u/CowPokeBowl

My personal favorites. For context, my preferred playstyle is Master difficulty with no minimap or mission stories, not much focus on mastery or challenges, just dropping into a mission and just improvising my way through, having fun and feeling immersed in the suspense.

Without going there each tier individually, the higher ones in my view offer the most believable, immersive, and organically cinematic gameplay. My favorite missions are big open ended maps with tons of options for how to approach, especially outside of scripted mission stories. These are missions I can replay often and always result in memorable new moments.

The overall atmosphere of the map also plays a big role: the attention to detail, hidden secrets, and how immersive it is vs. feeling overly contrived or artificial.

As we go lower on the list, there are the missions that are feel less believable and cohesive, and which provide less freedom around how to approach a goal, more reliant on scripted stories and more restrictive on playstyle, more linear, making them feel stale a lot sooner.

On my first play throughs, I often found myself taking a “checklist” approach to quests. I would circulate the map starting as many as I could find, and then prioritize travel to the areas with the most markers, to efficiently progress multiple quests at each stop.

Often I would feel productive while playing this way, taking satisfaction in completing as many objectives as possible, but the flip side was sometimes it would feel like a chore to be working through the “backlog” of active quests.

On my new Henry I’ve been having much more fun with an inverse approach, the Episodic playstyle.

The approach is simple: only pursue one quest at a time.

Each time I sit down to play, it feels like a well crafted TV show episode, following a single questline instead of progressing in multiple concurrently.

This can sometimes feel unintuitive, to see a new quest marker nearby and intentionally ignore it. And it does make the game take longer. But I have been having so much more fun; now when I’m playing I am really immersed in each side quest storyline instead of blindly following map markers to continue plots that I barely remember the context for.

Throughout I just follow a simple rule: no starting new side quests if others are currently active.

Highly recommend.

My favorites for an immersive playstyle

[KCD2] Ideal Playstyle: Episodic