Depends on the bow. Longbow shafts were an entirely different beast from the normal short bow arrows, which were as you note often more of a harassment weapon. Crossbows, though, could punch through armor at close enough range, and were quite a bit more deadly. There’s a reason they were regarded with such loathing by dudes in armor who thought they weren’t quite cricket. The main drawback with a crossbow was complexity and speed; with longbows, it took a ton of practice and strength to use them effectively.
It would be cool if someone compiled all the crazy and/or realistic details and tidbits I’m hearing about. I heard you can be fined for not having a torch at night?, and your clothes can be dirtied and the guards will realize more body searches to you then? and you have a reading bonus in the latrine?
I’m really in love with this game after about 8 hours. I’m fully invested in my character and the story - although it’s standard rpg good vs evil stuff, the cutscenes are engaging, the world is beautiful and I’ve got a real soft spot for the time & place. It’s gritty, there’s a ton of attention to detail and I’m motivated to level up skills.
It’s janky, sure, no doubt it’s a rough around the edges. And I haven’t run into any major bugs yet, but from reviews I’ve read those may come later. The combat has gone from something to be dreaded to something I look forward to as I’ve moved forward. The lockpicking suuucks - but I’m not using any mods until I figure out if I will improve at it or if I need to write it off. I have not yet run into a quest that I couldn’t get around through other means.
I get it on the save system, I really do. The tutorial, which is about 2-3 hours long, had pretty limited saving. But after that there’s a lot more choice - and I’ve never had issue. Any time you sleep in your bed even for just an hour, it saves. Visit a bath house, it saves. Every quest that begins, it saves. During different parts of a quest, it saves. Find a campsite in the forest, it saves. Drink a schnapps that can be brewed yourself with alchemy, it saves. So I’m super mindful of hitting a bed before trying to pickpocket or go stealing, or venturing off to a new area - but by the same token, I can’t save/reload, save/reload, every time I pickpocket - there are consequences. I totally get the complaints, but it has not yet been oppressive.
This is all subject to change at any time, but this sucked up my whole Friday night and I’m eager to get back to more of it.
I’ve watched more YouTube videos of this, and from watching one user in particular, combat can be cheezed with archery by shooting arrows at point blank range at the bad guy. It’s reminiscent of Thief where the player can panic shoot arrows to the face to stagger guards followed by finishing blows with the sword. My beloved Thief can get away with that though because it was never billed as a realistic combat simulator.
I am disappoint after all the pre-release videos demonstrating high fidelity swordplay. Keep in mind I have over 20 years of medieval LARP swordplay experience that would make most table top D&D players envious, so my opinion on this topic is akin to Richard Ordway’s on snap rolls.
Sorry if someone mentioned this before and I missed it, but I hadn’t heard that. That makes a huge difference. So it isn’t as limited as I understood it to be. I still would like a save on exit, but I am a little closer to buying it now, at least after a patch or two.
I think the Mongols and English would like to have a few words with you.
For the record, the steppe horse archer was the premier weapons system for centuries.
I think what caused problems for people is that the saving is just very limited in what I would call the prologue. After that the autosave happens much more regularly.
Beware the House of God quest that you get in the monastery.
It can break your game. Bug thread here: https://forum.kingdomcomerpg.com/t/house-of-god-neverending-loadingscreens-solution-included/39617
Despite the rather negative reactions I have seen this game to spring, many of them very well articulated, I went ahead and get it full price. I think the devs will appreciate the 30 extra bucks (minus Steam tithe).
I haven’t got very far into the game itself, still inside the Prologue, about 50% in I presume. That’s because I have a family and I usually spend my gaming time in little 30 to 120 minutes chunks. In that fashion I have played through Pillars, Wasteland 2, and I was making my way through The Witcher 3 until I got tired of playing RPGs… Geralt’s adventures don’t really get a grip on me. I tend to find open world RPGs - of the Bethesda persuasion - bland and boring, CDProjekt’s was much better than any of the ones I have played over the past 10 years, but I guess that Morrowind killed the genre for me after a couple mammoth playthroughs.
So the save system was for me a big deal, as I made evident on my previous post. After having played KC:D I still want/need save on exit, but I have seen the merits of the restrictive system implemented. Seems to me that this restrictiveness is heightened by the rail road - but multi-track rail road! - that the Prologue is.
I have seen on this thread and other sites across the Internet a few statements/remarks which I reckon can be answered even after a short playthrough:
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Horseback crossbowmen: there’s an action scene where the main character is pursued by Tatar/Mongol horseback raider archers. Those little short bows had quite a rate of fire. Horse archery was the hallmark of Turkic and Mongol armies, with warriors being trained since early ages and well capable of hitting people faces, groins and other tender bits. They were renowned fighters and feared by their generally well armoured Byzantine, German, Russia and Hungarian enemies. Note that no Western army had an strategic victory against the Turks until well into the 16th century: there’s several reasons for that, and the adept horse archers and light cavalry tactics are part of the explanation to that. The action scene in the game is very accurate and still manages to be quite of an adrenaline rush.
