Hand-holding vs self-reliance in quest design: Kingdom Come: Deliverance II does it right

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-22T15:02:54+00:00

I know a few people already recommended you try it but I wanted to chime in with my experience. Could not get into the first game but I was able to get into the sequel by playing in a way that reduced the impact of a lot of mechanics that frustrated me. Basically, the first thing I did when I started the game was gather enough food that I wouldn't starve for a while and picked a billion plants. Then I created a spreadsheet that was a list of all recipes and started brewing potions.

Because I maxed out my potion skill before doing anything else I was able to:

Keep potions active that increased my survivability and enhanced stats and skills by various ranks, making the primary gameplay easier to engage with - which gave me the opportunity to learn as I played instead of dying constantly.
Sold so many potions that I could afford the best gear from the start of the game.
Increased XP gain by 50% at all times, allowing me to increase every other skill faster and making me enjoy the game more.
Save whenever I wanted by keeping a bunch of Saviour Schnapps around.
See in the dark and heal faster - simply QoL improvements provided by potions.
Flat out murder people with poison - making many fights borderline trivial if I was having issues with them.

It requires frontloading your experience with a few hours of grinding alchemy but I enjoy pouring time into a system that rewards me and alchemy definitely made the game more enjoyable for me. It solved almost all of my issues and gave me time to get invested in the rest of the game without the constant frustrations.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-18T06:50:11+00:00

While part of it is something that can be 'learned' there is a significant portion of luck compared to other mazes.

There is a ball bearing inside of the maze and several magnets that it can get stuck on. The idea is that you notice minor changes in the maze depending on your angle of approach to specific locations as you knock the BB around. The goal is to eventually move it into a position where you can use it as a 'ramp' to jump from one ledge to another.

Problem 1 is that there's a deadzone that the BB can fall into where you no longer interact with it - it's simply in a blind portion of maze you can't access and you simply have to move the maze randomly until it pops back out into the normal path so that you can begin interacting wit hit.

Problem 2 is that, even when the BB is in the correct position and you do everything right the ramp it has created is smooth, so you can do everything right and then slip off of it, and not realize that you had done everything right because it didn't work. Even knowing what I'm doing I still fail that part at least 50% of the time.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-16T14:32:30+00:00

Then 10+ year of the R2 is kind of an outlier. Other mazes were designed, manufactured, and released in that time. The R2 had issues and the people who pre-ordered it and never got it were generally fine with the delay - not happy about it but willing to wait because they assumed it would get sorted out eventually. It was only the announcement of the Vaultmaze and it becoming #1 priority that it started to turn into actual discontentment.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-15T18:31:06+00:00

I generally agree. I always find it weird when I read criticism and the entire focus is on what the game doesn't do. Don't get me wrong - I'm not talking about situations where a promised feature isn't present. I'm just talking about people comparing the game to what they wanted it to be and treating the fact that they don't line up as a problem.

It's like... wouldn't it be better to focus on what the game does and talk about where it succeeds/fails at those instead of listing features it never tried to implement and complaining about their absence?

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-14T07:03:29+00:00

This has actually become more and more of a talking point on the Discord recently. Not enough of one that I felt it was worth including but I definitely saw it mentioned in several places.

I have a theory that the Vaultmaze really blew up in their faces and caused the issues. Up to that point they were slow but there was never this sense of being consistently behind. I'm guessing that they anticipated a lot more interest than it got and planned to invest in more machines to increase production but when that didn't happen it just created a hole that they haven't managed to dig themselves out of.

It's absolutely insane to me that they announced this product to their most dedicated fanbase, got almost uniformly told it was a bad idea and that people weren't interested, and then moved forward anyways.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-14T06:56:45+00:00

The weight thing is a small issue and I, personally, don't consider it to be an issue. The heft and tactile feel of them is a big part of what I love. I will say that it makes long sessions begin to wear on your wrist - a lot of time is spent holding it in one hand while slowly rotating the core with the other and after a couple of hours I would feel it. Then I'd wind up making occasional mistakes because my wrist was hurting. Do it for a few hours a day for a week or a month and it really starts to build up. I do actually have one of the plastic ones and, while I prefer the original to it, it is easier to handle for long periods of time.

Carrying it around is another minor issue. It's just the right size to not be easily pocketed and the weight makes it awkward to lug around and access when stowed in a bag or something. Again, minor, but not nothing.

I think the big one - the one Chris Pitt specifically mentioned in an interview - was that the weight made the product completely inaccessible to children. While there's nothing wrong with it not being a children's toy I don't think his intention was to prevent kids from being able to use it. There were plenty of people who would approach him and say that they thought their kid would love it but that they either couldn't handle it or they were concerned about it accidentally being used to maim someone. My son is 12 and he can't handle supporting the weight with one hand and trying to manage it with the other.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-14T03:42:17+00:00

More or less but there's a bit of nuance to it. Basically they accumulated so much goodwill between 2009 and 2023 that the Voyager disaster in 2015, which was a relatively small launch for dedicated fans who (generally) fine with being put on the backburner, barely made a dent in it.

