Great bait heading.
This of course is based on subjective experience…
I have had five issues with this game;
A horse animation locking (happened twice; the second time because I was trying to make it happen).
Crash to win desktop (specific to two builds of the game; happened twice)
Models building in front of me (happened three times, newer game builds only)
Areas of game with abysmal performance (a handful of places that havent been polished that bring the best video cards to low framerates)
Some flicker indoors (a few places in game that need polish)
Yes I did have some missing dialogue for haircuts in a version prehotfix
Also lost some cutscenes once or twice -pre hotfix.
I wont argue how frustrating having a game halting bug can be (I completely agree)…
But for all the hours KCD has been fired up in my house between three gamers; this game is fantastic and of merchantable quality (for me).
Not everyone is having issues (these people are generally playing the game)
Some are having issues after playing for over 100 hours (probably not the scope of the game and not a heavily playtested playstyle)
Some are having issues with saves (a subset of these users use mods to save spam and have created an ‘unplaytested scenario’)
For all the rest of the issues… they are pretty much ‘par for the course’ for open world rpgs. Or even open world games in general.
Replaying Forza Horizon 3 on PC recently highlights this for me…
I used to put in fifty hours a week on the forza forums keeping people up and running…
The game was being hampered on pc by microsoft (intentional;to sell xboxes).
Being an open world game - one of the few pieces of software that taxes computers well- many gamers needed help to make it work ‘smoothly’.
Even a few mhz bump in RAM speed ironed out framerate lows. And virtual mem needed toying with even on machines with tonnes of RAM.
Even working against the forum mods who banned posters accounts for any mention of these difficulties- even temoving 10000 forum posts talking aboit PC issues when the new game (forza 7) was announced.
The last patch for that game broke it the worst and left it unplayable for many. Certainly is a worse product today that it was a year ago…
Their devs were unable to be contacted and support was often a ‘full reinstall’ of game/windows… (even if the fix was a 4mb file easily downloaded)
That was microsoft.
Worst pc products come from them everytime
Bethesda? Skyrim wouldnt even boot for me on day one. Undiagnosed bug affecting many gamers. It was fixable because the community spoke about it and forums ponied up the solution.
Most bethesda patching seems to be user/community contributed.
And people talking up how great the Witcher is?!
You clearly dodnt buy version one when it first released. .
It wasnt until it got a full disc repressing that many of its issues went away…
I dont think the industry norm of patching after release is a consumer win. But as it is the industry norm; KCD/WH have delivered a product of epic scope and done so as well as any studio moght have delivered -irrelevant of age or size.
Where WH have done well is in the after sales service. They clearly havent finished with this product yet.
Two months in… Skyrim didnt have Hearthfire, nor many mods wanting access to its scripts/assets. .
The community for KCD is still building.
All are welcome to ‘fly by’ and say they played it…
Many will keep playing it until some other medieval world view is given to us.
In the meantime I have no other software coming close to utilising my rig (Battlefield 1 multiplayer, sure!)
When playing KCD I can see why my rig is pushed hard to render this large scale open world game.
I wouldnt insist that everyone, OR even the MAJORITY, are experiencing game ending bugs.
Yes -YMMV (your mileage may vary),…
But I wouldnt use Bethesda as an example of software done better.