Hardcore Mode in KCD2 : Suggestions and Improvements.

[xR']

Hi everyone,

With the upcoming arrival of Hardcore Mode in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I’d like to discuss possible improvements to make the experience more immersive and challenging.

I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m basing this on my current experience as well as feedback from other players. So far, I’ve felt the need to use several mods to adjust certain aspects of the game, especially XP progression and the reputation system.

Please, consider I don't have every idea's in mind. You are all here to make you'r suggestions OFC.

The following suggestions are from everyone. They are however intended to remain realistic and achievable by the developers, with the game we already have. They mainly propose improvements, more or less already available through mods and which mainly modify somes values in xml or lua files. The goal is to bring thoses values changes standalone in HC and why not in normal for some of them...

The suggestions on this post are not "the only way", but more a direction and a line to take. A reminder that everyone can debate about it, if you're not convinced at all by some changes, there's nothing I can do about it.

🔸 Progression is too fast
-XP gains are way too high. You quickly become an expert in combat or crafting (such as blacksmithing), which removes any real sense of progression. It would be more interesting to have to make choices about which skills to focus on.

🔸 Combat is too forgiving
-The combat system lacks punishment and is too lenient on the player.
-The counter window is too generous.
-Why is it possible to dodge or riposte when you have no stamina left?

🔸 The economy is too generous
-Money is too easy to obtain, making purchases and gear management feel meaningless.

🔸 Hunger mechanics are too forgiving
-Right now, you can go an entire in-game day without eating and suffer no real consequences.

🔸 Reputation is too easy to gain
-A few good deeds are enough to make a village love you, even after committing crimes.
-Selling items to merchants gives too much reputation.



Suggestions for Hardcore Mode

🔹 A drastically slower and more realistic progression
-Reduce combat skill XP by at least 50%. Reduce other skill XP (blacksmithing, survival, etc.) by 80% (my take here, a more friendly version would be 60%) .

🔹 A more demanding combat system
-Reduce the counter window to make ripostes harder to perform.
-NPC attacks are more frequent.
-Dodging and riposting should be impossible to perform when stamina is depleted.
-less stamina should determine the duration of ripost slow-motion. less > shorter. This way, slow-mo become a feature. (imo) <- NC integration ? ->
-Armor should be the same for henry & NPC. Errors have more impact.
-Reduce damage cause by Bane poison on arrows and weapons.

🔹 A harsher economy
-Merchants should pay significantly less for sold items.
-Repairing and maintaining equipment should maybe be more expensive.
-The prices of certain items sold by merchants should be increased.
-Money found in nature (chests, bags, etc.) should be reduced.
-Food such as honey and the found plants should be reduced.
-NPCs playing dice should have a limit on the amount of money they carry.

🔹 A stricter hunger system
-The player should be required to eat at least twice a day.
-Going more than six hours without food should result in performance penalties.

🔹 A more difficult and unforgiving reputation system
-Crimes and bad actions should have long-term consequences.
-Earning a village’s trust should take much longer.

🔹 Crime system
-Killing multiple characters in the same area within a short time is directly punishable by death.
-Sneaking is way too powerful, noise stats should be a lot more impactful.
-visibility/conspicousness needs improvement.
-The guards are more suspicious, especially when Henry is covered in blood after a murder.

🔹 Other
-(why not) Heavily damaged armor & weapons, in the red, are not repairable.
-Make Save Shnaps much much harder to create
-Players alowed to save with Savior Shnaps every "......." minutes.
-Twitch items rewards are not available in HC.
-Twitch items rewards are available after a specific mid-game quest.
-Reloading a save is disabled. The player must face their choices.
-Disable quest objectives / HUD.
-Provide the option to enable or disable map markers or the HUD at the begining.
-Max carry weight reduced.


