So after completing From the Ashes and the Amorous Adventures of Bold Sir Hans Capon, I thought of an idea that could drastically change the game for the better. My idea is to have a sort of roleplaying mode where there are no story nor side missions to complete. You’ll have the option to start in any of the major cities and fast travel anywhere. You will be allowed to set your own stats like being putting Strength to 20 and Agility to 5 if you wanted to roleplay as a dumb brute. In this mode, you would be allowed to pick your own perks as well without needing perk points. As well as all this you’ll also be able to get any item you want. It would work almost like a creative menu and you’ll be able to select what gear you want without any cost. You can also have infinite groschen or no groschen depending on how you want to play. Enemies will spawn at camps and Vranik and Privilsylavitz (I know I bashed that spelling I apologize) like they normally would. In this mode, you could have an options menu where you can set yourself to be invincible or other things like how much health you have and how fast you are. This may be an advanced idea and probably not plausible but it would be amazing if you could spawn enemies and NPCs in as well so that you can make your own epic battles and bustling markets. I know all of this can be done with console commands but I am mainly thinking of this for those that play on a console like myself. I love the world and I get easily immersed in it but I think it would be cool to bend the world into my own world with my own story. I love everything Warhorse is doing with the game and I am extremely looking forward to the Band of Bastards DLC soon. Please consider adding this as it will breath much more life into the game and bring in many new players.
By the time I read your second or third sentence I was in agreement!
The details are something that would have to be hashed out, but the general idea that the game could have/should have a “RPG Mode” is a brilliant one! YESS!
Someone on Steam Community started a thread with the title “Open World a Bogus Claim?”
They say it’s an open world but I’m hours in and I have yet to reach a point where I am able to exlore the world or do side quests. It’s just one liniar script after the other and if you deviate you fail. When do I get opportunities to go have adventures outside the main story line?
Pretty much what I was wondering myself when I first encountered the scripted action sequences in the Prologue. THANKFULLY! once you get to Rataje you are “free” but then, yeah, there are more scripted action sequences in later chapters . . . I don’t know if WH appreciate how well “PURE” open world games perform on the market, or at least how well they seem to be performing from my perspective.
- Minecraft: perhaps the epitome of “Open-world.” There is an “end-game” you can get to (me, after thousands of hours, I never even got “close” to getting to that stage! Too much “exploring” and crafting and building to do!!
) Probably the best ROI of any game development project in history. - Rimworld: there is a back story, but there is zero ongoing narrative during gameplay. The direction in which the “narrative” goes is strictly inside the players head and only marginally reflected in the nature of some of the feedback and prompts the game feeds based on the state of events in the gameworld at any given time. One dude, with Visual Studio and Paint, spent a few years putting this little nugget together. Sales are reportedly in excess of a million as of a year or so ago, so maybe closer to two million now? I think it sells for about $10?? . . . Holee crap! $34.99!? https://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/RimWorld/
Well okay, so not all one + million of those copies were sold at that price, mine certainly were not. We gotta shoot from the hip here . . . lets just grab a number out of thin air and say . . . avg sales price was $12, and Mr. Sylvester is netting 55% of that pre-tax (30% cut for steam and we’ll shave off the other 25 just on the premise that he may have subscriptions or other clients he has to recompense on a per-unit sales basis of some sort . . . I’m probably undercutting his take home estimate . . .). One dude works for 5 or 6 years and nets $6 or $7 million!? Sign me up! At my professor salary rate I would have needed to have worked for over 75 years to net that much pre-tax!
- Any number of currently “early access” games on Steam which currently have quite rabid followings and seemingly good sales numbers (a coarse generalization, but it is my honest appraisal): Empyrion Galactic Survival; Interstellar Rift; Freeman Guerrilla Warfare (not quite the same as the others); Space Engineers --> ALL truly open-world games, though some more so that others. NONE have a narrative into which the player must become “enmeshed,” None use any scripted action sequences or cut-scenes (apart from perhaps an intro sequence to the game launch), none have spent a PENNY on voice acting or complex writing/quest structures. They are all pretty much sand boxes in which a set of game assets, a rule set, and some capacity to explore, build and master is provided.
All this to say: it seems from my standpoint that it doesn’t make sense to spend so much effort on overly scripted narrative elements when simply providing a gameworld, the assets, a rule set, and some reasonably well positioned “pre-placed” encounters and/or algorithms for randoms are embedded. Another way to think about it (as I tend to, given I come from a strategic war gaming background) is in a much more conditional event standpoint. A game like CK2 or the Europa series strive for, and arguably achieve high levels of historicity despite locking the player into almost NOTHING (other than the inherent constraints and opportunities which their starting position affords).
