I agree with everything you just wrote - my criticism was of the article author’s jarring misrepresentation of history as a discipline, not with the game’s take on history. I mean, in a video game you are going to play as one person and that one person is going to have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of events in the game. It would be really cool to see a game that tried to explore the idea of social history (or cultural history) and push you into specific courses of action because the broader forces at play make that your only good option, but it’s not clear if that concept would come across in any real sense unless you could play the same situation again with different social forces at work.
The game can be a good depiction of history while still focusing on one person’s journey, but it isn’t social history just because the main character isn’t a king, and there is no Great Man vs. social history debate going on - that’s a 19th century conflict that’s long since been settled.
a- it’s raison d’etre is historical
b-it’s also Czech.
I’m sensing a new hot/big thing in gaming, with KCD being “historical,” (quoted here to illustrate historical being used in the marketing, not questioning the authenticity of the history presented…) and ditto Asscreed.
@ravenight is pretty much correct in terms of history as a discipline; no one follows Carlyle any more and social history is complex. Whether that’s here or there is for anyone to decide on their own I suppose.
Every RPG pretty much is a “Great Man” theory in action. Hell, D&D was explicitly created with that in mind, with the player characters being exceptional actors who could affect the course of history, etc. while everyone else but the people they fought were pretty much powerless.
Question: is the game open like Skyrim where you can just ignore the main quests and go exploring, improving yourself or it it much more tightly linked to actually playing through the story?
You can do whatever quite a bit, though some things are timed. Like if you wander off in the middle of a mission for days, expect to get your ass chewed for being AWOL.
I really hate the horse controls in this game. I understand why they did it this way (so the rider could look in a different direction from that of the horse), but moving the horse with WASD and not mouselook is just horrible - at least for me. This is why I avoid twin stick shooters because I just can’t use WASD very well at all. I can’t get out of the opening village because I can’t steer my damn horse. It would be nice if I could have at least been able to practice before having to ride for my life. It’s kind of hard to get used to this when I can’t go more than a few yards and get killed and have to start over.
Horses will guide themselves down roads if you hold shift and don’t press WASD.
Though forks in the road might be tricky at times if they go the wrong way.
Edit: Oh wait, yeah the beginning… that’s a bit rough. It really drives home the desperation thing since you have no horsemanship, but after getting stuck on a hedgerow more than once it can quickly be frustrating as well.
Yep, I tried letting the horse guide himself and that was a no go. And at one point I was doing ok, then got stuck on a fence and that was all she wrote :(
Yeah the early part is a bit rough as you’re still trying to figure out how the controls work, it gets better once things calm down for the most part and thankfully it does auto save a bit during that sequence.
Not really, but Skyrim I can still imagine going back to, I think I might enjoy it once I get over things I didn’t like. It was mostly cosmetic stuff. Kingdom Come just seems like a nuisance to me.
