After earning a promotion, Henry’s first orders are to investigate a brutal crime scene in Neuhof, and bring the perpetrators to justice.
[G^G] Kingdom Come Deliverance – Hardcore Mode – 09: The Hunt Begins
Episode Index
Crime and Punishment
Apart from my various shopping sprees(more on that later), the bulk of this episode consisted of me investigating the crime in Neuhof. I was hoping that there would be more nuance to the investigation, but at the end of the day all I really had to do was brute force my way through a bunch of dialog trees.
The good news is for the most part the dialog was very well done. The villagers really did seem to be in shock and grief, so the by the time I got done talking to everyone I was very much motivated to help them out. With the exception of Ginger being (to paraprase Captain Bernard) excessively suspicious, I actually enjoyed the investigation portion of the quest quite a bit.
Finally this particular part of the investigation climaxed with a sword fight in the woods against a bandit. Given I had recently picked up a new sword and shield in town, this fight was considerably easier than the fight in the previous episode against the two cumans. This part of the investigation ended with me finding a bloody hoof pick on a bandit bleeding out in the woods. When I presented it to the villagers, they told me it belonged to Ginger, who had decided to up and leave while I was searching the northern woods.
Additional questioning revealed that Ginger was friends with the various charcoal burners around the area. Furthermore, the game hints that Ginger had run off to the north. However, the quest marker on the map has you going to the charcoal burners in the south. It is unclear at this point if you are allowed to search for the northern charcoal burners first if you’d prefer, but I decided to “go with the flow” and follow the quest markers to the south.
Upon arriving and asking about Ginger it turned out that my instincts were right, and that my next stop would be the burners to the north. However, night was falling, so I decided to save the rest of the investigation for later, and made my way back to Rattay for another round of shopping.
Fetching The Right Price
On top of being good for my crime solving reputation, this episode was also good for my wallet. At the start of the episode I was able sell the meat I gathered while hunting with Hans Capon, and at the end of the episode I had picked up a variety of goods, both “stolen” and legit that I was able to trade away.
The reason I put quotes around “stolen” earlier was because I think the game considering the items I got off the bandit I found dying in the woods “owned” is kind of nonsense. What is even more nonsense is that the quest item on his body was NOT considered stolen. Maybe the game was trying to tell me that as a member of the Bohemian law enforcement, I shouldn’t be picking loot off of criminals around town. If so, that sense of morality was lost on me, so I picked the loot none the less and took it to my fence at the mill.
However, when I got to the mill I noticed that the sales price being offered by Peshek was how you say… low for most items. I went ahead and fenced the stolen goods, but decided to do a bit of an experiment with the other more valuable goods I had collected, particularly the Burgher’s sword I got from the first bandit that tried to kill me and the game didn’t flag as stolen.
The experiment was to try selling that sword at 3 places; the mill, a general trader, and a swordsmith. The results of the experiment were actually very interesting! The prices offered for that particular sword at this point of my characters development were as follows:
- The Mill – 31.4 groschen
- The Trader – 46.7 groschen
- The Swordsmith – 62.1 groschen
As you can see, who you sell a particular good to makes a big difference from an overall profitability stand-point. There truly is a trade-off between the convenience of dumping your goods somewhere vs shopping around.
So with my bags a bit lighter and my coin purse a bit heavier I decided to post up in the north part of town for the night.
If you have ideas around how I can improve my videos, please reach out to me on twitter via @GrowUpAndGame.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great rest of your day, week, month, year, and life!