Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Does it get mentioned in GotY deliberations?

I'm a couple of days into the GotY podcasts, and they're up to about July. There has been no mention of Kingdom Come: Deliverance so far, which is a bit of a surprise to me.

I understand that the game is quirky, to say the least, and I would never expect it to get very far in any category because it's a bit of a mess. However, the game is definitely worth a mention. The visuals are stunning, the story is decent, the combat is odd but they've tried to do something original.

I know there was never any buzz around this game from the team, yet this seems like a massive oversight.

I'm very aware of this game's many shortcomings, but I still think it is a great RPG.

Having listened to the pretty much all of the deliberations, it does not get mentioned.

Of course not. No one at Giantbomb touched it.

Huh; I'd totally forgotten that was a 2018 release, I was sure it was more than a year old.

I guess it and Vampyr are the two biggest releases that got skipped over in the discussions, right?

Yeah, that kinda sucked - especially when they were going through the list of games by release. Think that was the big notable exception. Would have liked to hear their thoughts on it.

@omgfather: My thoughts exactly. I wouldn't expect much praise for it, but there's a definitely an interesting discussion to be had.

I mean as a group they barely play the AAA RPG's and even seeing a small bit of coverage of the non-standard is incredibly rare for the site. Let alone its just coverage of the 1-3 hrs they played the game and I can't remember the last time a big non-AAA RPG was played for any amount of real time, let alone completed by anyone on the GB crew. For how many people they have added over the years I am pretty surprised they never found an RPG person to round out their tastes.

None of them played it so it would have made absolutely no sense to even bring it up.

I think a lack of mention illustrates ones thoughts very well, should they exist at all.

@fezrock: I think they skipped over Iconoclasts too, even though they did a quick look for it and are familiar with the creator's previous works.

I wish there was some one from the crew that liked RPGs more. Stuff like Divinity, Pillars Of Eternity, etc are always overlooked during GotY discussions.

It's a gaping hole in their content IMO.

Rorie is into them the most but he isn't on podcasts and GotY enough to voice an opinion regularly. I know Vinny and Brad used to play them more and probably would if they had more time but it looks like that won't ever change. It stinks. RPGs deserve more love from the crew ?

I'm not. I love old-school isometric RPGs and certainly don't love that GB basically doesn't cover them, but I can totally understand that finding someone who's into those games is pretty far down on the list of things they care about when interviewing new hires.

@big_denim: Completely agree. Every now and then, we hear Rorie talk a bit about an RPG. It's rare, though.

A couple of folks in this thread said no one played it, so it's not worth mentioning. I totally understand this, but that's pretty much the point of what I'm saying. There's a massive gap in the content here and I would personally enjoy more RPG coverage from the team.

This isn't a complaint in any way, just an observation.

There will always be gaps in content with a small crew. Iconoclasts, Battletech, Bloodstained & Vampyr were forgotten. Legend of Heroes games don't exist at GB. Secret of mana & de blob 1 & 2 remasters happened. Surviving mars was not paid much attention to. A new The Show game was released. 2 Ys games. Warhammer 40k Inquisitor - Martyr, Agony, Lego The Incredibles, Chasm, This is the police 2 Et cetera et cetera. When you go in to the GB deliberations, you have to go in with the idea that they have played 20-30 ish games as a group with 4-8 games being played by multiple people. If they felt the need to round out their tastes they would need to get a visual novel person, a Crpg person, a Jrpg person, a sports person , a simulator person, someone that keeps up with all these live games etc etc. Exactly the move they decided they didn't want to do when they left gamespot.

@the_greg: That's just the nature of the site, though, and always has been. One of their core axioms coming over from Gamespot was that they, the staff that is, would only play game that they wanted to play. Every year throughout the life of the site there have been plenty of bigger games left unmentioned here; it should be completely expected by now.

@onemanarmyy: I understand. Like I said, I don't really have a problem with it. It's just that, as a fan of RPGs, it would be nice to hear their thoughts. Same as how it would have been nice for fans of the games you listed to hear their favourites being represented.

I know that Giant Bomb GotY is this team's own list. I fully appreciate that, in fact it's one of the things I love about Giant Bomb. They don't conform to anyone else's idea of what should be covered or how it should be covered (I'm aware of my contradiction here), but it still jostles me a little bit that some titles, which are considered by many to be GotY, go completely unnoticed.

Maybe we should start a thread where we give props to those games that weren't played or talked about. It would be cool to see community-driven deliberations, aimed solely at games that were overlooked by the team.