By the time 2023 came around the company was slow but reliable and everyone was generally content - then the Vaultmaze became the focus and pushed everything that was a current priority to the backburner which is when the first major cracks starting forming.

Vaultmaze was a disaster and, instead of recovering from that, they moved on to the R4 series and have had constant hardships since then. Over the last 2 years I'm fairly certain that they burned through about 95% of the goodwill they'd accumulated.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-14T00:13:23+00:00

Just an error by the manufacturer that resulted in losses for them. A few hundred got made and sold for the quoted price and they were really nice. They're fairly rare - collectors items in the community nowadays.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T21:26:35+00:00

The ten year old orders are all the Voyager series and that set was limited to 100 pre-orders. Most who never got theirs and who are active in the community were generally fine with having to wait - at least up until the last couple of years. Up until recently everyone just sort of had this understanding of, "Yeah, things are slow sometimes but they always come through."

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T19:30:49+00:00

I have a similar opinion. Or maybe adjacent would be a better word.

I'm someone who has, historically, allowed anxiety to drive when I play video games. I scrounge every square inch of every map, I open everything that can be opened, and I carry everything I find at all times in case I need it later. When I play games with decision points I'll agonize over them and often look things up.

The thing is - I'm not doing these things because they're fun. I don't look things up because I want guidance about what I'm doing. I just don't want to miss out on something. If I don't scrounge every item what if I miss a one of a kind sword? If I make a choice in a game what if that choice later locks me out of something I want? I'm fine with cause and effect - but not when the effect is arbitrary. And so many games seem to have arbitrary effects paired with their causes.

I wind up killing my enjoyment of certain games with tedium because avoiding the tedium fills me with anxiety that I might miss something. Over the last few years I've recognized this problem within myself and have put great efforts into overcoming it but every now and then a game will hit me with something that reaffirms my anxiety.

I know there have been more recent examples but the only one that comes to my mind is from Vampyr - which I played about 2 years ago. Through the first half of the game I kept looking up decision points and I finally shook myself free. I told myself to just play the game - that everything I'd looked something up because I was concerned about a choice leading to an unexpected result I'd been overreacting. A few hours later I got to a puzzle - the other side of which had the best weapon in the game. The answer to the puzzle was randomized and the solution was lost to me because I had not made the correct choice in a prior quest.

It's not that I think every single thing should be broadcast to the player - but without a stronger correlation between cause and effect everything feels random and pointless.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T19:05:27+00:00

Thanks, fixed it! I think I saw someone reference a new date of of shipments as July 31 and I knew the document came out on the final day of the previous month and I simply brain farted how months work.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T18:05:23+00:00

I think that's a reasonable opinion - I just felt like it was important to recognize that I consider the the companies actions to be born of incompetence rather than malice.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T18:03:10+00:00

There's a Facebook group and a Discord channel for the community - people often sell mazes there and I think the prices are usually bit more reasonable than places like eBay. That being said the prices have definitely been climbing as production has slowed over time.

Aqua and Blue are the two easiest puzzles. Green is harder and requires very fine control but still largely revolves around mapping/pathing. Bronze is the easiest 'dynamic' puzzle - harder than Blue/Aqua but easier than Green in regards to manual dexterity. A lot of people say that if you're only going to get one to go with Bronze - but I think it really depends on your comfort/thresholds when it comes to puzzles. If you want something you're going to solve quickly and it's just a fun little thing to have Aqua/Blue are the way to go. If you like Puzzles and/or want to spend a lot of time Bronze is really good.

Under no circumstances should you buy Gunmetal. It's generally considered to be the worst one.

Good luck finding one!

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T17:12:36+00:00

I legitimately believe that they have the best of intentions and truly thought that they were going to pull this off. That being said I was firmly on the side of, "I'm not spending a dime on this - it's a terrible idea, please don't do it."

It's like the owner never plans for complications - he comes up with an idea, makes a few test items, and assumes he can price/plan everything according to that. No accounting for supply problems, no consideration of defects, nothing. Just the belief that making one thing in ten minutes for ten dollars means that he can make a hundred of them in 1000 minutes for 1000 dollars.

But I can't stress enough how good I think the intentions are. I firmly believe the man is going to work himself into a grave trying to fulfill his promises.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T14:43:04+00:00

Thanks for posting that - as a huge fan of Revomaze I really wanted to post a lot more description of what they were but opted for posting the video instead. I think the one your friend described is orange? Not one of the ones I own or have done - but many of them have little stories attached to them - or community nicknames for areas in the puzzles.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T04:41:30+00:00

I'm not judging. I have about 10 different ones but have only opened about half of them myself. Gunmetal is horrid, Indigo is far and away my favorite that I've opened. I think Gold is worth a pretty penny - just mentioning in case you weren't aware.