I would love to see more Indie action game developers who like “realism” and “historicism” embrace more of an historical strategy game approach to narrative structure and game design, and I see you Warhorse Studios as a PRIME candidate. So I’m trying to convince you here to “kick the habit” of relying on overly scripted action sequences to advance a narrative 
That’s not an “RPG” mode. The game already is an RPG. A role-playing game. You are playing the role of Henry. What you want is a sandbox mode…or rather, cheats. Most of what is described in the OP is just stuff that’s commonly achieved through cheat codes entered into a console. Set your stats freely, pick perks without needing perk points, infinite money, invincibility…
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A Kickstarter target 
Even if somewhat limited, it’d be nice
Good luck, they certainly like their scripted events A LOT. So much so that a lot of the main quest line used to be broken after patches because some scripted cutscene or another crashed the game…
LOL, no Cowa. An Open-world might be “just a sandbox” but it might also be “the pinnacle of RPG.” RPG does NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT! require that there is a predetermined narrative and that ONE character with a very specific starting identity who is “locked” by virtue of the game’s structure into a series of highly scripted action sequences, prepared dialogue or other interaction scenes and cut-scenes.
In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that this “take” on roleplaying game is NOT roleplaying gaming at all. Its an interactive story with a predetermined path (or perhaps a couple slight variants of that path). Yes, the player “plays a role” but it is a role that was already largely predetermined when the game was designed.
Arguably, the essence of “role playing game” is freedom to play a wide variety of roles, maybe even “ANY” role. The best example I can think of (off the top of my head) is Oblivion. Yes, you are the chosen one (or whatever it was called in that game), but you start as just “prisoner” and can be whatever you want at the outset and become whatever you want through the game. You can completely ignore the “Main Quest” if you choose and get hundreds or thousands of hours of play out of the game.
It is certainly true that, going back to the roots of the term RPG, we find there is always “A story” in which the player has the opportunity to play out the role they are pursuing. As far as I know the term as it is used in this context originates in the 1970s with Gary Gygax’s Dungeons and Dragons game. I played the original version in the early 1980s and I can tell you that: there was ALWAYS a focus on the player “designing” what they wanted, and then exploring how that character would interface with the other player characters in the group and with the game world (facilitated by the Game Master, or as it was termed back in those days ,the “Dungeon Master”). The story was there as a framework and the role of the DM was to adapt the representation of the game world in which the story (e.g., a module like “Keep on the Borderlands” or “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” which were set in a specific imaginary world) existed to keep it properly aligned and responsive to player character actions. What it key to understand from this: the reason this type of game play caught on and the reason it has gone on to spawn whole industries, is not because it sticks devoutly to specific narratives, but because it allowed for a “new” kind of narrative creation. I have heard it called “Interactive story telling” and I think that is a good label. The DM might try to steer the players away from the “blank” areas of his/her map/plans/preparations, but a “good” one was always prepared with enough prepped material to be able to handle almost any oddball direction the players might go in.
Oblivion or perhaps Morrowind (I played that one much, much less) are the closets computer game representation of this of which I can think.
ADDIT: but yeah, he was asking for “cheat mode” wasn’t he 
I honestly only read the first two sentences of his post! Agreed with those! Didn’t have a taste for the rest, and as you say, it is basically just “cheat mode.”
What I had in mind was more along the lines of the “Live another Life” mod for Oblivion or Skyrim. Where you start the game from a different starting point but character generation is the same as in the vanilla game.
Nothing wrong with a cheat mode, but not something to confuse with a “Sand box” or “Open RPG” mode either
At the outset, it could just be a “Sand box” mode: start in some other role, and with some or all of the vanilla game’s side quests and activities available; maybe somehow the Main Quest can be “unlocked?” all to say: relatively small changes that primarily use existing game functionality and assets.
However, this initial “sand box” mode could gradually be morphed into more of a full fledged “Open RPG” mode, by having modders or WH staff (depending on whether we are asking/expecting them to do it or do it ourselves) write more characters, more dialogue lines (initially not voiced), more quests, maybe more locations, hell maybe even another map!
Beyond Bruma or Fallout New California anyone?
a game with (general) fidelity to history doesn’t have the latitude of designing what you want. history is a funnel. even historical fiction (essentially KCD) has to funnel. if Henry kills off all Cumans in the whole of Sigismund’s army, what follows (ie, the rest of the game) isn’t based on history. so, maybe historical RPG is an oxymoron. in that case, KCD, KCD2 and RDR2 are interactive storytelling games.
a game with (general) fidelity to history doesn’t have the latitude of designing what you want. history is a funnel. even historical fiction (essentially KCD) has to funnel. if Henry
kills off all Cumans in the whole of Sigismund’s army, what follows (ie, the rest of the game) isn’t based on history. so, maybe historical RPG is an oxymoron. in that case, KCD, KCD2 and RDR2 are interactive storytelling games.
