So it got kind of quiet at work last week and I have managed to make an English transcription of the entire video live stream update for Alpha 0.5. I though it would be useful especially for those, who have not had the time to watch an hour long video. But even if you did, you would very likely find some info you have missed otherwise.
Since some people asked, I was actually gonna make ENG subtitles originally. Well, I am less positive right now. With a little help though, we would be able to manage.
You can find / correct that transcript here, and I will just copy / paste some answered questions from our community + some general update on the development here below.
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So Dan or Martin, do you plan to make some killing animations?
Do you mean like fatality kind of stuff? Stealth animation and stuff? (Various) killing animations like, lets say in a fast or a stealth way, back-stabs etc. We already have that actually. That’s one of the first features we started to work on after we have released this very alpha… In our build we currently have that today. You can actually sneak up on someone and stealth kill him with the dagger. It looks really great. You can do that to standing people, sitting people, (or) the people who are laying down. You can either kill them or just knock them out unconscious. You can than carry their unconscious bodies to hide them and stuff like that. That is actually something that we already have. We just need to plug that to our crime system. We need to make people react to you carrying other dead/unconscious people around. But we have animations, we have a stealth system…
How about insta-kills? How hard will it be to kill someone?
We plan to have special finishing moves… If you are fighting a knight in armor, it should not be possible to kill him easily with sword. A sword is very ineffective against armor. You need to tire him up and finish him up somehow and that’s something we want. It’s not there yet. Plus we have combos. They can probably work this way as well. If you perform a combo, you will perform something special. Like ultra-kill animation or something. So yes, this is planned and it is not there yet. OK. In interest of how hard it should be to kill someone, there is some sort of a trade off we have. It is easy to complain that when you sneak up on someone and he does not know about you, and you hit with any attack, you should be able to kill him with one strike. If he doesn’t wear any armor… But if that is the way we tuned up RPG and all the values, than that is going to make the combat very quick. (But) on the other hand we want the combat to last a little. We want you to take a few hits and dish a few hits out. So we will have to find a good compromise there. And that is something we will continue to tweak.
So Dan, how are we going to implement weapon and armor degradation?
It’s already implemented, I would say. The thing is, that it is not visible on some armors, maybe. But if you hit people in arena, I guess, most of them should have visible scratches and stuff, like damage from swords. It may not be applied on some materials yet. And people should be bleeding. I don’t know if bleeding is already visible. Bleeding is already working but I don’t think it’s visible. But it is working beneath, so people are actually dealt damage when they are bleeding. So you and enemies will have to heal the bleeding (with a bandage)…
Another question was saving and loading system… Do you have any ideas about it yet?
We are working on the saving system. Saving system in a game that is so complicated as ours, especially AI and state of the world… people are not just standing somewhere, they are actually walking around doing stuff, they have several different states, they can be affected with you, they have a reputation. Every single person in the world has reputation and stats regarding you. So everything is so fucking complicated that the saving is not as simple as in a game where you just need to save position of several guys and amount of bullets they have in the magazine.
People are asking about for example half-swording. The half-swording is already implemented right?
Partially… You can do it on purpose of course, but it is in the combos. If you are using …the right combination of attacks you will change into the half-swording mode, but just with one hit. You can’t just change to half-swording and beat him with a pommel all the time. Unless you do the right combo over and over again. Victor was, at least, thinking about it, if we will enable it on a bigger scale. But currently it’s in combos. And we will see if it’s going to be possible to switch modes somehow, but not promising anything, because it would be quite complicated.
How about combat on the horseback?
That’s actually something we are working on right now as well. Yes, that’s a huge thing… With the large scale battles and castle sieges I think that’s the biggest thing people are expecting right now. But if you know the combat presentation video we have released on Youtube, you will see exactly how much effort we put in every feature. How we work on this, how many technologies we need and how many people. So we want to release something, in terms of the horse combat, which is as good as regular combat we have. But in order to create this high standard, it’s a lot of work. Yeah, so horse combat is something really complicated and we are working on the first simple version. And we will see how it (plays). Well, the interesting part about the combat on horse is, …that there is a sort of kinetic energy going on. Like you are sprinting on a horse and we want to translate that to the gameplay. So we really want the combat to be based on physics a lot. So we want you to be able to weal the weapon and sort of capitalize on the energy …of the speed of the horse. So we want you to be able to charge against people and damage them with the collision damage you do, with the weight you have with your horse and all the equipment. We want the horse combat to be based on physics a lot. We are trying how we can to translate it to a cool gameplay. And we think that we are on the right track. But the AI on the horse is a challenge. Like AI is complicated without the horse, but with the guys on the horses as well, it’s much more complicated. So that’s the biggest reason why it’s a problem.
