Yeah, hated having to use the game assigned sniper rifle during final battle in Van Horn. That and the other forcing was plain stupid. But, then again, in some instances it likely prevented some of the issues KCD had with select broken missions and mission tracking: Erik stuck outside Sasau monastery, the rescued girlfriend from Skalitz mining hut that you don’t get credit for saving, monks that respond inappropriately to you after you sneak back into monastery after running away, etc
Sure, but KC:D has a lot of options for completing quests, and while this adds in a great deal of complexity, and therefore the possibility of bugs, it leads to a richer environment and the possibility to come up with solutions that aren’t gained by just looking at your mission log and going to the next mission pointer. NPCs move during your quests on their own, and you can exploit this.
For example, I found the bandits hunting Reeky in town, just drinking some beer, chatting about how to find him. Pretty good at stealth, I killed them both in broad daylight, thus ending the possibility that they might endanger his life. You could also follow them, and kill them when they reach the cave, or (now I’m curious), follow them to see where they go after they attack Reeky.
There’s also multiple solutions to a mission, so that if you fail one segment, the game doesn’t throw you to a reload screen like RDR2 does. Screw up with Father Godwin, and he doesn’t want to talk to you about Reeky? Well, in that case you can go to Rattay and search records for known associates of Limpy Lubosh. The interesting thing is that if you do this, you know precisely who Pious is, because his other alias is in the records. When you get to the monastery, you have your target - as long as you remember the names.
A number of quests are like this. You can solve them, in many cases, easier than the guided marker method by actually thinking about what people say, and the situation. At Neuhof, they tell you that Ginger ran off to see his charcoal burner friends. He mentions that there are charcoal burners to the South along the river, but that Ginger ran to the North. Quest marker leads you to the South to the nearest burners - but you can go straight up to the burners to the North and avoid being sidetracked.
Similarly, if you listen to the dialogue in the monastery-quarry quest, and analyze the situation, you’ll realize that there’s suspicious holes in peoples stories, and one guy who you would naturally suspect for planting the devils skull mysteriously vanished. One verbal clue could lead you to believe he’s hiding at the mill out back, and sure enough - if you search the mill, you’ll find him hiding there. If you question him, you solve the mystery.
Have a horse while hunting with Sir Hans? Expect a somewhat different mission.
There’s a lot of clever stuff like this thrown into the game, and it makes the world feel alive. But, yes, it can lead to bugs. What if a guy gets stuck in his pathing in the forest? Well, that can happen - often due to player choices affecting the game world and the mission. It explains why some people have these “game-breaking” bugs, and others don’t. It takes a lot of bug-testing resources to resolve such issues before a launch. Warhorse did reasonably well in this regard, seeing what a challenge it can be.
Funneling/railroading is a negative (ie things that I don’t want). What I like to focus on more in product quality improvement is the positives (ie things that I want). From RPGs, I want different outcomes (material ones that impact NPC world) based on your decisions/actions earlier in the game. I’ve read Gothic 1/2 had this. FO NV had it.
Yep, and I appreciate this as well. All the Fallouts had various ways to affect the world, but New Vegas and (much to the consternation of some) Fallout 4 were the best in this regard. It was due to non-linear storytelling, and being able to choose different factions to team with. This type of game, however, can be extraordinarily complex to create, and very buggy.
FO4 attempted to reduce the complexity by making a voiced protagonist and reducing you to a couple choices per quest npc. Your choices were almost always limited to some variation of yes, no, or troll. Instead of two main factions like New Vegas (though there was plausibly a 3rd), you had the Minutemen, the Brotherhood, the Railroad, and the Institute. Each of these arcs had their own linear story, but you could also play them off each other and eventually side with one, or engineer truces with all the factions after you’ve blown up the institute. This was a monumental task. Can you imagine the bugs they had to work with?
This is why I think FO4 was one of the strongest in the franchise. Despite some of its flaws, it allowed you to affect the world and story well and beyond what any of the other games had done. Choices and actions mattered. If only it hadn’t added in magic weapons and took a step towards borderlands, it would be my favorite of the series. If they had kept in the standard NPC dialogue, it would have been by far the best - but this would have been simply to complex to contend with on even Bethesda budgets.
But, second best to non-linear gameplay is linear storytelling with multi-varied solutions in an open world. That’s what KC:D delivers, and generally does it very well. Perhaps when Warhorse gets better funding, they can pull off non-linear games. Not many companies can really do that at this juncture. It takes a lot of talent, which can be expensive, and a lot of time. The two can blow a budget quite quickly.