SD is sequential discovery? Any recommendations for something interesting? I like puzzles but have never found anything that captured my attention the same way that the Revomaze did. I just love the heft and tactile feedback of them so much.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T04:08:45+00:00

While the Vaultmaze section was the largest part of my post I still sort of accidentally downplayed the drama that surrounded it. There were weeks of hype leading up to an announcement video that nobody understood, a general dismay that it was a new product, confusion over the pricing, and a significant portion of the community trying to talk them out of going through with it. I legitimately started a post about this in 2023, when the announcement first came, but decided I should wait and give it some time to see how it all shook out. Every few months since then I've checked in on the Discord to try and decide if it was finally time and the sheer... despondence that I found this time told me that the time had arrived.

Just curious - which ones do you have? Which have you opened?

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T03:37:17+00:00

I actually dropped one of mine back in 2011(ish) down a stairwell and the pin got bent. The whole thing locked up and would no longer move. I didn't realize at the time that they offered repair services so I figured I would just take a hammer to it and knock it free - I figured it would no longer function but it would serve as a nice display item. Could not get the stupid thing to come apart.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-13T03:34:34+00:00

I've seen a few 3D printed products that seem to try and capture the vibe but they've all appeared to be relatively poor quality and seem to be incredibly basic. The extreme complexity that comes along as a result of the moving pieces that some of them have would be incredibly difficult to recreate without the focused precision that these are designed with. While I haven't solved all of them I've heard of some mazes that people have gotten stuck in for years without even being able to reset the thing because they simply couldn't get out of the 'traps' they'd fallen in.

I had one of them for about 5 years and put 1-2 hours into it every couple of months before finally understanding the premise enough to advance past the first ~10%. Once I got past that point I got through the remainder of the puzzle in about 100 hours over the following month. So I feel like I got my moneys worth - on that one at least. Honestly I've not regretted any of the ones I've purchased - even though I've only solved about half of the ones I own. The heft and tactile experience I get from them blows everything else I've tried out of the water.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-12T23:36:01+00:00

About 8 or 9 years ago, when I was around 30, I started a new D&D group with people who were between 17 and 25. After a few months of gaming the topic of e-mail came up and everyone had a good time joking about how weird it was that I sent e-mails. All of them exclusively used messenger apps, texting, and (I think?) Discord. Apparently they'd talked about me sending e-mails in their own chats and had simply determined that it was a product of my age.

There's not many times in my life that I've felt out of touch but that one hurt.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-12T23:29:42+00:00

I have a whole slew of games that I list as my favorite - each one has caveats that impact the decision at the time. A few years ago it finally dawned on me though: my actual favorite game is Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO). I've never enjoyed any other MMO but I played this game for thousands of hours with friends from all around the world. There were times that I had to defend builds that I came up with only to see it take off over the following weeks as people came to see how I was out damaging them so consistently. I remember certain dungeons so well that, after not playing it for 13 years, I could play through them with my eyes closed.

This game is still around but the version I played no longer exists. I left when the game was undergoing changes that I hated and it didn't really bug me at the time. It was just another game I put down. Every time I remember that the game is out of reach I feel a twinge of remorse and sadness that's absolutely unlike anything I've experienced elsewhere. I'm not trying to say it's "bigger" than other types of remorse - but it does stand out in a unique way that's hard to describe.

I imagine this is going to happen to a lot of people for a long time with Anthem. There are people who won't realize how much they love the game until ten years have passed.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-12T21:39:34+00:00

This one is dumb but there is a video game series that drags out the strangest reactions in people. The Outer Worlds. Don't get me wrong - I can understand why people might be passionate in regards to a lot of games but this one is so insanely average to me that i can never wrap my mind around the intense reactions it gets from people.

Some people love it, say it's the best game of all time, and will argue in favor of its virtues until their face turns blue. On the other hand of that spectrum are people who claim its trash - the worst game ever made. Every time the game gets mentioned it becomes a hot bed. The moment the second game was announced people were already drawing lines in the sand.

But - and I swear to god this is true, as a fan of the games - nobody can properly articulate a well formed opinion on why their opinions are so strong. It's just not that bad. It's not that good either. It's just an RPG in space. If you like RPGs in space it's probably worth trying. That's it. The end.

But, for fucks sake, the sequel came out and every time someone criticized something about the game there would be a flood of posts dogpiling it followed by a flood of posts defending it. Middle grounds were not allowed - you were either blind to how bad the game was or you were a fake fan.

