Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come Deliverance (KCD) is a huge open world RPG with a lengthy and exceptionally well written narrative, a commitment to historical detail and themes, and very well realized characters.

Set in 1403 Bohemia (to the west of modern day Czech Republic), KCD’s player character is Henry, a blacksmith’s son who begins his life in the village of Skalitz. Under the liege lordship of minor noble, Sir Radzig Koblya, the village of Skalitz is primarily a silver mining settlement and we come to understand that prior to the start of the game it has also largely been the extent of Henry’s world.

Over the course of the first few hours of KCD Henry completes a series of errands in his village that takes the player through the core of the game’s tutorial. A process that simultaneously sets the scene for the game’s prologue and concludes in Henry’s departure from the village and out into the wider world.

And as Henry comes to find out, chaos has come to that wider world recently following the death of King Charles IV. With the throne in dispute between Charles' sons, Sigismund and Wenceslas, there are many who are seeking to exploit the power vacuum to their advantage. Be it bandits, brigands, or armies of unknown backing and intent, there are many things for the locals of Bohemia to be concerned about. As a blacksmiths’ son who can barely hold a sword, let alone fight with one, Henry is very much outmatched when it comes to combat at the start of the game.

However unwise it might initially be, combat is always an option however, and it is possible to level up a series of skills and their parent attributes over time. Even at the highest skill levels for combat it remains a risky proposition to face more than one attacker alone. Skill progression with the various weapon types (sword, blunt, hand to hand etc.) is slow with experience for each issued relative to successful strikes on an opponent. There are training areas and sparring partners in the game and they are extremely useful for learning some basic attack combos and defensive timing. It may feel like hard work learning to fight effectively but as with many things in KCD, hard work is the point because they are going for realism, and in the era there would be no shortcuts to success available for someone like Henry. Skill books relating to most skills can be found here and there, and read for a significant but limited benefit. However, as Henry is illiterate (a normal state of affairs for most in 1403), if you want to read them then you’ll need to find a scribe to teach you how to read first.

Even harder than swordplay, is learning how to use the bow. As would be the case with the bows of 1403, there’s no reticule or aiming marker of any kind and the bow itself has potential to cause self-harm via the flaying of forearms if you do not have the correct brace equipped. Eventually once you have reached level 5 with the bow, you can take the brace off (and ideally replace it with something that offers better overall protection). Learning through repetition brings big improvements to archery and as with other weapons skills there are ways to improve it that exist outside of direct combat. Illegal poaching and archery competitions will be the way to go for a while before you start acting out any elaborate Robin Hood fantasies.

One of the biggest differentiators in combat outcome is obtaining, wearing, and maintaining good quality plate armour. Doing so isn’t cheap, and as such it also has the interesting effect of altering NPC perception of your social standing should you be fortunate enough to obtain any.

It would be wrong to consider KCD primarily a combat RPG however. There are an awful lot of game systems in play within it and they do a good job of connecting you to the world in a variety of ways. For instance in addition to the impact of clothing (and how well maintained it is) on people’s social assumptions about you, there are impacts to your charisma (potentially both negative and positive) that come from not washing regularly. Hunger, energy (tiredness), and health must all be dealt with, and their depletion impacts upon Henry in different and meaningful ways.

In game conversations cut to third person and in some cases lead into narrative-impacting dialogue choices. Conversations can simply be influenced by progression of story events or by Henry being in possession of the correct item to progress the story. In other cases, in-conversation choices will be presented that have a motif against them that indicate what type of attribute will influence the outcome of persuasive success for that particular choice. Think you are tougher than your conversational partner, then consider threatening them. Think you present to them as being of higher social standing, then perhaps you can pull rank? With levelling of the speech skill, it eventually becomes possible to see these attributes as numeric values on either side of the conversation. Intriguingly, simply choosing options with higher values may result in ‘success’ in a particular part of the conversation but also lead to an overall conversation failure if the general tone of the option is socially incompatible with the situation. In combination with clothing, armour, and cleanliness, these overlapping systems bring nuance to the process of having in-game conversations and while it is possible to skip forward through them, I rarely did so as the quality of character writing was generally extremely good throughout.

There are a number of extended multi-stage investigative sequences and quest lines throughout KCD that span the spectrum from realistically mundane to intriguingly complex. On occasion the game manages genuine drama, intensity and tension but overall it must be said that KCD is a very long experience, with extended periods of meandering, that overall does not lend itself to short sessions of play (for reasons I will get to below). It might well not be accessible to a majority of players because of this. Indeed, KCD is very much a Morrowind rather than an Oblivion or a Skyrim. You have to put a lot of time and patience in to it in order to get a rewarding experience out of it. My play through took 157 hours and while I saw the end credits, I definitely left a large minority of the game incomplete.

KCD employs a peculiar save system which I at first thought was pretty cool idea but by the end became one of two major complaints I had about the game. The game auto-saves at certain points in the narrative, after sleeping, or when you drink a particular type of alcoholic concoction known as Saviour Schnapps. You can buy it, and you can brew it, with the latter option also helping to level up your ‘alchemy’ skill. All of this contributes to the idea that if you want to stop playing the game you need to make a plan and consciously exit the game world by doing something deliberately in-game in order to make that happen.

Which would be absolutely fine if it wasn’t for the fact that the game crashed so frequently. I played on an Xbox One X, on day of release (v1.0) and completed it while it was v1.25. With each update, bugs were fixed but the stability of the game overall seemed to decline. Perhaps this trend was an artefact of having a save game that stretched across multiple versions? In any case, crashing became so frequent during the last 20 hours of play that I ended up making and drinking save game booze all the time just to guard against lost progress from crashes. I never intended Henry to become an alcoholic but circumstances forced him down that path!

The stability of the game was really the only negative to an otherwise exceptional experience. In light of this I have to say it falls short of 5 stars.

There are many positives though, and in addition to those listed above, I would call special attention to the beauty and variety within the world. The towns all had a unique character, but the forests were where this game shone for me. The variety of the biomes within each habitat and how they transition into one another looked the most real that I’ve ever seen in a video game open world. If you get a chance to look at the game, KCD is worth that glance on this basis alone.

It is this kind of commitment to realism and detail that I came to thoroughly appreciate throughout KCD. Indeed my experience of reading the codex that unlocks as you encounter each corresponding in-game artefact thoroughly underscores the commendable thematic and historical seriousness that Warhorse invested in the production of this game.