Decided to give Kingdom Come Deliverance another shot [Spoilers]

I bought KCD close to it's release but dropped playing it due to bugs. Recently I've been seeing a lot of posts here saying KCD should be GOTY, even came across a video saying how its a "masterpiece" with comments there saying its truely the best RPG in years... So I decided to give it another chance.

This time round, I never experienced any bugs and it ran better. After completing it however, one thing stood out - the game design is inconsistent and at the half way mark becomes really poor. It astonished me so much, that I had to write this thread which I know is going to be long! So brace yourself.

KCD has so many game design flaws to be called "an RPG Great" or a "masterpiece". Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad game either. It's just okay/decent, it doesn't do anything special except that its a historical RPG.

#1. Quest Design

(btw there's going to be a lot of spoilers)

The game contains 2 acts. Act 3 I assume will continue when the next game releases. There's a clear difference in quality of quests and story from Act I and Act II. While at the start there were quests that seamlessly told its story through well thought out quest designs, Act II was a different picture.

As an example of a good quest:

- Example Good Quest 1

Act I had a quest where you are ordered to go on a hunting trip with Lord Capon (a character who seems like quite a douche at first glance). As you hunt wild rabbit underneath the mellow light of the afternoon you mingle with Capon in an almost brotherly way. Capon decides to up the ante and comes up with the idea to hunt boar. He goes off ahead and when you finally catch up with him you see him with a bow aiming at a boar by the creek. The arrow hits the boar, but the boar runs and a chase ensues. Eventually you see Capon running through a few bushes and follow him through, only to find yourself in a clearing and Capon down on the floor captured by bandits. ---- All of this is gameplay and I loved how they made a quest like this with such a roller-coaster of events that felt naturally connected to each other. Quality quest design! If the rest of the game was filled with quests like this then sure, KCD would have been a great game. But it seems like they lost their creativity halfway through

However, lets compare this to quests in Act II.

- Example of bad quest 1:

Later on in the game after a certain point there are quests like picking x50 weed from the priests garden. This is the definition of lazy quest design. "Let's just prop up a simple fetch quest to fill the gap in this part of the game, huh?". Whats even worse is you are tasked to pick specific types of weed and if you pick the wrong weed the quest fails. Good thing all the weeds are mingled together with a dozen other unrelated weeds. Fun quest!. It's just extremely obnoxious.

- Example of bad quest 2:

Another quest is breaking into the Cathedral to gain information/an item from someone. Now you could break into the Cathedral like a mad man and kill everyone and take the item from the target. What if you want to play like a pacifist? The pacifist route requires you to spend the time going through menial jobs like praying and eating. During these times there are no mini-games involved within these actions, you can't use these situations to garner information from the other priests around you, you can't even walk out of line from the area otherwise the priests 'catch' you and proceed to moan at you through a semi-cutscene. If they catch you 3 times you get kicked out of the Cathedral. So you have to sit there for 3-4 hours of game time watching yourself pray, watching yourself eat, doing nothing else but leaving your screen as it is. Now you could press T and auto-pass time... yes, lets pass all the 'content' the dev's put in there. Why put it in there in the first place if you know we're just going to skip through it?

- Example of bad quest 3:

Another quest is near the end where you and Lord Capon are given the task to stealthily infiltrate the castle to save the hostages. There's so much emphasis on stealth yet whatever you do that quest will always fail. You could spend 2 whole hours stealthily taking out all enemy guards OR as soon as you start the quest you can run up to the first guard you see like a headless chicken, jumping around making all the noise you want and then get blamed by Capon that you have to abort the mission as the alarm goes off. Both of these lead to the same result! Like wtf is the point of putting this quest in the game if everything is scripted to the point where failing a quest 1 second into the mission is the same as doing it the proper way by spending 30-60 minutes doing it. This could have easily just been a cutscene.

- Example of bad quest 4:

Another quest is before the siege of the castle, while you're waiting for the trebuchet to be built you get asked by the general of the local troops to help find food and drink for the men at camp, otherwise many of them will die before the siege starts. Let's put aside the fact that this is just another basic fetch quest. What got to me is regardless of if you decide to feed the men or ignore them, there is no alternative consequences. It would have been interesting if you ignored the general and half his men died, and the consequence was the siege was 50% successful making your infiltration more difficult. It just seems like a last minute tacked on quest added to fill up that area of the map.

It's certain quest designs like these that are quite poorly thought out and have no substance to them. They are much more frequent and noticeable in Act II. I could have given more examples but I guess 4 is enough.

