There's more. Go read the "mega-impressions" article at RPS linked at the top of this extended quote.The hyper-detailed historical RPG heralds from a small army of developers who once steered the creation of Mafia and Arma, among many others. Despite coming from a relatively small team by triple-A standards, the game’s production values are through the roof, and the dev team really wants it all: Skyrim-like exploration, a Mount and Blade-style world, entirely procedural combat, and choice reactivity inspired by The Witcher.
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Everything is procedurally generated. There are no pre-made animations. "Combat is calculated entirely with inverse kinematics, so it’s not even animated," boasted [project director Daniel] Vávra. "It’s all procedural. On non-flat surfaces – say, stairs or something – we don’t need to do special animations. If characters are on something or hit something, then everything is calculated."
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Don’t expect Mount and Blade’s control scheme here, or even War of the Roses’ for that matter. The way Vávra explained it, it sounds like combat is tailored to controllers (Kingdom Come is also headed to Xbox One and PS4), and without being able to grasp a button-studded hilt myself, it came across as fairly confusing and potentially limited. While Warhorse is striving for obsessive historical accuracy in world design, battles have block-based bullet time and QTE-ish combos. [:(]
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"There are three main types of character you can be," said Vávra. "You can be a fighter and assault stuff with brutal power or just threaten people [if you don't want to be violent]. You’ll have a reputation for strength, so people will know to be afraid of you. Or you can be agile and fast, like a thief or stealthy guy who solves things by killing from behind and stealing stuff. Or you can be a kind of bard/intrigue guy who’s trying to solve stuff by talking, lying, and convincing people. We’re trying very hard to make sure every quest is playable in every way. It’s really non-linear and emergent in that way," he added, noting that there’s no pre-selected character classes either. You simply get better at skills the more you use them.
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[In terms of its systems,] Warhorse is aiming to hit more of a balance between the likes of Mount and Blade and theme-park-ish worlds like Skyrim. So, for instance, NPCs have schedules and lives, but they aren’t really operating as part of a giant, interwoven ecosystem. Neither, however, are they the mindless dead-eyed mannequins of, say, BioShock Infinite or its on-rails ilk.
Me, I don't much like the sound of combat (QTEs), or that the game is presumably squeezed down from what it could be on a PC to run on consoles, or that the world in between cities is shrunk, or that dialog options are time-limited, or that large-scale interacting systems aren't simulated.
But everything else? Wow.
Definitely watching.
Oh, and there's a Kickstarter for it.