Another question is about building a house.
So there won’t be any constructions in game for sure. And another question was: “Do you live somewhere, do you have a place where you can return”? Yes. Well, so far we don’t plan that you would be able to buy it or something. But naturally, as you progress to the story, you meet people and you work for or with them and they will give you the place to stay. So you will have a place to stay, where you can store your stuff, and such things.
OK, another thing is that we are asked pretty much is the customization of the character
It is important to understand that here in Kingdom Come we want (that everything make sense). In this game it’s not about how you look like because you will play the Henry, who is the son of the Blacksmith. And because of the story reason you will look exactly like this. How Henry looks right not may be just a placeholder, but you will have given character with the given back story. The customization part is more about how you shape his character. So you will have this historically correct story, something that really happened. Most of the events, all the churches, castles, villages, most of NPCs, they really lived there. They really did those things we are displaying in the game and you will get the chance to tell your personal story within those historically correct events. So you can’t change history. This will be given. You can technically spoil yourself by reading history books. But it’s about how you decide to do quests or not to do quests… About customizing characters: You can change his look but you can’t change his face. Customizing in terms of armor or items, that’s a sure thing. But people are asking about faces and hair and beards, green skins and something like that… Like how is the hair thing or the beard thing? Well, we will see. There is a system for that in the game so if we have enough time… which we don’t have enough time… Well, but it may happen that there is going to be some guy… a barber, where you will be able to change the haircut. Because we will have different haircuts for different characters, it’s something that is theoretically possible. It is not our top priority, but its theoretically possible. May be in some update if not in the first version of the game. Otherwise you can change stats of the character, and skills. So basically you can see that we have several different stats and states. For example charisma is basically a state. It is changed not only by your stats, it’s changed by your clothing, your rings or such things. So it’s not something defined only by you, but also by the equipment you have (and by rest, alcohol etc.). Another thing, the noise, is a state. Because it is calculated from (various) stuff. If you have an armor you make more noise than if you have a cloak or something. Speed is also delivered from your strength, agility and the amount of objects, the armor you have and how heavy is your inventory.
How will the leveling work?
Leveling works in the way that when you do something, you level up. And you have skills for everything. Now, we have just those five, but you will have lots of them. And as you do these things, for example we were lockipicking some locks, so our lockpicking (skill) went up, and when you level up (the skill), you receive a perk. Basically, perks are very similar to the original Fallout games. The a perk means that you have some bonus / advantage. In combat they are usually combos, so when you learn a new combo, it’s a perk. So in every skill you can choose several different perks as you level up. And there is a general Level. That is basically the accumulation (sum) of all experience points you have received in all the skills. And as you level up (general Level), you can also get a perk. Either from perks you have not picked from different skills, or there will be separate general perks. So that is our leveling system. It’s quite sophisticated even without magic. There is a lot of stuff to tweak and level up. Plus we have buffs as you can drink something or do something etc.
General development update
Is there anything else major that want to talk about?