I get that they're not gonna play some games. What confused me was that they went through that list of releases on the first few days of GOTY like it was a complete list - not just games they felt needed discussion. Maybe I missed something when they introduced how they were gonna do it. But they could have easily gone through all the big releases and just put an asterisk next to any games none of them have played, giving a reason why it won't be in any of the future deliberations. At least then it's clear.

I think they were going through a release date list and picked out the games that were noteworthy to them. They didn't mention games like Detective Pikachu, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Battletech, The Show, Fifa, Magic the Gathering Arena, Swords of Ditto, Trails of Cold Steel II or Laser League neither. Here's an idea of how many noteworthy games got released in 2018

Simply too many to adress. And when you are going to try to give the big ones a shout out, where do you draw the line? Will Fifa get a yearly shoutout despite everyone knowing that it's not for them? Will a remaster of de blob & age of empires qualify for a shoutout? Laser League? Muv Luv Alternative? Agony? I think it's more natural to leave that in the hands of the people at the table. Shout out the games that you want to mention but know in your heart that they wouldn't get much action during the GOTY talks.

I googled "kingdom come deliverance game of the year" and went back three pages of results. I only found links from KC:D forums on/before release asserting it would be GOTY, but no results in which it is being called the GOTY, let alone in a top 10 list.

They didn't play it, no one ever expressed interest or excitement in it, and the game is apparently still extremely buggy for people on the KC:D forums, so, very unsurprisingly, it didn't get mentioned in GOTY talks.

@kcin: And that's all without even considering that one of the lead designers is a misogynist, bigoted a-hole.

This is one of, infact it is the number one, problem with Giantbomb for me. There isn't enough diversity in the staff members gaming tastes. Something like this can go untouched whilst you have 5-6 of the staff playing the same game. I guess what I would want is people on staff that have different tastes. Have a RPG guy, or an MMO lady or a tactics guy or a sports lady etc etc.

@the_greg: As someone who loves RPGs and has often wished they got more coverage here, I'm not actually sure it would be beneficial to hear their thoughts on these games. Fans of anime style games and JRPGs have long lamented the fact that GB doesn't like those games or take them seriously. The past couple of years have seen that change a bit, but it's a recent change after years and years of no one on staff really liking those games.

To be sure, there are a couple of people on staff--primarily Vinny and Rorie--who are into AAA and mid-tier RPGs and occasionally talk about them. I actually asked Rorie in a UPF chat a few months ago if he ever got into Pillars of Eternity 2, and he said he just hadn't gotten around to it.

I just don't see the value of asking the crew to spend time on games that each require dozens of hours if they're not interested in them. First, it's pretty selfish of us to demand they play what WE like. Second, their input on those games would NOT be something that fans of the genre would like to hear. The Witcher 3 wouldn't have won GoTY in 2015 if only Jeff had spent more time with it.

@kcin: It's easily in my top ten, so I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there like me. I agree with what you're saying, to a degree. My point is simply that it is a bit of a shame.

Regarding the designer, yes, he is an a-hole and a misogynist. He's kind of right about the progressive bias though. It's affecting movies and games. Look at The Last Jedi. Anyway, let's not get into that haha.

@bladeofcreation: Again, totally understand and agree to an extent. Speaking completely selfishly and as a subscriber, I would much rather watch people diving into some non-AAA RPGs than mucking about in Hitman.

That's not to say I don't enjoy the content they put out (including the Hitman stuff), I'm just saying it would be cool.

I completely understand the logistical reasons behind not putting time into content like this.

Eh, they didn't talk about Vampyr at all(?) either, which I only realized now when I read that one comment. It wasn't a big release, but still one from Dontnod and most of them liked Life is Strange quite a bit.

As a big fan of RPGs generally, I'd love to see more coverage of that stuff here but seeing as it doesn't interest the group at large (Vinny and Rorie do seem to dabble tbf) I'm not all that disappointed/surprised. I generally go elsewhere for my RPG coverage and the last thing I'd want is them force covering games they don't like (Like Dan playing Yakuza or Ben playing KH) as that makes for the worst content imo.

At the end of the day, I come here to see the duders have a good time playing games. A RPG loving staffer would be great in the future but that seems a lousy reason to hire in and of itself.

Bugs aside, KCD is like if Skyrim had a lot more to offer than to just hit that reward center of your brain. One of Alex's praises of RDR2 was that he was planning out his days, as in making a note of what he can do in the day until it's time to go to bed, which is what I was doing frequently in KCD. Brewing the potions and hunting was fun and unlike anything I've experienced before in a game. I love how all your armor/clothing carries over into the cutscenes, at one point Henry looked so buff because I had 3 or 4 layers on.

