Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a grand idea. In a genre awash with fantasy epics, it sought to ground a role-playing adventure not in some distant and imaginary land, but in history. There would be no wizards, no dragons, no giant rats – just you, a horse, some mud, and a cast of flawed human beings.
Drawing on extensive historical research as well as the experiences of its homegrown Czech development team, Kingdom Come sought to tell a very real tale, narrowing its focus so that it would only include a small cast of important characters and an intimate patch of 15th-century Central European countryside.
Since its announcement back in 2013, I’ve been quietly excited to get my hands on the finished game, both as a big fan of this kind of RPG as well as a lover of European history. It’s been a depressing month spent playing through it, then, to find that for all its ambition, Kingdom Come just doesn’t work very well.
There are the separate and individual parts of an incredible video game here, but the game’s flimsy tech and inconsistent design just can’t hold them together long enough for Kingdom Come to win me over.
The writing, occasionally honest and endearing, is in other parts agonisingly out of place and over-cooked. The pacing of the game’s main storyline is completely off, spending its first half lazily spinning its wheels before dragging you through an excruciatingly overdrawn conclusion.
The so-called “realistic” combat system, implemented in an attempt to fix the click-happy madness of games like Skyrim, introduces more problems with its speed and clumsiness as it solves by making swords feel truly dangerous. And that’s just the melee systems. Trying to use a bow is a frustrating exercise in repetition and guesswork.
Most glaring of the design missteps, though, is Kingdom Come‘s save system, which restricts saving your progress to certain key points in the story, or by obtaining, then drinking, potions. Time is precious, and it astounds me that in 2018 a game was released that doesn’t respect the fact I may have other shit to do (or have things come up) that prevent me from sitting through long passages of a game, or that I don’t want to replay hours-long stretches of a mission because of a bug or accidental death.
And it’s not like losing progress to a bug, or simply having one wreck interrupt your session, is a rare occurrence in Kingdom Come. When I say there are technical issues with this game, I’m not talking about the odd performance hiccup or framerate stutters. I’m talking about fundamental problems at almost every point.
The pop-in I encountered running on a standard hard drive is some of the worst I have ever seen, although things are supposedly improved by installing it to a solid-state drive.
At times entire cutscenes played out like the game was released in 2001, all jagged faces and empty textures. NPC scripting was also not up to scratch. Sometimes the results were funny, like seeing a man floating in mid-air holding a ladder going nowhere. But other times it’s a more serious concern, like the two times I had to reload during key story missions because important characters simply didn’t show up or start delivering their performances.
Running into one or two of these things during a game would be a problem. Running into so many of them so often undermines the entire point of Kingdom Come. It’s presented by Warhorse as an immersive, authentic role-playing game set in a fully-realised medieval world, but at every turn the world is breaking down around you.
Even were successive patches and updates to fix many of the more superficial technical woes, I still don’t think I’d come around to recommending this as a great or even serviceable RPG, because the struggles at the heart of its design are simply too great to overlook.
So many of Kingdom Come‘s features are seemingly there merely to boost the perceived “authenticity” of the experience. This is history you’re meant to be playing through, and Warhorse have decided that the best way to truly immerse the player in that history is to recreate the past, warts and all.
Combat is slow and unwieldy because, supposedly, that’s what it was like. That you can’t save games all the time because that’s not how the real world works. But that’s all bullshit. This game isn’t a simulation, it’s only a simulation when it wants to be.
Why is the save system so punitive when the game has various magic potions? Why do players have to continuously eat and rest to survive when your horse can be instantly summoned to your side at a moment’s notice? It’s incredibly frustrating to ponder just where the line was drawn during development that determined which parts of Kingdom Come could bow to modern luxuries and which parts were going to be dragged out and made difficult simply to satisfy some inconsistent historical mandate.
The game’s lowest ebb, a dreary slog through the daily routine of being a monk-in-training, is the most memorable example of this. Players are made to wander a monastery on a strict timetable, attending mass, reading books and adhering to a curfew. It is as fun and interesting as it sounds, and it’s insane to think anyone at Warhorse thought the scant amount of education or immersion on offer was worth the drudgery.
That’s a question I found myself asking throughout the rest of the game as well. In what universe was I supposed to enjoy these broken systems implemented in the name of authenticity, when they flew in the face of more convenient, enjoyable ways to play video games? And why did these specific things suck in the name of a greater cause, yet so many other parts of the game weren’t made to suffer the same fate?
The answer, of course, is that as Nathan Grayson found when exploring the game’s success in spite of all the flaws I’ve dwelled on above, there is admiration to be found in the idea of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, if not the execution.
The nuts and bolts of the experience – daily village life, objective markers and quests, mission structure – is very Elder Scrolls. The inhabitants of this artificial Czech countryside are going about their routines around you, and everything takes place in real time, according to a day-night schedule. It’s a lot to process under the hood, and that might explain why the relatively small team at Warhorse couldn’t manage it for the bulk of the game like a larger, more experienced studio like Bethesda can.