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Combat Gameplay: more hardcore than Elder Scrolls’ and The Witcher by a wide margin. Yet, still worth of being played rather than just being admired as one can admire, say, DCS recreations of cockpits. Mount & Blade Warband is a much better point of comparison, and I found that game to have a quite massive learning curve. That is, I died a lot. In this game I die a lot too, but I learn quicker. I do think, though, that the combat system is a nightmare on mouse and keyboard, I have to figure out how to try my gamepad with this one.
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Realism in Combat: This is not a game where you can yell “KROM DEMANDS YOUR BLOOD!!!111!!”, go Conan The Barbarian on the NPCs and get away with it. Again, Mount and Blade is a good point of comparison. In that game, and in this one, you will get your ass kicked badly if you do stupid stuff. Such as engaging 4 armoured enemies alone and without armour. The chances of pulling that off are one in a million… the stuff of chivalric romances like Tirant lo Blanch and Amadis de Gaula. This became clear to me after being slaughtered like 10 times at some point before the action scene involving the horse archers. It made me appreciate the nuance of the system. Also, this is a game that after four or five swings of your sword your vision blurs and you start panting, as you’re an untrained peasant swinging a very heavy piece of metal at people that want to kill you. The LARP fencers, and I mean those that wield actual metal, not polysterene, will probably have a lot to say about this aspect of the game.
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Gender: Culture wars sometimes get ridiculous, and this game is an example I think. Women in the game are, as much as it offends our contemporary sensibility, depicted in an accurate manner. Indeed there are a string of notable women in positions of power throughout the Middle Ages, and that in general, women exercised many forms of “soft power”. Yet, these famous women - which we remember because somebody bothered to write down about them - were a tiny minority of womanfolk of those centuries. Other than Jeanne of Arc, very few Christian ladies belonging to cultures with strong Greek-roman influence, wore any armour ever and much less led armies to battle. If KCD had to have a female protagonist, it would be a very different game, and certainly, not an action one, otherwise it would be ridiculously anachronistic or far-fetched. This is also, a game where the world is cast through the lense of the male gaze. If you cringe reading Petrarch’s poetry, some of the most salacious episodes of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron, and find The Tales of Conde Lucanor as hopelessly outdated… well, then my friend, you’re misreading those classics and probably KCD too.
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Ethnicity and Cultural Diversity: Regarding ethnicity, I think the game doesn’t pull any punches involving the cultural and ethnic differences that actually mattered for the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1403. We have the Cuman/Tatar mercenaries… whose reason of being on Bohemia is that of waging war the way it was waged in the 15th century. They were not expecting any quarter, and they gave none either. The customs and beliefs of the Bohemian folk were as alien to them, as they were to their victims. Those who may think this is over the top… they need to read about the Turkish Wars, plenty of “over the top” killing, pillaging and raping took place in the Balkans for the best part of three centuries. Another cultural/ethnic group which is represented in some detail are the Hungarian… which may have a culture more close to that of the Czechs. But those Hungarian soldiers weren’t in Bohemia to enjoy the sights and the beer, either. Last, and most poignant, is the depiction of the relation between Slavs and Germans… I think the game is an object lesson at the reasons why multi-cultural empires, like the Austro-Hungarian one, came into being centuries later. This game is a window into a country that does not exist any more: the ravages of the Thirty Years War and the Second World War saw to the religious, cultural and linguistical diversity of Bohemia vanishing. The characters sound charged with prejudice and are always suspicious of foreigners: that is the hallmark of peoples who rarely went anywhere more than 50 kms away from the place they were born throughout their lives.
I hope this provides some facts to the discussion. Which have been sorely missing!
I am really bad at this game.
I am some starved poor guy that often is about to die of sleep deprivation and walk around the world because have no horse.
I must make some money. My spies say that poaching is a good way, but I can’t outrun a bunny.
Cheers friend!
I just finished the Prologue. This game does reek style if anything and I’d never expect this from a “indie” group which I kickstarted. The style reminds me a lot of Mafia 1, which I love. Story and character build up is just so right and I started to care for the character, Henry. I think once they put in Save and Exit, I will not have any complain anymore but I’m just baffled why there would be bugs. Isn’t it like drinking the alcoholic stuff to save the game?
Yeah that was a great read, appreciated.
There’s been plenty of facts in the discussion. You just haven’t liked some of them.
This is the best review I’ve seen for Kingdom Come as it is today. The reviewer is clearly rooting hard for this game to succeed, enjoys the story and so much of what’s in here…
…but also recommends waiting for a sale to buy, so that the bugs – which go beyond tolerable open world jank – can be patched first.
There were plenty of statements, which turned out to be quite inaccurate.
FWIW, I’m about halfway through the tutorial section. I think there’s a really good game in here. The bug issues definitely seem fix-able, and the combat is an interesting take. If they can fix some of that stuff, this will be really special.
But there’s no way I’d recommend anyone buy this until at least it gets one extensive patch first.