Okay, better late than never.
So, first off the game is broken. Goodness knows I forgive games for their glitches and imperfections (I couldn’t even give you a ballpark number on the times I’ve played through Oblivion and Skyrim and all the ridiculous shit I’ve seen), but KCD shouldn’t have been released in this state. It looks and plays more like an Alpha than a game that’s been in development for more than four years. But it’s broken in more ways than just having people clip through walls or disappear if you close a door on them.
Lockpicking is DOA on XBox. They didn’t properly port the system from PC to console, so what works as a challenging mini game with a keyboard and mouse is damn near impossible with two joysticks. When I first got to the Miller’s house and asked him how to teach me lockpicking, I had to restart the game half a dozen times because - since both lockpicking and movement are mapped to the joysticks, any time I would fail, I would break away from the mini game prematurely, causing a glitch where the game thought I was still in it, and I couldn’t speak to the Miller to try again. I eventually gave up on even trying.
Movement in the game is imprecise and clunky as fuck because of Henry’s animations. The camera is anchored to his walking and running animations, so on XBox One, he’s incredibly jerky and floaty. Sometimes it’s hard just to line up with an item I want to pick up, a person I want to talk to, or a door I want to open. There’s tons of attempts at “realism” that just hinder gameplay. And walkways are often too narrow and NPCs block the way. Time and time again, I tried to get where I was going, only to be blocked by another character who just stood there and cussed at me. What the fuck?
And half of the conversations I have, I’m looking at the backs of Henry’s eyeballs because the camera has clipped into his head.
The ambience and drama are there in the story, but Henry just stares at everything blank-faced. Dude watches his mother and father get killed a few yards in front of him, and he watches with the same expression I had when I checked the mail this morning. The lip-syncing in cutscenes is all over the place, and throughout the prologue, Henry kept reverting to his original green tunic and red scarf, regardless of what he was actually wearing.
And there’s missions themselves. I turned the game off and started a new play-through of Breath of the Wild when I reached the part where you go hunting with Hans. I spent a damn hour trying to learn the archery (which is too “realistic” for it’s own good - again, what they think is realism is actually just getting in the game’s own way) to shoot hares to beat him in a wager. So now I’m loaded down with the hares I’ve collected, and he’s on a horse while I’m walking behind him. We move on to the next part of the mission, and he gallops off faster than I can run. I dropped the hares so I can run faster, but he’s gone.
…and there’s no mission marker. The guy I’m supposed to follow has disappeared into some thick woods, and there’s no way to find him, because “realism”.
Half of Kingdom Come is interesting and innovative with the choices they made to make the game more realistic. I love that there’s no magic or +1 swords or any of that (even though, oddly enough, there are potions for things like seeing better in the dark… yeah). I really dig that it’s a completely historically accurate world. But with the other half, they went too far in too many areas that it stops being a rewarding video game and it just feels like a chore or doesn’t work properly at all.
And don’t even get me started on the save system. Kudos to Warhorse for trying something different, but they fucked up. I have to work my way through a lengthy mission or sequence in order to have the game auto-save. Otherwise, I have to drink a “Savior Schnapps” in order to save – but guess what? It’s an alcoholic drink, and alcohol affects your stats and abilities. So if I want to save before trying something difficult, I have to get drunk, and a simple game mechanic like saving has suddenly changed my ability to do the thing I wanted to save before attempting. And the Schnapps are expensive in-game.
When I quit the game, it was after I had to reset to the last auto-save when Hans disappeared into the woods. The last auto-save was back at the beginning of the mission. Fuck that.
