Kingdom Come - Review Roundup

So apparently the take-away is it is a bug-fest atm. I'm in no hurry with this one, so I'm happy to wait another 6 to 12 months before I take a stab.

Also, the save system seems to be very annoying. Not that I have anything against making your decisions meaningful and counter save-scumming, but nowadays I need a quicksave button because I rarely can afford to play as long as I want to.
 
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One of the more popular youtube game reviewers also didn't really like this game. I thought his review was pretty in-depth. If you are excited about the game, then definitely don't watch this video...he points out numerous issues, some minor, and some major, with the game. Lots of little annoying issues and bugs and one of the major issues is a huge turn-off, at least for me. (near empty, static type gameworld)

video link (youtube) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZfoz7UVr0
 
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So apparently the take-away is it is a bug-fest atm. I'm in no hurry with this one, so I'm happy to wait another 6 to 12 months before I take a stab.

Also, the save system seems to be very annoying. Not that I have anything against making your decisions meaningful and counter save-scumming, but nowadays I need a quicksave button because I rarely can afford to play as long as I want to.

There is already mod to make saving possible without limits :)

Ah, PC gaming.
 
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This looking a bit half-baked. They took on more than they could deal with, I'd say.
 
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Yeah, looks to me that they've spent most of the time and effort on making the game look gorgeous and on the combat system.
 
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It looks to me like one of those games where the release day is really the beginning of the unofficial beta. I think the 20gb day-one patch says quite a lot about the actual state of development. I hope it does well enough that they can continue working on it, and maybe it will become a significantly better game.

EDIT: I think what's causing a lot of bad blood, is the combination of releasing with significant technical issues that break quests and crash the game, and having a highly restricted save system. I think that was a very bad move.
 
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I think the 20gb day-one patch says quite a lot about the actual state of development.

Actually, that patch size is because the CryEngine is crap when it comes to updating files. Changing a single file in a .pak means having to update and re-download the .pak in the patch. The game has 14 .pak larger than 1gb (some near 2gb) and only 3 under 200mb...
 
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The development information always looked like it was a tech demo more than anything else.

I am looking for a little more gameplay and story.

Does look beautiful though!
 
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Actually, that patch size is because the CryEngine is crap when it comes to updating files. Changing a single file in a .pak means having to update and re-download the .pak in the patch. The game has 14 .pak larger than 1gb (some near 2gb) and only 3 under 200mb…

Updating entire paks unnecessarily may well be part of the problem, but I don't believe this is the fault of Cryengine, and nor is it insurmountable. Almost every game engine uses archives of some type, and it's absolutely possible to delta patch them. Pak files are just zip archives, and I doubt very much they are impossible to patch in this way.

Patching can be a tricky business, and studios often have to build tools to do it efficiently. The crude and hugely inefficient method they are using here is, IMO, testament to one more thing they haven't yet got in order.
 
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Updating entire paks unnecessarily may well be part of the problem, but I don't believe this is the fault of Cryengine, and nor is it insurmountable. Almost every game engine uses archives of some type, and it's absolutely possible to delta patch them. Pak files are just zip archives, and I doubt very much they are impossible to patch in this way.

Patching can be a tricky business, and studios often have to build tools to do it efficiently. The crude and hugely inefficient method they are using here is, IMO, testament to one more thing they haven't yet got in order.

Star Citizen had the same issue (dev's explanation). Took them until 3.0 and rewriting most of the CryEngine (+ ditching it for Lumberyard) to get delta patching in and that is using their own application to download updates and launch the game. Steam and GOG have their own limitations in regard to changed files on top of that.
 
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Star Citizen had the same issue (dev's explanation). Took them until 3.0 and rewriting most of the CryEngine (+ ditching it for Lumberyard) to get delta patching in and that is using their own application to download updates and launch the game. Steam and GOG have their own limitations in regard to changed files on top of that.

There's a few things to bear in mind, though, and I don't think we can conclude it's the same issue.

Firstly, it appears that Star Citizen was attempting to create some sort of torrent-based updating scheme, and that may have all sorts of implications for the way they needed to structure their archives. I don't think we can conclude from that enterprise that Cryengine itself is uniquely problematic in using PAK archives. Unreal and Unity use them too. It is true that if you insist on using encryption and compression at the archive level (which perhaps RSI does), you make it impossible to delta patch straightforwardly, but that would be true of any engine. That's why Steam tells you not to do it when you upload a game to their platform. If you upload paks as straightforward archives, Steam has no problem delta patching them in a reasonably efficient way, using its own chunking delta system.

Then the guy from Deepsilver has this to say about the massive Kingdom Come patch:

“So, let me stop the rumor mill dead in its tracks before everyone continues jumping to conclusions. The way that I’ve been told that the engine works, is it takes the entire game and separates the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives. If during a patch you so much as alter a 1KB text file within any of these 2GB archives, then you need to reupload the ENTIRE 2GB portion. That beings said, this is a major patch that improves overarching mechanics throughout the game, so it touches almost all of these 2GB archives in the entire game build. Essentially you are having to redownload the game to replace the existing files. It shouldn’t stack them and inflate on your harddrive, but rather replace the previously downloaded build files.

This is nonsense, and the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. "The way the engine works" does not "separate the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives." The devs must decide how to efficiently package assets into PAK archives in a sane way, organised into different types of data, at whatever sizes make most sense. That's how every modern engine works.

IMO, if you're pushing a 20gb patch, one of two things is true - either you've actually made huge changes right across the game, or you've made a mess of the way you've packaged up your assets. I don’t buy the idea of blaming Cryengine at all.
 
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Really hope it's not an empty world...i.mean this thing was in development what 4+ years? What the heck did they spend all that time on? From looking at the map the world doesn't look that big so I was expecting a quite detailed interesting world to move around in.
 
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Really hope it's not an empty world…i.mean this thing was in development what 4+ years? What the heck did they spend all that time on? From looking at the map the world doesn't look that big so I was expecting a quite detailed interesting world to move around in.

The complaints about "empty" world come from people who are used to encountering bandits and dungeons every 30 meters like in Skyrim. Here the world uses much more realistic scale, it is not empty, it just uses different design philosophy than bethesda games.
 
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Here the world uses much more realistic scale, it is not empty, it just uses different design philosophy than bethesda games.
That sounds encouraging.
I'm a backer, so I'll give it a try myself anyway after a few patches.
 
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It's certainly going to get points for the Landscape Screenshot Factor. A lot of my friends on Steam are posting screenshots.

The forested area I saw looked really nice. Too bad there wouldn't be some Forest Troll or something jumping out at you, though. :(
 
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