Knights of the Chalice 2 - A Chance of Gaming Heaven

lackblogger

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I kickstarted Knights of the Chalice 2 quite a few months ago now, or was it last year, or was it 9 months ago, or was it, well whenever it was and I finally fired it up today to have a nosey around. It's already at version 1.08, which is cool.

And a little tear of joy seeped from the corner of my eye.

It's been so long since I felt this from an RPG. I thought I'd never find another game that had that same effect on me that I always crave. Just the sheer joy of a menu screen asking me to create six D&D'ish characters prior to adventuring forth.

To gaze upon the myriad of character builds. To feel the utterly incomprehensible sense of sheer overwhelm'ment as I slowly navigate the help pages to try and get some sense of what on earth I'm supposed to be doing.

To gradually, very gradually, start forming ideas for builds in the back of my mind as I read how Improved Trip might work quite well with Death Blow, how the many Two Weapon Fighting feats imply such intrigue in the new-to-me concept of a Mantis race.

To nervously create my first character, only to realise I've done it all wrong, delete it, do it again, realise I've still messed it up a little bit, to delete it again and, third time lucky, make something that I feel is a… good build. But still not quite perfect, but close enough that I can feel it ready.

And six hours later I have my party. I press start campaign. I'm in a small room. I don't know where and I don't know why and there's things to look at and objects to interact with. And I'm all a tingle of trepidation and mystery.

And my gaming time for the day is up. I save and exit.

The best gaming experience I've had for about two whole years. And I remember again why I love RPGs.

Now, the game might well be shit from here on in, I have no idea. But, my god, did that feel sooooo damn good just getting to this point. And, boy, can I not wait to get back to it in the very near future. Did I have to be dragged away from it by metaphorical horses or what!

This is now RPGwatch's Official Knights of the Chalice 2 thread. Even if no-one else ever posts here, I'm going to be here for quite a while… if you do post here, don't forget to spoiler any story or build spoilers and try to keep your sentiments and experiences as vague but precise as possible!

(screenshots will be forthcoming)
 
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Short question:
Can I mark Knights of the Chalice 2 as released?
 
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I have no idea to be honest.

In the blurb for the release of version 1.08 it states:

Once KotC 1 is on GOG [1st Dec], send out GOG keys of KotC 1. Work with GOG on the KotC 2 store page.

Continue working on the Steam page for KotC 2 and start working on the Steam version of KotC 2.

So, no, I wouldn't class it as released yet, personally. And he's still adding stuff and I've already found a few links/things which don't work with a mouse. I'll soon enough find out if it's in a playable state generally though, which might count enough, I suppose.
 
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The second game is not released, as of yet. As someone that has played the first game several times already, I'll be all over the second volume, when it's fully released and completely updated. I'm fairly certain it will be released next year.
 
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Well this second game is a lot different to the first in that the first game was a stand-alone game. This second iteration is much more like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights in concept, in that the base game, Augury of Chaos, is just the first module, the introductory module. The game comes with a toolset and its expected that many more modules will follow from developers and fans.

So its going to be one of those games that's never really truly 'completed' as that's not really its goal in the first place, it's goal is to never be fully completed & people can just jump in and out whenever they like and try new stuff.

Having said that, I can understand holding back until the official release date, it's always nice to think you're playing the least potentially buggy version of something and I probably would have done the same if I wasn't in desperate need of something like this right now.
 
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Party creation is the best part so far. You better lvl everyone to 3rd lvl before you start your journey. The first module is stupid hard right from the beginning. This is coming from someone that enjoys hard games. When you are fighting multiple spell casters every battle and there is no place to rest it just gets frustrating.

KotC was a hard game but fair and once you got the hang of it, I thought it was fantastic. I have tried to start a new game 3X now but stopped each time because it's not enjoyable when you have a 5% chance to win a battle.
 
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It doesn't surprise me at all to hear that it's a difficult game. Matter of fact that just makes me even more eager for the release!

Difficult is cool but impossible isn't. It will get ironed out before the main release I think.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=11599

Even the website that should not be named thinks it's bonkers.
 
