Hey there! I picked up a used copy of KCD while at Gamestop to see what the fuss was about. My partner and I are almost done with Witcher III (no spoilers!) and were looking for a new RPG to play together, this seemed to fit the bill.
These are my thoughts in no particular order.
While the game touts itself as realistic, it’s sort of goofy but it comes off as charming more than anything. The story caught my interest with its cinematics.
Sadly, the impact is weakened by the poor animation and style of the people. I wish they had gone for something more stylized than the sort of “pudding” face we ended up with (reminds me of The Sims 3 and 4, whereas the graphics in The Sims 2 were good enough, had a nice simple style). The limited and often exaggerated way these models must convey emotions makes the whole thing campy. It’s clear the 3D animators should have recorded people acting these lines out, to convey the emotions through subtle body language instead of the stiff, stock animations. There are some scenes towards the beginning where real people were obviously referenced and the difference is night and day. I hope Warhorse can learn from this with future content (and maybe it’ll be a fun mod for me to reanimate the scenes when I reach my upper limit of the game!).
Still, I like the game in the way I like Skyrim. I didn’t like Skyrim’s story. The fun of Skyrim is not the story, it’s running into the forest in your knickers casting fireballs at a dragon. While it’s a little more mundane in comparison, I enjoy watching the NPCs routes and then planning a perfect heist. Or discovering alchemy recipes. Or taking a ride on my horse and admiring some nice scenery.
Speaking of scenery, there needs to be a better way to distinguish which foliage you can and cannot pick. Also, make dandelions weigh less. 239 dandelions do not weigh 23.9 lbs. the approximate weight of a dandelion is less than 0.01 (the weight of a cup of dandelions is abt 0.12 lbs of 0.06 kg, consisting of approximately 15-20 dandelion flowers). Please, I beg of you. I pick so many dandelions… they weigh more than my chainmail… please Warhorse my children are starving I can only carry these flowers with my weak noodle herbalist arms.
I’m sure everyone knows lockpicking sucks. It’s so bad. It’s terrible on the PS4. Please let us use the d-pad to turn the lock instead of left analog. The help screen is not helpful. I had to watch three youtube tutorials before I realized I needed to engage the left analog before positioning the right or it pretty much instantly demolishes the lockpick.
Q q: how do you equip a dagger? Why doesn’t it say anywhere on the information screen?
Alchemy is fun. It’s time-consuming, but I feel like it should be. I really enjoy it. Good job there!
The detection system of the NPCs is really good. I’m glad they get suspicious if there’s a crime and I’m hovering around. It’s neat and very smart. But I do wish I could keep stolen horses like I can keep literally everything else I steal. Or at least let me loot the saddles and make the horse return home. There’s been a stolen horse in the middle of town for 6 weeks and I can’t move it without getting chased down.
As a historian, the game checks a lot of boxes for me. Curiously, when looking into LGBT+ issues on the game, a lot of people pushed back that having gay characters (who are NOT villains) wasn’t historically accurate. This is an incorrect based on modern bias. The game is set in 1403. Things weren’t great for gay rights, but off the top of my head I can tell you about a 13th century same sex union in between a Ukrainian deacon Evagrius and a priest named Tit (yes, that was his name). It wasn’t until 1424 things got bad again, but the game takes place in a lull between the height of the 13th and 15th century inquisitions which largely targeted gay men. I’m not sure where people are getting their history from, but being gay in the game’s setting was as common now as it was then. There have always been gay people, but it was often so “normal” that history didn’t bother to record it except as a footnote.
While the game is buggy at times, I encounter the same sort of goofy bugs in Witcher III so I honestly don’t find them too terrible.
Ultimately, I’m still hoping to get the PC version on sale at some point and look forward to hanging around the community!