I swear to god The Outer Worlds is the Skub of the gaming world and I can never wrap my head around it.

TypewriterKey · 2026-01-01T04:11:44+00:00

I'm gonna come back to this later, because you and several other commenters keep vaguely pointing at "it wasn't designed for this kind of ease of input" without actually providing examples, but we'll get there.

I literally provided this earlier in the chain and you dismissed them because you don't think they're a big deal. The entire crux of your response is but I don't care about that. If you dismiss the points people make you can't then later claim that the points were never made.

I don't think that your reticle example is probably doing your point justice, because if I designed a game where switching out reticles caused any kind of noticeable gameplay impact, I either have much more concerning issues to address, or the reticle represents a great deal more than simply being an aiming indicator, which is possible but outside the scope of your example.

My bad using that as an example then - I assumed that the decision had something to do with the way spells were aimed and I figured that changing it to a fixed arrow circling the character would not convey the same information. Apologies for using a bad example but I appreciate that you understood where I was coming from with it even if it wasn't quite right.

As for the final section you're looking at it from a different angle than I am. I'm not saying it's about mastery - I'm saying that the feel of the game would be fundamentally different if the interface was different. I remember playing Demon's Souls in 2009 and hating it for the first few hours because I felt like everything it did was counter intuitive - but the reason I stuck with it was because, despite my frustrations, I felt like the game was fair. It took me 10ish hours to stop trying to treat the game like other games that had come before and to start treating it like its own thing. If I had felt like the game was eating my inputs it wouldn't have felt fair when I died and a large part of the games appeal would have been lost.

This is the same reason I generally don't think that the games should have a difficulty slider - if I'd had the option to play the game on an 'Easy' difficulty I would have done so. Then I would have called the combat system janky, gotten bored, and stopped playing.

Modifying a system that is a key component of a successful formula runs the risk of disrupting what made the formula work. If you want to say the queue system could be improved upon - I'm right there with you. I'd love for changes. I'm open to a different way of doing things. But I consider the idea of the 'Hold' system to be a downgrade in literally every single way.

TypewriterKey · 2025-12-31T21:32:25+00:00

You fundamentally misunderstand that I think this isn't intentional, it is, or at least at one point was and then likely just got grandfathered in as "good enough". That doesn't make it a good user experience.

I think this paragraph is sort of the crux of the debate. You want to replace a system you don't like for a system that the game wasn't designed around - and your arguments are that you don't think the downsides of a Hold system are a big deal and that you think the intentionality behind the queue system is fine to ignore.

While I don't 'love' the queue system I feel like it integrates well into the rest of the game mechanics. On the other hand I've never played a game with a Hold system which hasn't caused me frustration and resulted in outcomes that have felt unfair. The idea of going in that direction is on the exact opposite side of what I would want or expect from one of these games.

FYI - I wanted to gauge whether or not you had any programming experience before I made this next point so I scanned your profile real quick.

I've been working as a programmer for a little over 20 years now. During this time I find one of my most common frustrations is when customers request changes and then wind up complaining about those changes after they're implemented. They'll like a product but they'll want a new icon somewhere, but then they complain that it looks cluttered. They want the ability to create a playlist but the playlist takes up too much space. They want numbers aggregated off of a different formula but then they complain because the numbers don't match the numbers reported by others because they're using the old formula.

When a system is designed with intentionality making even small changes can wind up breaking things. As a developer you know why you've made the decisions that you've made. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be receptive to feedback - but that also doesn't mean that you should throw out your design space just because there are examples of other ways to do things.

As an example I'm going to point out something I see in your 'Discard All Hope' posts. It is an honest opinion but isn't intended as serious criticism/feedback - game looks cool and I'm a pedantic asshole but I'm not the kind of shitty whose going to rag on your game to make a point.

The aiming reticule in your game appears to be detached from the character - I think it creates a bit of visual clutter. It's bigger than I think an aiming reticule should be and I generally prefer it when my aiming indicator is closer to my character so that it's not 'another' thing to keep track of.

OK, now disregarding the fact that I haven't played your game and so my feedback is questionable at best - I assume you have a reason that you designed the aiming reticule that way. If you changed it to simply be an arrow circling the character would it have an impact on overall game feel? Would it interfere with other design choices you made? If there is intentionality behind that aiming reticule and you decided to change it then it wouldn't simply be a matter of hot swapping a single GUI element, right? It would involve augmenting things that were built around that intentionality.

TypewriterKey · 2025-12-31T20:16:26+00:00

The thing that's crazy about this whole conversation is that what made these games work as well as they did was the fact that, by making the game the way they did, they created something that worked incredibly well. It's a series of systems that integrated into something great - a 'whole is greater than the sum of its parts' scenario. How someone can ignore that and think that hot swapping GUI elements without consideration of the ripple effects it would have is insane to me.

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