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Yes, that's why I said in the OP "it could well be shit from here on in", lol, I've heard it's verging on the stupid with its difficulty.

However, I'm not too fussed about that. As carnifex says, at least it makes a change to have a game where normal difficulty is actually a gigantic challenge. A novelty in the gaming landscape. And it might have changed in patch 1.08, you never know.

I'm also mostly interested in just getting used to all the classes and how the game works generally, in readiness for all the potential new content over the years. The NWN base campaign was almost unplayable, though for completely the opposite reasons, so there's some cultural symmetry here :lol:
 
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Regardless of how much a big pile of bollocks the first module is at this point in time, and it is a huge pile of bollocks, make no mistake, I'm going to share a preview of the game as it currently is, to show the potential of what could come from this creation tool at some point in the near future.

I'll attempt to show you all everything up until the end of the first in-game combat over the next few weeks. There'll be no spoilers whatsoever here, just an examination of how the game looks and how it functions.

A where it's at at the moment. A chance to drool over the concept and marvel at what could be achieved here.

Part 1 - Firing up the game

The game has a classic main menu screen with a nice accompanying soundtrack. You are instantly invested in this from the word go:

UgrwaB2.png

The first thing you'll notice is that it's windowed by default. There is a full screen option, but at this time I don't want to risk it in case it gets bug-stuck.

You'll also notice the window is a funny shape, it goes into the area where the desktop toolbar is usually located. Yes, I had to move my toolbar to the right of the screen when I played this game.

Next up, you'll see there's no start game option. Instead there's a launch module button. The expectation being that, in time, there'll be loads of game to choose from.

Pressing this button at this time, however, just brings us to a list with only Augury of Chaos, as that's currently the only module currently available:

fGstaZY.png

The Load Save Game option is self explanatory, so lets move onto the help pages. The Help section of the game is fantastic. A true encyclopaedia that contains almost everything you'll need to know about anything the game.

You could easily spend an entire day just cycling through links in this section, getting your 12 hours of game-time purely from reading this maze of information, dreaming up builds and party-plans. Fantasising a game almost entirely in your imagination:

ewh1Vdi.png

It really is a database.

Next up is the Module Creation button. Hopefully the most important button for lots of talented fans.

I haven't tried this section out yet, but it takes you to a screen which allows you to modify modules and also create entirely new ones:

KEKquT3.png

The Options button from the main menu takes you not only to the usual sound and picture options you'd expect from a small indy game, but also reams and reams of individual game changing options.

From quality of life issues to difficulty issues to so many tweakables I don't even know what half of them might or might not do at this point in time:

YvONf5X.png

Credits and Exit Game are self explanatory, so lets get on with this, let's press Launch Module and see what we're presented with.

The screen we're presented with is a highly detailed page with lots of things going on it it. Mainly, it's the Party Creation screen:

r9DVHMQ.png

And you'll see a vast amount of pre-made characters to choose from in the top left. The bottom left empty area is where you'll put the party members you'll want for the module (up to 6 for this first one).

On the right are all the various party manipulation options, the most important of which is the biggest at the top, the Character Creation option.

Pressing that button brings us to the Character Creation screen:

WGAwNph.png

And so ends part 1, a perfect cliff-hanger for any RPG.

Next time, in Part 2, I'll do a quick run through of the extent of character creation on offer here.
 
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And so here's the really exciting aspect of Knights of the Chalice 2 looking forwards, Character Creation.

The currently near-unplayable module allows you to create up to six unique characters, but future modules will be able to allow anything between one and eight, apparently. So is there enough variety to warrant that? Yes, there sure is. Let's go through them.

So, once you've decided upon a name, the next option is Gender:

vWCmRg7.png

In this game gender really does matter, in that different genders will have different stat scores. Some races and classes are also gender-locked.

Next up is race, and here the game is quite unique in offering a selection of options that other games don't have, alongside a healthy selection of the expected ones:

QyPHojR.png

As expected, there's Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, Humans, but also, and for much experimental amusement, there's also Centaurs, Drakes, Half Giants, Half Salamanders, Kobolds, Mantises, each of which offers a whole array of benefits and drawbacks.

