vectorgorgoth

You forgot a rather important step. After creating the .pak file and adding it to the game's Data/ directory, you should also add it to the file Data/pak.cfg - I had to do this step in order to get the game to recognize my file. Edit: I don't know about normally, but I definitely know in my case I had to include the WHOLE file (not just the values I wanted to change) or the game got really strange. I was hoping it would simply override piecemeal, but I guess not.

This sort of crap is why archery in video games is always irrecoverably broken. That's NOT HOW BOWS WORK. I tend to think the devs of these games have probably never bothered to pick up a sword or bow even once and see what it's like to handle them. For a game like KC, where realism was a supposed goal, they sure failed hard. Hell, just watching some videos of archery would have gotten the basic idea across. It's very possible to fire ten arrows into the air before the first one hits the ground; see The record I'm aware of is 11, though the video may be out of date. That technique, by the way, of holding a number of arrows in the draw hand while firing was common with skilled archers at one point. The quiver was for hauling the arrows around (you don't exactly want to march 20 miles holding a giant handful of arrows), but it wouldn't be uncommon to grab out several at a time and hold them while firing. Sure makes knocking the next arrow a lot faster. Anyway, drawing a bow is pretty quick - and has nothing to do with the skill of the archer, nor does it have much to do with the weight (or type) of bow. As long as you're strong enough to draw the bow at all, you can draw it fast. I'm also not aware of any bows so heavy that a reasonably strong (i.e. strong enough to wield a sword and kill someone with it) man can't draw it all the way. I'm aware of bows that are heavy enough that they'll wear out an inexperienced archer quickly, which limits their usefulness for combat, but that's a whole different issue. Another really screwed up aspect of KC is the way they made the bow "wander" while being held. That's pure stupidity. The skill with archery is with handling the bow (not skinning your own arm - although from personal experience, I never skinned my arm once while learning to fire a bow, but that wasn't in combat obviously) and with being able to put the arrow where you want it to go. Mostly the latter. Holding a bow isn't some arcane science - once you draw it, it's going to stay exactly where you aim it unless you hold it so long (like 30+ seconds) that your arm begins to shake. They wanted a "bow skill", but they had no idea how to implement it. What they should have done, really, is given the player an aiming reticle. Gasp, yes, I know DURR UNREALISTIC, right? No. It's just an indicator of where the PC thinks the arrow is going to go. And at a low archery level, that might not be too reliable. In other words, at low levels, maybe the reticle would move around - or be fairly large - or something like that; as the player gained skill, it would become more reliable. Which would actually be really neat - at low levels, you could still fire reliably if you simply ignored the reticle and used the arrow itself to aim (letting player skill compensate for low character skill); at high levels, you could just use the reticle, because Henry would actually know what he's doing. One last note: if they'd actually taken archery seriously, they'd have made it outright impossible to do archery with gauntlets on. Most gauntlets have that big flaring rim to protect the arms - what do you think is going to happen to the bow string (and your arm) if you try to fire a bow when wearing those? Hint: that arrow isn't going to go anywhere near where you aimed it, and you may end up dislocating your wrist and/or elbow.

Pretty self explanatory. The lockpicking minigame is actually pretty fun, but the idea of having hardcoded failure thresholds completely ruins it, especially since they made it so you have to be like level 15+ in order to pick the very hardest locks. Right now, it's easier (and MUCH faster) to simply get the "lucky thief" perk, a stack of picks, and try/fail to open an excessively difficult lock until you get in through abusing the RNG. While I don't mind the idea of the lucky thief perk in and of itself, making it so that RNG abuse is the ONLY way for a skilled player to open a difficult lock just feels wrong.