I think Paradox Game Studios would beg to differ! 
Oh dear God you sound so patronizing I wanna puke right now, I KNOW.
I’ve done P&P for about 20 years now and PC RPGs for just as long, my point is that calling what is described in the OP a “roleplaying mode” to differentiate it from what is in the game now is completely pointless, because the game now is ALSO a form of RPG. And 90% of the OP is about cheat codes, not different ways of roleplaying.
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Yeah, Okay, I shoulda read the OPs whole post to realize you responding to his calls for “cheat mode” elements!
But I still disagree that KCD is “good role playing” as you seem to be suggesting. It isn’t. Its playing a role in an almost completely pre-determined story.
Definitely fun, but not really what “RPG” means and if you’ve been playing the stuff for 20 years you know that just as well as I do.
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they can beg all they want but if the outcomes can depart from history (avoiding the epistemological arguments surrounding the def of history, for the time being) by virtue of the agency enabled by the player’s actions, then it’s historical fantasy… which is a bit of an oxymoron
Paradox Game Studios
they can beg all they want but if the outcomes can depart from history by virtue of the agency enabled by the player’s actions, then it’s historical fantasy
You just dismissed about 8000 years or war gaming!
The whole POINT of war gaming is to replay historically well-documented battles wars using representations which are as accurate as possible and see if changing this or that factor can lead to a different outcome. In the absence of time machines or super computers to analyze all the underlying probabilities that any given particle that weighs into the butterfly effect was wobbling that way instead of this way, this is the best thing which leaders and military commanders could come up with “experiment” with warfare and try to arrive at basic premises for how to approach it.
simulations aren’t history. KCD intends to maintain some fidelity to actual history (outcomes). that’s the difference
Oh, I certainly don’t think that it is a GOOD form of role-playing, because the majority of the role is pre-determined and I’ve ranted many times about this on these forums (although I usually got drowned out by the rabid fanatics every single bad design decision in this game seems to attract). There is hardly any player choice in how the story plays out, which is terrible; still, it’s role-playing of some nature. You’re playing the role of a gormless idiot in an utterly uninspired, horribly predictable plot.
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Notice the suggestion here is not “the game shoulda been?” but rather “game needs a new mode?”
KCD can intend to “maintain as much fidelity as they want” in whatever we want to call the existing game design. The point is: the engine, the setting, the art, the characters, the game play, etc., are all SO GOOD, it literally BEGS to be covered with an “Open RPG” mode (ADDIT: WITH! a third person camera! )
That is literally money they are leaving on the table . . . If they are too stubborn in their insistence about “WE MAKE HISTORICAL FIDELITY” to understand that, meh, it ain’t my loss really . . .
KCD and RDR2 both suffer from the same problem: funneling to service a particular narrative.
agree that and open or sandbox version would be fantastic for KCD (and RDR2) to create our own narrative.
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Also I should probably add: I’m actually all for the idea of an open world mode where you’re not Henry and there is no story line; because in my opinion, the story of the game is rather weak. As are almost all characters in the story. What is captivating and immersive about this game is the beautifully crafted world that said story takes place in, I would love to just experience that world without being forced to do so playing as a complete moron stumbling through a woefully generic plot.
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love the idea. problem is what to do with the fake army (eg in background of my avatar). maybe that’s it. get rid of it.
put Erik and Toth on the map with their assets. and it’s left to you to decide what’s next. flee Skalitz. fight, then flee. or just plain flee. but where? you decide… Talmberg or Rattay or just lurk in the woods. etc. if you do nothing for long enough though. Toth’s army will build, and eventually conquer the map
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Keep the marauding army, after a bit of tutorializing in Skalitz it gets bulldozed and you get kicked out onto the curb but unlike Henry, you don’t have any secret silver spoons tucked away in undisclosed cavities and nobody f###ing cares if you live or die. There you go, end of story line, go nuts. This is pretty much how I played Skyrim for about 600 out of 800 hours and how I would have loved to play in the world of Witcher 3, I like the feeling that the world doesn’t completely revolve around you. Guards and passers-by just mentioning events from the main plot in conversation pieces you pick up here and there so that the world feels alive, but otherwise you’re being left to your own devices.
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yeah, Henry isn’t the chosen one but he is. sure he doesn’t have magical skills but he gets sent on superman missions
only problem i see is overcoming ascribed status. if you’re truly a nobody in medieval times, you might not even get a chance due to your social status. have to concoct historically plausible mechanisms to social climb… put more gravitas behind Miller Peshek. he becomes more than a side quest. or, being a pugilist opens a door to join town guard. Nightengale and Bernard become more than side characters. they become your boss. etc
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