Not content with just that, like any good D&D game, there are then a whole raft of racial subsets to choose from, such as whether you want a fire or ice Half Salamander, a northern human or a stygian human, etc etc etc:

sYgD9vy.png

I haven't done the math for you, but I can tell you that that is indeed a vast variety of builds that are possible here for any would be adventurer.

There's also all the Character Classes you'd expect, and a few you might well be quite happily surprised by:

eD3pAlD.png

Some notably original for computer games ones might be the psychic options and the storm warrior, death knight, gladiator, to name but a few.

While it's never really certain what relevance Alignment has in computer gaming situations, the system does allow for it and has the usual bank of nine:

sw93VzO.png

During the hype for this game there was much controversy about the use of Tokens instead of Sprites. So much so that sprites were eventually added as an alternative option to tokens. I, personally, actually quite like the tokens and feel they add a level of uniqueness that isn't actually bad and, I would say, preferable to the sprites. Anyway, here are your two options:

The Tokens:

UV8ufuo.png

And the Sprites:

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Which you choose will be very much personal taste.

In deciding whether to go with point-buy or randomly rolled primary stats, the game has, again uniquely, decided to go with whatever you want. You can just press ReRoll until you're happy:

ftYQax8.png

Or manually increase your stats (if you've reduced another stat):

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And so, inevitably, also decrease your stats manually:

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The most frustrating aspect of this whole character creation process is the problem that: Let's say you get to this stage with a build, and now you suddenly want to change to a Halfling fighter instead of a Kobold fighter, well, as soon as you change an upper-choice the game immediately rerolls all of your stats anyway.

The other important thing about stats is that all the races, classes and genders will have their own minimums and maximums to your stat allocations (like "can't go below 14"), so for some builds total min/maxing is not entirely possible, although the first module expects you to min/max as part of its design. This, to me, suggests the developer is possibly muddled in their focus of intent.

But that doesn't matter for modules made by other people, of course, it just means its going to be hard for anyone to balance any future games around the ease of min/maxing the stats allocation process allows.

Finally, we get to pick all the weapon specialisations, feats, spells and etc for each character we make, and there is, again, vast options here, much as you'd expect of any good D&D 3.5ed style game:

k4MJtU4.png

And just one curiosity to note for these, in these screens it starts you off by saying "1/5" when you have to choose, for example, five weapon specialisations. This makes you think you've already picked one, or that one has been pre-picked for you. However, this is just clumsy design, it actually means "Please Now Pick Your 1st of Five", not "you only have 4/5 left to pick".

So when you get to "5/5" and think you're done, you're not, it means you've now got to pick your 5th. Good heavens but I got stuck at this stage for quite some time figuring this out! LoL.

Once you've created your characters (in this instance six), you select each one and move them into the bottom left of the main Character Creation menu screen and then do one final thing. Curiously, you now pick "An Avatar" for your team. I have no idea what this is all about, but it wont let you proceed without doing so:

oQeCwBf.png

The only thing left to do now is, errr, start the game!!! :

oIULuWz.png

What a cliff-hanger!

You are in a room dundundah!

Next time: general user interface and environmental interaction and the like.

Oh, and, if you can't see the detail on the pics because they are too small in spoilers, then please Right Click on them and Open In A New Tab, and they'll be nice and big and full screen sized.
 
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The char creation options are incredible. I will also be in heaven with this game being a huge D&D nerd (currently playing hundreds of hours of user modules for NWN and FRUA!) I just pray that people actually use the toolkit and make cool adventures for all levels and experiences. If it takes off like NWN or FRUA, I will definitely be in gaming heaven! I also pray that we see a lot of pen and paper adventure conversions in this engine, too, since the char creation options alone would make them a lot more fun to play.

Thanks for sharing, @lackblogger; !
 
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I have had no problem with full screen although I haven´t played that far due to the difficulty
 
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That's good to know @mprod;

I've just read the latest patch notes, 1.09 (30th December), and he's added a few more screens to the character creation process, so the above may well be outdated by now even, but the list of options remain the same, which was the main point.

