Hi there! A bit late to the party, but I finally joined the Alpha testing phase too just few days back. I recently started to get the feeling that my meager Knight pledge is really not doing the KCD much justice, so I eventually reached deeper into my current savings to upgrade to Earl.
I still don’t have a PC that could handle the game properly, but at least my brother does, so together we gave the Alpha 0.5 about 30 hours of gameplay this far and below are some of the notes that I took while watching and playing myself.
I decided to start a fresh thread since there don’t seem to be too many threads for some structured cumulative gameplay feedback around here. So far it seems to be mostly fragmented to various threads about some specific things. I also include my combat notes here, it just doesn’t seem practical to separate them from the rest… although I can repost them in some dedicated thread if there would be any point.
Feel free to follow up with your own general feedback notes, if you want, just let’s keep them organized and easy to follow for the @Warhorse’s sake. 
The desktop setting we use has an i5 quadcore CPU, 16GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 760. Most of the time we used Medium or High settings, which are mostly stable and usually keep running between 30 and 40 fps, with drops even below 30 in some densely detailed areas such as the Kolben estate and Zbyšek’s camp. A couple of crashes occured on the High settings. We tried the Very High only once and briefly since it made the framerate generally drop even below 24 fps and the game didn’t take very long to crash.
Environment, lighting and effects:
- The new Global Illumination lighting looks generally fantastic!
- The darkness at night is impressively authentic, but the “minimal light” effect around Henry feels a bit odd, especially when it becomes too obvious in some cutscenes, like herb gathering. I understand it’s probably a temporary solution in order not to leave us “completely in the dark” without a torch, but some camera-applied visibility effect emulating how eyes get slowly used to the darkness would definitely be better in the long run.
- Another kudos is for the smoke effects, the burned-up Kolben estate has a great haunting atmosphere at night!
- The apparently randomized generation of mud, waste, horseshit and other stuff makes a bit funny effect when roads are bordered by lines of fish skeletons, even midway through the fields…
Gameplay interactions:
- Some of the interactions are not represented very effectively. On one hand we have short cutscenes with repetitive actions like flower picking which become boring to watch very soon an would be better off left in the 1st person view completely. On the other hand we have a unique action which should technically take a lot of time and could use a short cutscene with several shots and cuts to simulate the passing time - the Kolben estate gravedigging with that weirdly “sinking” grave bottom…
- Waiting/sleeping function needs to speed up a bit. It doesn’t seem to save that much time for the player, but it does provide (enforce?) an opportunity to go fetch yourself something to eat and such.
- States like fatigue and hunger might be better represented in-game in words by certain stages rather than in exact numbers and percentages.
- We randomly encountered a minor bug where interactive items didn’t show their Use button option, or even their name on the cursor. Happened once while trying to initiate alchemy (all workbench items remained inactive) and another time with the coal pieces around the smithy. First one solved with reloading the game, the other by changing the resolution. No idea how to replicate this bug further. The issue with the coal actually might have been that the nametag and Use button show at a different distance/angle from the item.
- Just a small detail, but it would be nice to be able to both mount and dismount a horse from either side - currently the dismounting goes always only to the left. I mean an option to either choose by pressing a left/right button together with the dismount button, or leaving it to the game to choose at random (or based on the environment).
- In the current build every pickable item resets on reload, but how it would be in the final build? It would be great if there were certain pre-set areas (like around the stream, etc.) where certain amount of flowers could spawn over (longer periods of) time.
Alchemy:
- Splendid mechanics! A bit puzzling to get into at first, but very nicely designed overall!
- Please, place the alchemy tome closer to the center of the FOV (at least the page with cooking instructions), the necessity to keep on turning your view extensively even in widescreen and/or switching between the workbench and the book is a bit too ineffective and gets tedious soon.
- You should be able to check your inventory and all your ingredients and potions at any time without leaving the workbench (just to keep track of all that you have). So far you can only select the ingerdients for cooking, which should be bound only for the workbench shelf.
- The autocook function is very helpful at the beginning, before you learn to handle the boiling and timing properly. Just the function names might be more descriptive, like “prepare ingredients” and “cook by instructions”.
- An alternative function to straightforward autocooking might be to (temporarily?) “memorize” a recipe and “cook by memory” right at the workbench.
- Also, when autocooking, the character should be able to feed the flames with several pulls in a row like the player can, instead of repeating the whole animation separately.
- It would be fantastic if you could effectively multiply the amount of the ingredients to create and pour off several doses of the same potion at once, automatically, or manually.
Dialogue interaction:
- There seem to be a couple of bugs in dialogue setup, few lines of voiceovers are mixed up on the Bailiff character talking about Jerry and on some other occasion I noticed a significant drop of volume in lines spoken by Henry to some other characters. Not sure where it was, though. Will specify it further if I encounter it again.
- The selection of dialogue options should more closely represent the most important points of what is Henry about to say in that following line of dialogue, or where it’s approximately/expectably about to go. It’s also not much use to stumble upon two dialogue options one of which seems the same as the other and even after trying both you’re not much the wiser about what was the difference, or why was one of them exclusively more important than the other. One case where I pretty much felt this way was after talking to Jerry’s wife. And btw. I wouldn’t expect a countrywoman to use anatomical terms like “anus”…
NPC and location names:
- We have a lot of authentic Czech names here such as Pavel, Miroslav, Zbyšek, or even Diviš (a very archaic name today, I guess an actual historical character of a local lord in this case). Great to see!
