Dear Warhorse Studios,
you have so far created a beautiful looking product, good job with that.
However, that is about everything that’s good about it. As you are well aware, it’s perfectly possible to achieve a high turnover based on graphics quality alone (for example Skyrim). Yet in the long run that won’t be enough to build up any kind of brand recognition other than: Kingdom Come, The game that looked good but was otherwise completely unremarkable.
I highly recommend you to consider the following points:
- Combat system
It seems you never had a finished concept of the combat system before development.
Why do you have 5 attack directions if they can all be blocked by a single button, without even aiming? I don’t know if you tried to imitate the Mount & Blade system, but the main difference there is that you actually have to aim your block in the same direction as the attack. Your system, as it is, is utterly pointless and just a cheap attempt to make the game look more complex than it really is.
Now you can either just hold that block button or mash that attack button. Since the block will be broken eventually, mashing the attack button is the one and only strategy needed in Kingdom Come.
Stamina? Yeah that stops the attack button mashing for a couple seconds. But your great AI you always talk about never makes use of this opportunity. So while the player leisurely regenerates his stamina out of the enemies reach, the enemy swings his weapon through the air or approaches the player at snail speed. Might as well have no stamina then.
Enemies not attacking bug? You got such a large team and this far into the development you couldn’t figure that one out?
Either way, the combat system is the most pressing problem for your upcoming game. You have all those videos theorizing about combat in armor and medieval fighting techniques, motioncapture and whatnot. Yet the actual combat system is simplistic at best, probably due to lack of an overall concept before development.
The other things aren’t that important but certainly need some fixing too:
- Saving / Loading the game
If you have so much trouble with loading the game because of your awesome “AI” system. Maybe you should rethink your approach. There are plenty of old games that had daily routines mapped out for all actors, they also somehow managed saving and loading. Again it seems like you have great artists, yet lack in the programming department. Your routines are probably too complicated to achieve things that could have been done in a more simple way.
- The pacing
It takes forever from the start of the game until the player gets to fight anything. You should know a game needs action, or otherwise I could just read a novel.
- Ingame Pricing
This one is really minor. But since you have done all this research, how about making the prices of things ingame realistic, i.e. a sword costs as much as a peasant would earn in a year and is not just the same price as 10 eggs.
As written above, the main issue is the combat system, though it certainly would do you good to fix the other issues as well.
Sincerely,
Somebody who hopes your game will be good.