He's also now suggesting he's going to alter the difficulty of the combat encounters in his Augury of Chaos mod, though what that means is anyone's guess.
 
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So let's have a look at environmental interactions and the general UI of that next.

When last we saw, we were all standing in a room somewhere. Before moving anywhere, the first thing that needs looking at is the in-game menu options. Let's save our progress.

In the top left of the screen are two menu options and the first relates to the basic save and exit options:

DhPMYaS.png

You can have multiple save files. There's also an option here to export your characters, which will be a familiar option for any NWN fans, but for other people, this means that you can level-up a character in a game and then save them at any point and use that character at that level to start a different module. Effectively creating a continuity between all modules, should you so wish.

To the right of that menu is the dice-shaped menu button, which provides a huge number of in-game related short-cuts and information screens, from sound options to opening your journal and much much more:

VKGQn97.png

Let's take our first tentative steps. By moving the mouse around the screen, an available square will be highlighted by the mouse having the word "walk" appear next to it:

fyP9JfE.png

Your entire party will move as a single blob towards that space. This game's version of pathfinding issues will be in the way your party formation gets butchered by everyone moving to one spot and then reshuffling themselves around that spot in order to stay in formation and not have more than one character on any one spot.

Unfortunately you cannot move characters individually outside of combat.

In order to interact with points of interest, first we have to establish what objects are interactable. To do this we simply move the mouse over objects and if they are interactable then we will be told in no uncertain terms:

71FoQin.png

So there's no pixel hunting and very little chance of missing stuff.

By clicking on those cobwebs, everyone scrunches up next to them and we are then presented with the game's first interaction screen:

qjLyAXY.png

Here we'll be presented with many options, and even options we can't choose (because they're build-locked), which can provides hints on what other builds in future runs might be useful.

And clicking 2 here, to search the cobwebs, brings us to our first failure in Augury of Chaos, it seems no-one in my quite well min/maxed party can even successfully search the first interactable of the game! Lol:

7Seoxtt.png

Bugger this for a bag of peanuts, let's get out of this room for now and go and have a look around town. See if we're supposed to 'kit-out' at all before adventuring. Going against the game's advice, we climb the ladder out the room and find ourselves in the game's starter settlement:

HWetnT2.png

The art is nice and the buildings look fun and interesting. At this point in time, however, none of the buildings are interactable and I was not able to enter any of them.

Also against expectation, a quest NPC did not exist in the town yet either, the quest giver from that room we were just in appears to have led us on a wild goose chase.

The only NPC in the entire town is one trader:

ZghDJgR.png

But she can at least provide a small service by trading goods and allowing us to examine more controls in peace, as it appears she's non-agro-able.

By right-clicking on any character we cycle through the available NPC interaction options. So my first right-click here brings us to the 'attack' option, which, in this case, we can't use:

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Right-clicking on her again and we come to the talk-options, to which a speech bubble appears next to her and we can now left-click on her to talk to her:

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And the NPC dialogue window opens, which is the same kind of window we get when we interact with objects in KotC2:

s9Qxwu2.png

The shop screen is a bit confusing at first, because it looks like our character inventory screen, because it is, and her 'shop' is just the small segment in the right-hand box called 'available items', to which we can now scroll through the available items:

b5dLK5g.png

The third and final NPC option, if we right-click on her a third time, is the 'examine' option, indicated by now showing us her Hit Points and Challenge Rating (CR):

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Left clicking on her in this mode will take us to her Character Sheet:

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And Inventory:

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And this is something we will be able to do with any NPC or creature in the game who has a token as their avatar. So we can see exactly what anyone can do at any time and what they are doing it with and we can look at any time, even during combat.

So there's wonderful honesty here. No creature will be using made-up or unfairly spammed abilities or whatever, and we can fully analyse how to approach and beat any encounter.