Of course there are flaws such as combat which for me divulged into shooting arrows to the face at point blank to the armored enemies, as that was much more effective. There was a game-breaking bug at one point which stopped me from progressing in the game until they fixed it I think one or 2 weeks later. Plenty of open-world jank. The guy below was someone you had to chase down for a mission, when I approached him here, he teleported way ahead, got away from me and I had to restart (game doesn't force you to restart, if the guy gets away that actually branches into another quest path, but I really just wanted to catch him).

Anyway, still my fave of the year, very memorable game.

@treetrunk: I wish this forum had a 'like' button.

I enjoyed RDR2 quite a bit but yeah, KC:D just did the 'a day in the life' so much better. I role played Henry hard. One of Ben's complaints against RDR was during main missions you couldn't stray from the path, but KC let you go about completing a task with quite a bit of freedom. I understand the staff didn't have any interest though.

KC without a doubt is my GOTY.

Really need to give this a go I think... been putting it off because of bugs (and other games) but it always seemed like the sort of thing I'd like and some of what's been said here makes me wanna just jump in and try it. Thanks duders.

I'd throw Pillars of Eternity II in that hat too.

@someoneproud: Buy it on PC if you can. The console UI for changing equipment and such (near launch anyways) was less than ideal. I imagine it works pretty well on PC though.

Yea, get the PC version. I have PC and Xbox One X versions. Although I've played more on the Xbox (much more convenient for me) the PC version is much slicker. Also, there's a decent modding community, so if you come across any aspects of the game that aren't doing it for you, you can probably mod them out.

I will say this, though. Not being able to mod the Xbox version has actually helped me get into the game a lot more. The stakes are much higher and overcoming the game's difficulties has given me a feeling of satisfaction that most other games can't compare to.

I am on a break at work, so I don’t have time to search for it... but ai know that Jeff, on his tumblr, said that they weren’t going to cover the game because of little interest on their part and the controversy surrounding the game.

@monetarydread: It's totally fair enough. Giant Bomb is great because they do what they want.

It's best if we don't talk about the controversies on the forum.

@the_greg: @rejizzle: Alas, pretty sure my mid-tier 5 year old laptop would melt if I played this on it... If I find myself with the means to upgrade I'll certainly play the PC version but as things stand it'll have to be PS4.

I'm not too concerned with the modding for now, heard a lot about the more archaic systems and I think I'm fine with them / can get past them to get that role-playing fix. I've a pretty high tolerance for awkward systems / bugs if there's something compelling past it.

This game took me back and showed me what a proper RPG looks like.

The first time I booted it up, I hated it. I thought it was another disappointing, clunky, Early Access title.. It wasn't until I went back; a good 10 months later, I realised it was "clunky" by design. I wasn't "the chosen one", I'm just some tw** kid still living with his parents. And at that point, everything clicked into place. You want to swing a sword and actually hit something? Practice! Can't draw a bowstring with your weak arms? Practice!

All of these systems I used to hate I absolutely love now, because they do get much, much better. I highly recommend this game.

They did a quick look of Hatred... oh well I guess that was an action title at least.

@treetrunk: It was also like..a garbage game worth dunking on.

Whereas this was competent, just nobody cared.

I really would have loved to see Vinny break that janky ass game but if I had to guess it was probably the controversy surrounding the main developer that was the big reason they stayed away from it.

Because threads about this game always have people half-remembering what Jeff said about Giant Bomb not covering this game and attributing more importance to one part of what he said, here's the source:

http://jeff.zone/post/171143206266/not-the-first-time-this-has-been-asked-im-sure

"It didn’t come up during the call-in show yesterday. Saw a few people talking about this off-site and thought it might come in the chat room.

"Anyway, a couple of us looked at it around the time it came out and didn’t find it interesting enough to pursue. The head guy’s shitty views certainly don’t help, but I doubt we’d have covered it either way."

Kingdom Come is a game that yells for Vinny's attention. To bad this game was so "overrolled" with controversy.

I kinda feel bad for the people who worked on this (lead dev. aside.)

What even sucks more is that they didn't mention Vampyr more people should play that game it's really good!

I dunno that I see where y'all are coming from with this being a Vinny game. I mean it's got the jank but from what I played of it the game felt like it would actively and harshly punish the kind of shenanigans Vinny gets up to in an open world.