Where KCD succeeds and where it fails
This is not about buggyness or unfinishedness - this is about game design and execution.
Just my opinion after 2 x play-throughs, one as a virtuous good guy, one as a nasty, damaged, cynical beast. Of course most of these have been posted here and there by people. This is just my personal take, for whoever cares to read through.
NB: I use mods (Dark Times, Tough Master Strikes, No Slo-mo, Like Father - replaces Henry’s head) and I have a decent PC. I empathise with console players who have had issues and can’t get mods.
Succeeds:
- Beautiful, immersive setting, the world feels hand-made. Looking out across a wooded valley at a castle during a storm at sunrise is really awesome. No light pollution so it gets proper dark on a moonless night!
- People have lives, routines and personalities (if no kids) and it conveys that sense of Henry being a newcomer in their established world that he is singularly (and frustratingly realistically) unprepared for.
- Choices can lead to radically different paths, despite the story needing certain things to happen to move it along.
- Combat is tough but rewarding, if not quite “realistic” when Henry learns ripostes after a few weeks. Avoid learning those until Level 15 and it’s a more rewarding game (esp with mods).
- Armour and weapons are lovingly crafted and the multi-layer system is seriously cool. The variety is decent, too. Putting together outfits and load-outs is fun and rewarding, even if Henry shouldn’t be so adept at dressing up without a squire.
- Cuman Beings. The Cumans are really despicable villains, like Stormtroopers in their anonymous singlemindedness (and poor aim). Killing them is satisfying, whether you are Good Henry or Bad Hal. Oh, the incumanity!
- Horseriding is quite fun and with a decent animal it’s rewarding to ride through certain parts of the map. Being able to armour up your horse is very cool - now it just needs proper mounted combat.
- The merchants and trade are pretty good, even if money eventually becomes superfluous (as in every RPG and in life for most rich people).
- The main story is pretty good. Not Pulitzer but decent.
Fails:
- There is no sense of fear. None. Nobody stalks you in the night. You never get beaten and robbed. Nobody can steal your stash. Your only moments of anxiety come when picking locks and avoiding patrolling guards, sneaking through people’s houses and trying to creep up on unsuspecting bandits in a forest. It’s a massive failure to not make the player fear there is someone out there in the dark woods, watching their every move and there is a sinister plot afoot.
- Hunting is laughable. Compare it to Assasin’s Creed: Origins where the animals generally try to run away. The exploit of hunting docile prey and selling game meat is a critical oversight.
- You are the only person with a horse (apart from a few scripted events) and a mission. Nobody else is trying to do anything but a routine set of daily tasks or story-related events. You ride around the countryside for hours and eventually days without encountering a single NPC on a horse, or anyone with any kind of purpose or ambition. There is simply nobody to rival you.
- The bosses are inexplicably helmetless and visor-less, making a rispote-to-the-face with a shortsword a far too easy way of taking them out. And if you made the “mistake” of learning riposte early in the game and you execute a far-too-easy perfect block, you take them out in an instant. An apprentice blacksmith turned Olympic fencing champion in weeks.
- Damage scaling is just silly. The game spends hours making you sweat through the early tribulations, then you become a god in no time.
- There is no attitudinal continuity. You can save someone’s life and in the next interaction seconds later, they address you “God be praised” as if you were from the tax office.
- The greetings…I have to turn off the sound when grinding swords or the Artisan in the forge will tell me 25 times how great it is to see me. I was going to consider attitudes as a Success but they are so repetitive so often, they are a Failure in execution, partly because of the lack of attitudinal continuity.
- Voice acting. Apart from a few decent performances, these people speak as if they are trying to emulate RPGs from 20 years ago and not real humans. And what a missed opportunity to give Czech actors the opportunity to star in this game. Instead we are left with largely unconvincing Brits and Americans, especially Henry. I cringe every time I hear him say “Thskalitsth”. Yes, speech impediments are no reason not to select someone, but Sean Connery’s and Winston Churchill’s were assets, not liabilities. Truly this is one area of an RPG that you absolutely have to nail. Yes, Anthropoid had non-Czech leads, but many of the supporting cast were excellent English speakers and there must be hundreds more who would have loved the opporutnity to voice this game. Henry could have been Vaclav - a brilliant young Czech actor with a desire to voice an evolving character in medieval Bohemia. Instead we got some kind of West Country “laddie” who can’t decide whether he will be convincing and authoritative or hapless and dull in the same conversation.
- The AI is frustratingly inconsistent. On a couple of camp-clearing missions, the bandits all come after you and it’s an intense game of dodge and stab, figuring out how to switch targets and it would be soooo useful to be able to hold the middle MB to swivel only your head. There is a difference between bugged detection, scripted behaviours and AI.
- Realism…oh, realism. For all the effort put into the combat, how is it possible that you can move backwards in full armour through uneven ground in a forest and never fall over? There is zero risk of tripping and falling unless you come to a cliff or rock ledge. This allows the player to just keep backing up and fighting one foe at a time. This is a poor design choice and poor execution. There is an animation for when the player gets knocked off a horse, and there should be one for falling over, which was a huge liability for a foot-soldier in this era.
A poet whose name I cannot remember once wrote that we have many words for pain (sharp, dull, throbbing, piercing, burning, etc) and few words for pleasure. Such is human nature. We criticise more than we praise, especially when the promise of what we criticise is so great.
Scores:
Look & feel: 9/10
World: 9/10
Combat: 8/10
Immersion: 7/10
Story: 7/10
Challenge: 5/10
Open World: 5/10
Voicing: 4/10
Humour: 3/10
Fear Factor: 2/10
Overall Execution: 6.5/10
Potential with patches, evolution & mods: 9/10
Value for Money Index: $60 paid / 45 hours of fun / 90 hours played = $1.30 per hour of fun * 1.5 mod contribution to fun factor = $1.95 PHoF = A.
Sleeping in the wilderness a chance your camp gets attacked