🔹 Other suggestions for the game in general (NC/HC)
-please make in-game days slightly longer if possible (exemple : 12 noon > 10 AM).
-I'm not sure if it's possible to have all the perk, but if that's the case, the player must make choices in his journey (at least in hardcore).
-less stamina should determine the duration of ripost slow-motion.
-Let the player skip the scene before meet Bozjena or let us choose to start directly in front of the head of this good woman.
-natively add an XP modifier system in the menu.
-Horse/mutt not teleporting (like rdr2, & everyone was ok with that).

[Spray n' pray]

IMO HC should be:

Gear rebalance:
"bandit" class NPCs gear should have tag - "ragged".
it can still be fixed to full functionality, but it should be extremally cost ineffective.
cost (tool/trader) should be 4 times higher and it should break 4 times faster.
also that items should be completely worthless for trades, item base value is automatically set to 0.

"soldier" class NPCs gear should have tag - "well worn".
Repairing it is still not very cost effective, at cost repair tool 3x/trader 2x and break 2x faster.
it will also have reduced value for traders. base value should be only 50% of original.

"noble" class NPCs gear and trader items - no change.

Also items looted from corpses, should be permanently tagged with "death smell".
Those items value is only 10%, multiplicative with all other modifiers. Also if Henry wears them it will make him stink after some time.

No more: 2 bandit camps and I have decent starting gear, another 2 and I'm as rich as noble. You will still stockpile bandit gear, not for sale but for replacement, as each will probably be only one fierce battle use. Now quest rewards will matter and be useful.

everything nice but stealing would be overpowered...

Energy system rebalance:
Energy should deplete very fast. - Without any perks and buffs 6 hours and its out.
Long not disturbed sleep should give "well rested" buff - that buff should greatly slow down energy drain. Longer sleep, longer buff.
Bed quality should matter more - it should not only affect how fast energy regen, but also affect mentioned above buff, high quality beds should have decreased thresholds, while bad increased.
Overall, it should balance quite well for regular time frame activity like from dawn to dusk.

Main quest rebalance:
For me best quest was For Whom the Bells Tolls. Mostly because of time limit, so let upgrade all other main quest by giving them time limit, of course with enough time for SOME side activates and exploration. For example first deadline: wedding starts in 7 days.
No more: months in game to kill every bandit, open every chest, and do all side quests. No more: "end game" Henry at the beginning of main quest line.
After all there is so many things to do and so little time for all of them.

Thievery rebalance:
Some adjustments to exp gain and done. Just time investment to level up should balance possible profitability. Price for stolen gear wont be money, but combat stats you will not gain and side quest that you will not do.

[Whiplash27]

I'd like to see master strike not automatically attack and instead just create an opening for a free shot on a certain side of the enemy that the player has to take advantage of quickly before it closes up again. That's more of what it would do in real life from what I've read.

[Witchblade]

Progression
I agree the XP gain is overtuned in comparison to KCD1. 50% seems OK.

Combat System
- NPC Attacks more frequent is not always a "harder" thing. NPC's must follow the same stamina rules as the PC regardless of difficulty and therefore only attack if their Stamina allows it.
- Yes to not dodging and blocking when no stamina is left. You should also not be able to attack.
- Yes to same armor rules. In fact NPCs and PC must follow all the same rules. Cheating is not difficulty.
- Yes to reducing counter window
- No to Slow-Mo changes. In KCD1 Slow-Mo was removed in HC altogether. It is better than tying it to stamina. Feels way too gimmicky.
- Can't comment on poison use.

Economy
- No to extreme reduction in sell prices. I am sure they will reduce sell prices like in KCD1 HC, but this was more annoying than impactful. In my HC run in KCD1 i simply ignored picking up and selling items because it was not worth the hassle. A change in prices should not result in players ignoring the whole looting system.
- Repairing is already expensive. What is too cheap is the price of repair kits.
- Money in nature should not be reduced. Exploring is already weak as income method in comparison to other methods. This would kill it altogether.
- Making food in nature rare besides hunting can impact economy by forcing the player to buy food.
- Yes to NPC dice players having a limit on gold.