The only curious thing that has been a disappointment to many players is that the game wont let us loot what we see upon an enemy's death. So even if we could kill this NPC, all her loot would magically vanish anyway. Though this may only be something the dev wanted for his mod, it might not be hard-coded.

But wait, I have no idea what I might need to buy yet as i haven't even looked at what my starting gear is yet. Next episode then, let's have a good look at our inventory screens and equipment information screens!
 
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what's really going to set this one apart, for me, is the amount of user content created.

For example, i have 300+ modules, which are campaigns, downloaded for NWN and more added every day. For the record I only download modules with more than 5 hours of gameplay, so ranging from 6-100+ hours of content in *one module*.

If people pick up this game and make a ton of user content, it could really be gaming heaven. If it's just going to be one campaign and then abandoned, it's not going to stand the test of time. I just pray it will have a lot of campaigns made for it, which are high quality and fun adventures. Otherwise it's going to be the biggest letdown in RPG history for me personally. So much potential, we'll see if it's lived up to.
 
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what's really going to set this one apart, for me, is the amount of user content created.

For example, i have 300+ modules, which are campaigns, downloaded for NWN and more added every day. For the record I only download modules with more than 5 hours of gameplay, so ranging from 6-100+ hours of content in *one module*.

If people pick up this game and make a ton of user content, it could really be gaming heaven. If it's just going to be one campaign and then abandoned, it's not going to stand the test of time. I just pray it will have a lot of campaigns made for it, which are high quality and fun adventures. Otherwise it's going to be the biggest letdown in RPG history for me personally. So much potential, we'll see if it's lived up to.

Same here, thought the abominable artstyle was the biggest issue, boy i was wrong...The encounters balancing does not follow any guidelines, the plot is absurd , and all in all very little content . Most of the time spent was on reloading trying to get iniative and good saves. That's nowhere how a D20 rpg should be .
There's dorateen making, well porting, a module, but the game is simply not popular enough to have any more content creators .
That's understandable it's ton of work for no reward.In this day and age no one is going to do that anymore for free.
It should have been the new FRUA , really an opportunity missed and in my opinion is unsalvageable now .
 
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Same here, thought the abominable artstyle was the biggest issue, boy i was wrong…The encounters balancing does not follow any guidelines, the plot is absurd , and all in all very little content . Most of the time spent was on reloading trying to get iniative and good saves. That's nowhere how a D20 rpg should be .
There's dorateen making, well porting, a module, but the game is simply not popular enough to have any more content creators .
That's understandable it's ton of work for no reward.In this day and age no one is going to do that anymore for free.
It should have been the new FRUA , really an opportunity missed and in my opinion is unsalvageable now .

Eh, it could still be similar to a new FRUA. I still play FRUA so i can always play that, but i think modders for these games still exist. We'll see. I hope they flock to this game because adventures with that ruleset and system mechanics would be amazing. But if no content is made, it's going to be a waste, and be a really big letdown to me.
 
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To gaze upon the myriad of character builds. To feel the utterly incomprehensible sense of sheer overwhelm'ment as I slowly navigate the help pages to try and get some sense of what on earth I'm supposed to be doing.

To gradually, very gradually, start forming ideas for builds in the back of my mind as I read how Improved Trip might work quite well with Death Blow, how the many Two Weapon Fighting feats imply such intrigue in the new-to-me concept of a Mantis race.

To nervously create my first character, only to realise I've done it all wrong, delete it, do it again, realise I've still messed it up a little bit, to delete it again and, third time lucky, make something that I feel is a… good build. But still not quite perfect, but close enough that I can feel it ready.

Well, everyone's definition of "fun" is different.

I play RPGs mostly for story - I'm not a "builder man".

Sometimes i even play pre-defined parties (which ship with the game) just to see how a) the story is overall enfolding b) how the story is written for them.
 
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Well, everyone's definition of "fun" is different.

I play RPGs mostly for story - I'm not a "builder man".

Sometimes i even play pre-defined parties (which ship with the game) just to see how a) the story is overall enfolding b) how the story is written for them.

that's cool. i play those type of games too. always up for a good story, but the more depth in the systems it has, the more fun i have.
 
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