But at certain times, in certain situations, they can pull everything together. And those moments that emerge from the chaos are almost worth the hassles that bog you down everywhere else.
I’ve already mentioned the issues I had with NPC behaviour in storyline missions, but the one thing the game’s villagers can do without fail is hit the pub every day at sunset. It’s a hell of a thing to see; I parked myself outside a tavern one afternoon to see it go down, and was hypnotised to see everyone end their work, enter their homes, drop their tools then head to the bar, taking their seats, ordering beers, playing dice, dancing the night away and having fun.
It all looks and feels so human, and so natural, that for those precious few hours, Kingdom Come feels alive.
And not every mission is ruined by real-time NPC behaviour. Two quests defined the game for me, and may stick with me long after the general frustrations have faded from memory.
One involved the hunt for the witness to a crime, which led me to a windmill at midnight. Upon discovering that he was hiding in a nearby village, a group of thugs appeared, announcing they were also looking for him. I wasn’t capable or willing to engage three armed men directly, so to save my skin I cooked up a plan to test Kingdom Come’s mission structure: I told the thugs his hiding location in exchange for them not killing me.
Their leader ran off to murder him, leaving the other two behind to guard me. Upon doing so, I was presented with mission updates telling me that I’d failed to find and question this man. But I wasn’t done: I shot one of my chaperones with a bow, then overcame the other in melee combat, and took off after the leader on horseback, hoping to catch him.
Riding at breakneck speed along a country road at night, my way lit only by a torch, I actually came across the thug leader, running in real time, just outside the target’s home. I jumped off my horse and shot him, dragging his body off the road — and as soon as I did, the mission objectives reverted to me being able to save and question the witness. I’d saved this guy’s bacon, and salvaged a better path through the mission, through some fast-talking and improvised murder. It was amazing.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
BACK OF THE BOX QUOTE
“Please, install some mods to make this easier on yourself.”
TYPE OF GAME
First-person RPG
LIKED
The beautiful countryside. Sometimes, the game gets its shit together and it’s awesome.
DISLIKED
Most times, however, it can’t. And sometimes, it feels like it doesn’t even want to.
DEVELOPER
Warhorse Studios
PLATFORMS
PC (played), PS4, Xbox One
RELEASE DATE
February 13, 2018
PLAYED
Around 60-70 hours in total. Completed main quest and a number of peripheral diversions.
The other example was my attempt to cure a town of a pestilence. After being told to contact a physician slash herbalist monk for help, I was asked if I could read and if I had skill at alchemy, the game’s catch-all term for potion-creation. You begin the game as an illiterate peasant, but I had since put some points into my reading and alchemy skills, so I just clicked “yes,” figuring that since I’d been given the option, my skill levels must have been high enough to prompt the responses being made available.
Nope. The recipe I was given was barely legible – Kingdom Come simulates poor reading skill by making in-world text start off as mostly gibberish and making it become clearer the higher your stats. Let’s just say I found it incredibly difficult brewing a potion.
But eventually I managed somehow, rode to the village, and distributed the remedy.
Which killed everyone. Because I’d lied, then tried to fake my way through it, and had brewed the wrong potion. An entire village, wiped out, their blood on my hands, all because I’d got cocky and not appreciated the fact the mission had been designed to test my honesty as much as my stats.
That’s one that will haunt me for a long time.
This is the shit people wanted from this game, and at times, it genuinely delivers on its promise. Real problems that you’re able to solve with actual open-ended and relatable solutions. These two missions weren’t testing me with dwarven runes or dark magic. They required quick thinking and human intuition, and rewarded me with some of the best emergent experiences I’ve run into in an RPG.
Kingdom Come can at times be gorgeous, especially whenever you’re away from big buildings or crowds of people. The Bohemian landscape once you hit the countryside is beautiful, and the times I was running or riding around miles of empty woodlands were some of my favourite spent with the game. Things get especially pretty when the weather plays up and creates the kind of wet, moody landscapes that were once solely the reserve of The Witcher 3.
This means Kingdom Come is at its best when you leave its broken world behind. This isn’t Skyrim: the woods aren’t full of tombs and monsters and caves, so there’s really not much to do once you venture outside settlements, which might strike you as a bit boring. But it actually does more for the historical feel of Kingdom Come than any writing, wardrobe design or conversation does because the countryside feels truly wild. Just you, the streams, the birds, and the wind.
While I’m on the game’s visuals, Kingdom Come also has some excellent maps. Drawn entirely in a medieval style, they scale wonderfully, with a single large map covering the entire playable region, while zooming in on each settlement provides a separate, more detailed, lovingly characterised image for the towns scattered around backwoods Bohemia. Below is an example; as splendid as it is, it’s still a functional map, as it manages to show every road, building and bridge that it needs to.