Hunger system
- Big No to eating twice a day. I eat one meal per day IRL. Going from one extreme to other is not a good solution.
- No to tying hunger to time. We already have a hunger debuff. It should simply have more impactful debuff like speed reduction than a simple malus to stats. It can also be inability to sprint when hungry.

Reputation system
- No to long term consequences. Everything must stay fixable. Run ending consequences would simply make people avoid crime altogether as a system.
- Yes to slower rep gain. (I must add reputation is useless in the game)

Crime system
- Yes to death sentence, because killing multiple NPCs out of nowhere is not the intended gameplay anyways.
- KCD1 sneaking was way too harsh, KCD2 feels overtuned. A good middle must be found
- Guards being suspicious is not a real impact. How does this translate to game-mechanics? Having to pass a speech check would be too annoying.
- Generally no need to change anything regarding Murder of NPCs. Only 1% of the players do murder sprees out of nowhere. It is neither a needed nor intended way to play.

Other
- No to non repairable armor in any state. Again makes majority of found loot after combat useless. Making a whole system obsolete.
- No to harder save schnapps, the whole system is more annoying than useful. I could write an essay about it but yeah... They will remove autosaves on HC mode anyways.
- Big No to timed saved slots, absolute involvement in Player Agency IRL. I should be able to save 5 times in a short period If I collected enough Schnapps. This doesn't stop anyone from waiting for the save timer to pass and saving. Besides the hate on the so called save-scumming is not grounded on any difficulty related arguments.
- Yes to ban of Twitch or any other Pre-order stuff. They should not be in the game in normal mode anyways. They destroy progression. RPGs are about progression.
- Big No to not being able to reload? What is this? An aRPG Hardcore character? This is an open world story focused Sandbox RPGG. A completionism run can take as much ass 200 hours. Not being able to reload is out of bounds in any realistic expectations.
- Yes to disabling quest objectives / HUD. Not in Journal mind you, but in HUD.
- Yes to optional map markers. Better, remove them and let us place markers.
- Big no to reduced inventory weight. Has no relevance on Difficulty in any impactful way. Makes the game more annoying than hard.

Other suggestions
- Yes to longer days, this was worse in KCD1 but they are still too short.
- No to changes to perks. Current perks are not balanced enough to do branching. They are very much vertical in progression, not horizontal in branching builds. This is not feasible as they need to redo all perks.
- Yes to skipping Intro / Tutorial.
- No to player curated experiences. HC and normal mode should be balanced by Devs.
- No to not teleporting horses / Mutt. Unnecessary tedium. They will remove fast travel anyways and coupled with no map markers this can result in you losing your horse somewhere. Way too punishing.

My General Input to your Suggestions :
Some of your suggestions are good, especially combat related ones, but we need to understand that making the game more tedious and annoying (save timers, repair hurdles, gold reduction) is not making the game harder. It will only increase the amount of grind someone needs to do. -> So I play archery 100 times instead of 20 times. So I collect 100 herbs instead of 20 herbs for Schnapps. Forcing players waste time is not a good way to introduce difficulty.
In example, in my HC run of KCD1, I completely avoided any side quests, any form of looting or stealing but simply ran through the story. Even though I did a merciful run, in HC combat was way too easy to merit any "looting". Stealing and economy changes were useless because I did not need any armor. Armor was useless because I was not getting hit.
Fundamentally, tedium is always bad. Nerfing game systems to a point that players start to ignore said systems altogether is not good design.

PS : Let us not forget , majority of the people will do a HC run for the achievement. I argue only a minsicule part of the player base is in for "fun in HC) Therefore either crank it up but don't include an achievement, or balance it good but not make it annoying. Having to do a dumb HC run in KCD1 after my "complete run" over 200 hours soured the impression the game left in me. This is sad because the game is actually good.

[Baron01]

While I like the general ideas of OP, the suggested reduction to XP gains is just stupid. HC mode will be slower by default and now you basically double or tripple required time to level up on top of it. So, easily 100 hour game to complete now becomes 200+ one. No new content, just a never-ending grind. That does not sound like fun to me.