#2. Empty world

The world isn't an ideal place to explore. Sure the landscape looks beautiful but there's not much variation apart from trees, rivers and hills. I understand its based off medieval Bohemia but I'm sure there were things like caves, underwater caverns.. there is none of this sort of detail in the game.

lack of detail 1

I came across several Mines, a couple of which were guarded. First time I saw the entrance to one I got so excited, thinking "Okay mines usually have complex tunnel systems. If I was a bandit leader I would take over the mine, enslave the workers/kill them, and set up a huge underground base there". I mean that's not far fetched to think that could happen right? Realistically speaking right? Imagine exploring loads of tunnels with different rooms, guarded by various bandits. So I approached this mine entrance, all excited and giddy. After entering this mine it only took me 5 steps before I came to a dead end. No secret doors or items - just a dead end. There are half a dozen other mine entrances scattered across the whole of the map... each one I was excited to enter. Every other mine in the game also ends 5 steps in....

There is 1 mine shaft that's part of the main story that's a bit more complex than the 5 steps in. It's literally a long straight shaft that takes you 5 minutes to get to the end of. This shaft then splits at a T junction. Following either one of these two pathways leads to another 5 minutes of walking a straight narrow tunnel. One side has lootable chest/dead end the other side leads to the quest destination which leads to a cutscene. Next thing you know you end up outside.

lack of detail 2

There are dozens of broken carriages lying across the map along the roads you travel, none of them have any meaning to them. It would have been awesome to have some sort of side quest related to some of them, maybe some bandits were going around ambushing traders. Or maybe you could have stumbled across a trade war between two different towns, and in the end you could decide to take sides of either town or take all the trade loot for yourself and kill the overseeing merchants of each town.

lack of detail 3

Speaking of traders, it would have made the world so lively if they had people walking in between towns. There are no noblemen with guards travelling from town to town, or traders, or general villagers. Outside of towns the world felt dead. Witcher 3 has traders and horsemen that travel between towns which you see occasionally see in your travels. Even Fallout has random mutants or brotherhood of steel people walking in the middle of nowhere. Mad Max had groups of random travellers that begged you for water.

Literally the only thing notable outside of towns are broken carriages (these have no meaning to them, some have a meagre amount loot), shrines (no meaning to them other than the names of backers), and random events. Now these random events... Oh my! I'm surprised they can keep the term 'random'. They occur when you fast travel along the road and often you can guess at what part of the road they will occur (usually junctions).

Let's talk about the variety of random events. They range from:

• Either an ambush by bandits attacking royal guards. If you decide to save the guards by killing the bandits, after you've done your courageous deed the guards just walk off without saying a word or showing any sign that you exist.

• stumbling across a poacher, which gets tedious to watch the cutscenes of after the 3rd time you've experienced it.

• 1 v 1 combat of honour with a brave knight. The brave knight 1 v 1 fights are hilarious. This knight comes to you telling his woeful story how his mother kicked him out the house to persuade him to search for his courage and honour. To be a man! You can kill the knight, steal all his gear and an hour later you'll come across the same knight again as he repeats his dialogue of seeking the lands for an honorable fight because his mother told him to. Funnily enough he still has all the same armour and weapons on him again.

#3. Story

At the start you romantically pursue this girl whom you saved during some events at the very beginning of the game. You go through a few quests related to securing this romance with this character. Some of these quests involve giving her the right kind of gifts and having dates with her which act as mini-quests. This is like 30% through the game and consists of 4 or 5 missions. After you completed all her missions and have romanced her, she never talks to you for the rest of the game again apart from "Hello Henry!". There's 70% of the game remaining and yet this girl who's meant to be the main love interest will never interact with you again other than a 2 second greeting. Why even put her in the game? Is it to just mark the check box that you have romance in the game? She just seemed like some tacked-on last minute asset.

Yet at the start of the game, the devs of KCD gave a brilliant example of how to do an amazing relationship and how to explore characters. Right at the start where you meet Lord Capon. First impressions in the first 5 minutes of meeting him is that he's a douche prick. Then later you go on a hunt with him - This one quest acts as a mini-tutorial teaching you how to hunt/use bow, it also does an awesome job of progressing the story (with the escalation of Capon being captured), it also displays character development as you change your impression of Capon from being a prick to a hilarious guy who speaks his mind. One quest did all of these three! Very rarely has any game made me change my opinion of a character let alone be interested in them like Capon.

EVERYONE else in the game is forgetful (apart from the drunken priest).

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There are so many more examples I could have given that fall under each of the 3 categories I've highlighted. Overall It's an okay game but it did nothing particularly special. I do wish there were more historical RPG games, but in terms of game design there were so many shortcomings in KCD.