- A single note to Miroslav - I doubt someone would address his dying longtime friend in this very formal way, the more common and informal Mirek woud fit much better…
- Then we have some anglicized names such as Marianne, or Jerry, which doesn’t seem very authentic and even necessary. Since at least most of the average (not historically set) characters can have made-up names, it would be always better for their name to reflect their ethnicity, which makes mostly Czech and German. Most č/š/ř-heavy names would be definitely better avoided, but luckily Czech name registry has a wide variety. And even with English-torturing names such as Řehoř we always have a viable German counterpart, like Gregor, if there’s no other option.
- Marianne could be easily exchanged for domestic Mariana. Jerry is a bit trickier, as a diminutive of Jerem-y/-iah. I’m not sure if the Czech variant, Jeremiáš, has any established diminutive. But to make it sound similar, we could use Jiří (the Czech for George), or even better (since “ř” is difficult for English speakers) its rustic form Jíra (read as “yeara”).
What surprised me a bit is the actual extent of germanized names being used.
It’s understandable for a knight/lesser noble like Zbyšek to use a germanized noble title. Back then it was like to have an anglicized online nickname today - trendy, classy, cool-ish, whatever. But what puzzled me a bit is how frequently even ordinary Czech commoners use germanized names for their own towns/villages. This seems more probable among the upper middle-class, or nobility, but not that much among common villagers. Like even Henry himself referring to his home Stříbrná skalice as Silber Skalitz. Of course, the reason might be translational - it has that devilish “ř” again and the german Silber is easier to say in English.
But in this case I would rather argue for half-translating it as Silver Skalice. The reason? English language here plays a role of a communication substitute/compensator for the domestic language and as such it should try to maximize the effort to translate expressions that can be supposed to be in Czech by Czech-English linguistic means. Leaving influence of other languages only to cases, where they would clearly be used as default in Czech language itself. I’m just somewhat unsure in how much would ordinary Czech countrymen use germanized location names in between themselves. It’s much more likely they would stick with domestic names unless its somehow necessary to do otherwise.
A similar thing goes for the German term “Groschen”. Truth is that the German term for this type of coin is already established in historical registers of English too. Still, since English is there technically to translate/represent the domestic language, I would personally argue to anglicize it into “grosh” and “groshes”. To reflect the domestication in Czech language, which doesn’t really use the German plural inflection -en (nor the full spelling) by default. Plainly using the German form just because we don’t have much precedence in this kind of translation makes it feel like the term was actually being commonly used that exact way in this particular context. I don’t believe it was.
Mind you, I don’t really have anything against German guys or their language. I’m just more for translating from Czech where the Czech is due and from German where the German is due. To avoid possible lost-in-translation misinterpretations. For lots of people this game is going to be an introductory lecture to the particulars of medieval Bohemia (and medieval Europe) and Devil’s in the details, they say…
Combat:
- Just like with the alchemy, the mechanics looks great and extremely promising, but contrary to it… it needs a lot more tweaking yet.
- So far, to me the controls seemed rather non-responsive and unreliable, which makes the combat very difficult, frustrating and even disencouraging to get into at this point. I’m definitely not a newbie to close-combat oriented games - I love them and I’ve had my fair share of even the legendary Dark Souls too. But games such as DS usually manage to even out most of the intentional gameplay difficulty with seamless control of your avatar which gives you an effective fighting chance. Something which I did not find in KCD even after some five passes of the Tutorial and well over 20 attempts on a duel in the arena. I’ve even set the graphics settings to Low and the resolution to 720x480 (!) to have a stable as-smooth-as-possible 40+ fps in the arena whatever happens. The game was running smooth as butter, but that’s no help if the following occurs:
- The opponent starts to attack even before the intro animation fades out and at least in 1/4 occasions takes about 1/3 or 1/2 of my health before I can even respond.
- Any opponent blocks (and parries) almost anything I throw at them, but my block alone frequently doesn’t stop even two subsequent strikes. I can stand about 3-4 hits, or 4-6 with armor. Any opponent remains alive and kicking ass even after I actually manage to land 7-8 successful hits all over him.
- Henry keeps on taking a long comfortable pause between each attack, no matter the stamina, or however I try to time the strikes. How to achieve a fast streak of strikes like the opponents do so often is beyond me. Combined with the staggering effect on a successful hit, these usually finish both me and the whole combat instantly.
- The only effective way to break through opponent’s defense is to push them to the fence, after which they somehow start failing to block. It doesn’t, however, prevent them from killing me with a couple of random swings anyway.
- My brother actually managed to win a single duel… because the guy who stole the document at Kolben’s froze and stopped fighting after a few seconds…
To watch someone pulling it off like DannyProw did leaves me awestruck, especially since his hardware/software setup is apparently mostly identical to ours.
I definitely will keep on trying and hoping for miracles and swift combat patches. 
But in the meantime:
Really, thank you for all the work that you’re doing! This all looks fantastic for an Alpha build and I can’t wait to see what’s waiting further down the road.
Hope this textwall will be of any use.
Wishing all the best!