the Blacksmith and later realized that the best medium to tell the story is say an abstract painting. Then we would have no game.
I am with you here regarding story-intensive games. I would even say that in some story intensive video games the gameplay aspects of it can be a distraction from enjoying the story. I guess that is the reason for the cutscene compilations you can see on YouTube.
As to RPGs, I made the point about MMO RPGs earlier and I stand by it. Gameplay and setting is enough.
There are certainly better experts on medieval period than me, but I’d say that life back then was not as terrible as you describe it. As far as I know, people ate a lot of pea soup with bread, not roots. They were perfectly capable of making a non leaking roofs and insulating walls by stuffing moss into the gaps and so on. The average length of life was admittedly pretty low, but that statistics does not reflect the underlying data well: there was huge infant and child mortality which is dragging the average down. In other words, life expectancy at birth was pretty low indeed, but life expectancy at 21, after you’ve survived the critical period, was fairly decent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time
I think that the basic premise of KCD is a no-nonsense no common sense defying ceilings containing medieval RPG. Historical accuracy is not the original goal, but a side effect of choosing to research things instead of making them up whenever there is an option.
But sometimes they don’t: Walking through a realistically modeled medieval village requires no additional work at all on the side of the player compared to walking through a made up unrealistic medieval village.
I am pretty sure that Warhorse know that pretty well and I am not worried at all. What we get at the end WILL be a game.
if warhorse was making a museum exhibit and not a medieval rpg, it’d still have more “gameplay” than anything else. certainly more gameplay than the typical open world 1st mouse button holder simulator.
btw, sim is really relative. some people think arma 3 is sim, i think it’s a game. arma 3 devs agree. as games become more advanced and better able to represent reality, sim standards will become higher. a game that represents reality as best as possible is not mutually exclusive with the idea of “gameplay”
in short, i don’t understand what’s difference between gameplay that conforms to reality and logic as opposed to the lazily designed gameplay that is based on tropes and cliches that everyone now considers the “real” “gameplay”
and yes, i think herd 5 sheeps back to their pasture is much more interesting gameplay than go to dungeon, kill 5 goblins, take magical ring.
[quote=“bebuce, post:17, topic:16193”]
Are you really sure about the vice versa part?[/quote]
Yes. Let’s elaborate on the matter a bit. What does “official” definitions tell us?
video game
According to the Oxford Dictionary a video game is “a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a monitor or other display.” According to Merriam Webster a video games is “an electronic game in which players control images on a television or computer screen.” To understand what that means we have to look up first what is defined as “game” because both definitions of video games are based on games in general.
game
According to the Oxford Dictionary a game can have multiple meanings. The three main meaning are:
"1 A form of competitive activity or sport played according to rules. 2 An activity that one engages in for amusement. 3 A complete episode or period of play, ending in a final result:
It should be pretty obvious that the third one isn’t very useful here. The first one clearly states that it is only useful in a competetive environment. That applies to some video games, but not all of them. It’s quite a good definition of competitive multiplayer video games for example. The second meaning though applies to each an every video game. Let’s connect this definition of “game” with the definition of “video game”. A video game is then - according to the Oxford Dictionary - "An activity that one engages in for amusement played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a monitor or other display."
Ok, so what does this mean? Isn’t that exactly what we mean when we speak about "interactive (media) experiences? We can add the rules aspect of the first definition of games easily to the definition without changing a thing. It’s still basically the same. And most important: each and every video game I’ve played so far (and I’ve played a lot) met the requirements of this definition…
Let’s double check that with Merriam Webster. According to Merriam Webster a game can have as well multiple meanings. The most important ones for video games are: 1 activity engaged in for diversion or amusement : play
2 a procedure or strategy for gaining an end : tactic
3 a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other or a field of gainful activity
So what’s a video game according to Merriam Webster? Again the third meaning of games only applies to competetive multiplayer games (direct opposition). The second meaning only applies to some games as well (there are for example many non-video games out there that only depend on luck and not on tactics). Again the first meaning applies to each and every video game and thereby a video game would be “an electronic activity engaged in for diversion or amusement in which players control images on a television or computer screen.” You can see, no big difference here to the Oxford Dictionary and again no difference to the basic meaning of interactive experiences.
[quote]
A point they were making very strongly in the video was essentially saying “We should stop making definitions because the definitions then limit our creativity”. Which is a pretty stupid idea by itself and I strongly disagree with it. First, constraints can aid a creative process as much as hinder it. And more importantly, being able to share a common terminology is an essential prerequisite for any effective communication. Dispensing with definitions is a terrible idea in that respect.
I think what the video should’ve been instead about is that commonly used terms which are meaningful to a large group of people tend to lose precise meaning during frequent use and become nebulous. Especially if the group of people who use the term is quickly expanding or changing in some other way. Adding to it that the spectrum of available games is wide and ever changing, so that no single person can play all of it, we necessarily get a “fragmentation”. Different people play different games and therefore have a different ideas what “being a game” means.