No, that is the new alpha we have. Of course, like usually, everything is work in progress. It is just a first draft of most of the features. That means that the crime system is far away from being final. It is the way we are going, so you can see what we are working on and how we try to implement, how the game will look like. And actually that’s the last alpha that we are releasing, because we are heading to beta right now. Yes, we will have a feature lock by the end of the year, hopefully. As you can see the features are coming along pretty nice, I would say. But it is important to know that not all the features we have are in the alpha right? There is way more. The map is way bigger, basically nearly finished… Yeah, but the feature lock means that all the major mechanics should be there. And this should happen by the end of the year, so in about a month. We have a big wall over there, with papers with the names of every feature, and we were taking those (papers) away as we programmed them. Now the wall is almost empty. Not everything was done in a way we planned or thought, but 90% of the features are in a stage that we should consider almost done. So we will have a feature lock by the end of the year and will only work on (a game’s) content and polishing all those features. So at the beginning of next year we plan to release the beta. Maybe better word would be the tech-beta. Beginning means Q1, the first quarter of 2016. We don’t want to release full beta with all the quests, because it would basically spoil the game. IT would be like releasing half-written book or something, so that is something we would like to avoid… Which means there is gonna be most of the features that are going to be in the final game, so you can evaluate the gameplay, and help us to polish the gameplay. And there will be one larger set of quests, …hopefully even a battle. And a lot of new features. We are currently working on the battle. We have 60 vs. 50 people fighting? Yes, I guess. On the flat field so far. The battle will be in the forest so we will see how it will work out. But right now, we have like more than a hundred people fighting in the battle, and they are playing with it this. And since we did not have any video update for quite some time, I would like to summarize the stuff we were doing because we were working on a lot of stuff. So the reason why I am not that active on forums or making videos is that we are finishing writing the quests. The amount of quests we have written so far is quite impressive, I would say. We have about 70 quests written. We have wrote 2200 pages of design. Just the quest design, than we have a few hundreds of pages of game design about the game mechanics and stuff. So overall, in last few years we wrote almost 3000 pages of text. So that is what we are working on right now. We are really busy with finishing the last quests of the story. So we are a little bit late than we expected, thanks to many different reasons. But now, 90% of quest writings are there. Next year we will be polishing dialogues. We are casting actors right now, so we are really starting to implement quests and completing the story. We are actually sitting in a room in front of the green screen in our motion capture studio… And we created our own custom 3D scanner for scanning actors, which is next to us. With this thing we are going to scan everyone that is going to be in the game. I think the characters look quite fine right now, but they are going to look much better even. We also have a lot of… Like we have a new GUI, we were working on fast travel. So hopefully in beta will be fast travel. We are working on the horse, on jumping of the horse which is a little bit… not very good right now. Avoidance, so the horse should be able to avoid obstacles, for example in the forest. We have a new weapons in combat, We have sword and shield. We should have hand to hand combat, that may not make it into beta, but it is being worked on right now. And since we have one handed weapons, (and) they are all very similar, we will probably have axes and all that stuff. Maces. Unlike our expectations we may have in the end polearms. Which is great. They were working on it right now, right? Yes, I think so. We started to produce cut scenes finally. Like today, yesterday, the guys were recording the motion capture and dialogues for the cut scenes. We have a dog being produced right now. We have a model already and some animations, so the dog is also shaping pretty well. And of course we have tons of new graphics, I think that it looks awesome. And since we are all used to this blue sky all the time, if it’s not night, in the alpha, Kuba our 3D artist has worked on the weather system. And it looks awesome. It lookes really good. If you look at my Vine, I posted it on Twitter as well, there is very blurry video of our weather system and it looks awesome. It’s really great and with the new lighting system it’s… awesome. Than, …we have started to produce the stuff for backers. This is the prototype of the sword. We have it for some time already. It is hand-made, forged not… how do you say ‘brousit’ (grind, sharpen)? Blunt. Not blunt. It is semi-blunt or semi-sharp. No. Well, this is actually made really in a forge. Not produced like those cheap swords from India. This is the sword for Wenceslaus backers. Wenceslaus xxxx and higher. Yes. And than we will have one and half swords for the top backers, like 10 of them. We will have to produce 100 of these for the backers who has pledged high enough. Thanks guys. There will be a sign on swords. And here we will have a relief or… A coin. Well, basically we are starting to produce a coins as well, with the motive from the game. And it is going to be placed in here. So that’s it. You can use this in actual combat. No, you can’t. You can’t use it in actual combat, it’s just a replica. Yes, it’s a replica that you can use in combat. It is something to put on the wall, right? Be nice to other people. And we have t-shirts…
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Great work!
The most important part by far.
My eyebrow is now raised so dangerously high that i fear it will desert my head and turns Viking, riding and plundering other faces and later joins other rouge eyebrows in Browhalla.
That is the least interesting part in that video.
This is the most interesting piece of information:
And this:
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@ProkyBrambora
Okay polearms and horse combat,… but for me is this part the most interessting:
I want solve problems not only in a combat. There is poison and more… 
Warhorse do it, in a good way! 
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OK, that, I will allow 
Well, this brings the recent series of South Park to mind.
Can we FUCK THEM TO DEATH?
I’m afraid we might not meet the deadline with this feature .
(P.S. I edited this message to avoid any possible misrepresentations ^^)
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deadline of… ehm… “šup sem šup tam” them to death?