“Not a game” is just a shortcut for saying that “this interactive experience does not have the qualities I got used to expect and that I am seeking”.
Using the term interactive experience is nothing but an attempt to drop an old discredited term that became extremely nebulous as to be meaningless and also very contentious because of all of those hot internet flame wars and replace it with something even more nebulous*, but without the scent of the past flames. Something akin to calling Gypsies Romas. Which interestingly seems to me to be an European thing. Americans apparently do not have problems with using the first term.
*) because even real life is an interactive experience[/quote]
Yes and no.
I take your addition with a life as a good example why I said no here. I think we can both agree that we talk about the term “video game” only as a distinctive form of media. Seperating video games from cooking makes no sense but seperating video games from movies or books does. So what is the basic difference between a movie and a video game? It’s the element of interactivity, the possibility and necessibility of the player to give an input to proceed with the media experience. In both books and movies you just sense or try to understand what someone else recorded or wrote without any possiblity to influence it. You’re just a passive consumer. The main difference in video games is that you are an active player because the game won’t run without you. But there is no official agreement or definition how much interactivity a digital experience needs to qualify to be called a video game. Basically every digital experiences which requires some input is a video game.
Yes, because of course people make definitions to make it easier to talk with other people about things, to be able to make precise statements. But to seperate “non-game video games” from “game video games” is one of the worst approaches you could make imo. The video game industry and the fans created genres exactly for that purpose. If you want to make clear that you like “competitive multiplayer games” you can say exactly that and everybody knows what you mean. There is no need and no sense in splitting up the world of video games. To me that is the attempt of people to make some games more “valuable” or “worthy” than others. In most cases I’ve experienced so far the seperation of video games in real games and “other interactive stuff” was deeply connected with some sort of elitism or arrogancy on the topic what whould be played or not. It’s a very small step from “this is not a video game” to “each and every video game should be created exactly THAT way” tbh but it’s a very dangerous and silly one imo. There is nothing worse than dogmatism in a basically creative environment. I personally think it’s for example very irritating that guys in the industry or fans talk about new ways in development and the lack of innovation and all that stuff but at the same time they have a very rigid opinion what a video game should look or feel or play like (Dan among them I fear). I personally think we should reconsider again what the basic purpose of a video game is: to offer a fun and entertaining experience. There is no natural law that a video game for example should offer challenge or that it should put gameplay above story or vice versa. All these discussions should be made based on the creative vision you have for your video game as an interactive experience to offer fun and entertainment. If you think that gameplay should be more important that story in your game and that such a decision would fit your vision for your game, do it. But don’t justify it with anything else than your actual vision and your actual game. There is no need and no point to search for some kind of “objective law” that says that a video game should be that way and that everything else couldn’t even be called a video game…
[quote]
I feel the opposite way. I am glad that from the beginning Mr. Vavra decided to make a RPG game and the story only came later. Imagine if he started with the premise of telling the story of Henry the Blacksmith and later realized that the best medium to tell the story is say an abstract painting. Then we would have no game. [/quote]
Then I think we have different expectations when it comes to RPGs or at least different tastes. But maybe it’s only a basic misunderstanding what “gameplay above story” actually means (for Dan and the game). It could mean that he thinks that story is less important than gameplay in general or it could mean that he wants to develop the basic gameplay first and then create a story that also fits the gameplay. I could definitely live with the latter since that would mean to me that story IS quite important and one of the core elements of the game. If it means the former I would be disappointed because I personally think that games without a strong story are somewhat boring in a way that they are more “toys” than “compelling experiences”. That’s ok for some games which are meant as toys or games in the classic (sporty) meaing but not ok for RPGs which should offer food for both my mind and my soul.
Well, I personally hate MMOs (while you seem to like them). I think they are boring in some way. Maybe it’s because I’m an avid fan of good books who likes a good story with sophisticated characters and clever writing, I don’t know. I know that there is this deep seperation in RPGs between let’s say “premade story RPGs” and “find your own story RPGs”, or more figuratively between the Elder Scrolls games and the Witcher games. The basic problem with KCD is that it was advertized from the very beginning as a kind of “jack of all trades” who offers both, the sandbox-feeling of Skyrim and the story-driven narrative of the Witcher. But let’s be honest, that’s a very difficult task and more like riding on the edge of a razor blade. You basically can’t simply deliver both, letting players find their own story and offering a deep and character-concentrated narrative at the same time. So what does Dan really want? We have a player character with a name, sex and background which indicates that we get a story-driven Witcher-like narrative. But he also promises and sandboxy world with gameplay above story. What does that mean and how does he want to accomplish that? That is what really worries me tbh…