I’m not angry at Kingdom Come, I’m just… disappointed. It was touted as this grand historical representation, an abandonment of fantasy for a true medieval setting, a game that would let us live the middle ages. But the game we got is just this busted, inconsistently ambitious RPG that shines in points, but falls apart in most others.
Comments
14 responses to “Kingdom Come Deliverance: The Kotaku Review”
Very fair review, from my experience. Glad I got it on PC where I could install mods, and I’ve encountered far fewer bugs than the reviewer, but I’ve also played significantly less.
Still: Console players, fucking beware. PC or nothing.
The various quality-of-life mods winding back the developers’ bone-headed decisions designed purely to punish the players are just too vital to do without. I simply would not enjoy the game without mods, and could not recommend it.
Which mods would you recommend ?
I personally consider the saving mod to be pretty much mandatory. It’s the primary mod I can’t imagine playing without. At all. The game would frankly be utterly intolerable without a quicksave. Also, the ‘skip intro movies’ mod. Shave at least a minute if not more off your start-up. Just aggravating, that shit didn’t need to be there.
No save mod = unplayable, IMO. Strongest argument against the game on console. The rest is personal taste:
Another really good one is the mod which restores the reticle when using a bow. The reticle is actually there at every other point of the game and only disappears when you use the bow – ie: when it would be useful. It’s a total dick move. I also use a mod to dim the reticle a little, because it’s a pretty garish yellow blob by default.
Another quality-of-life mod is the one which adds segments in a wheel to the lockpicking minigame. Lockpicking’s a bit weird, and it depends on being able to see where you’re keeping your pick as you rotate the entire thing, so the mod just adds some lines to the thing so you have more of a reference point than, ‘splodgy bit of metal that looks vaugely like a sideways L’. More quality of life comes from an inventory sorting mod, which organizes your shit in categories better. Saves on scrolling. The UI is… not the best, by default.
I also installed a mod which increases arrow speeds. That’s just a personal immersion thing for me. It means fighting archers and getting hit by arrows sucks balls because you can’t just dodge out of the way of arrows, but it also means the same for enemies. There’s something really off about arrows that are apparently lethal, but also appear to have the same physics as a water balloon thrown by an eight year old.
I also use a lighter herb mod (reduced carry weight), increased carry weight (it’s very cheaty, though. Still, I do this in every game ever because I hate inventory management so much, especially when I’m an in-game kleptomaniac), and I’ve installed -but not used yet – a promising-looking mod that adds additional perks for bow skills and unarmed. Most of the skills have perk trees in them, but for some reason a couple skills don’t. Not sure why, maybe they ran out of development time, or they couldn’t get them to work right? I’m really curious about how those will work out, when I’ve got more time to play it.
Oh, and the mod which removes the visual effect of wearing helments – if your helmet only has a slit for a visor, it obscures your vision. It’s quirky, but ultimately more frustrating than entertaining, so fuck it. It’s gone. Oh, that and the stamina effects being gone. You can tell you’re spent from audio, you don’t need the entire screen to turn blue and blurry.
I so wanted to like this game. A historical take on the RPG format. Witcher 3 without monsters and magic.
But is it is boring. Even if the save system worked, even if the bugs were all worked out, it’s just dull. It really needs some monsters and magic. And sometimes it tries sooooooo hard to be the Witcher and get’s it so wrong eg. the ‘seduction’ of Theresa.
Good try. 2 stars.
I kind of feel the same. I mean I don’t hate it, but I don’t find it particularly engaging either. I just don’t really care about the characters or what’s going on. And it isn’t even the lack of fantasy setting – it just feels altogether boring and not very motivating. I can’t quite articulate why it doesn’t grab me.
That said, I never found any motivation for the Witcher games either…
I have never been more conflicted over a game (I am on PS4 Pro). On one hand it is simply stunning, all the type of game play I didnt realise I was missing from gaming is suddenly all back. Little quest help. Challenging. Interesting. Unique.
But then there are the bugs, and I dont just mean a few hilarious things like horses getting stuck on fences. Quest breaking. Game breaking. Save game breaking. Small ones, big ones. Visually the game goes from being beautiful to absolutely dire, like a cheap B grade game, with ghastly textures, load times, and pop-ins, so many pop ins. To say nothing of the features like locksmithing that were launched as fundamentally broken, it is hard to believe they were tested at all.
All that above is some what understandable if they launched the game as an Early Access but this is a full price game and beside the gameplay (and love that went in) there is an overall lack of quality.
The save game system is the worse part of the game. In itself isnt bad HOWEVER, see the paragraph about bugs, it is the combination of the two that make this game a chore. I have spent over five hours of backtracking due to this perfect storm. The other main issue with the save system is the lack of consistency… sometimes it will save when you sleep, other times it wont. Some times it will save when to finish a quest, sometimes it doesnt. Do one or the other. All this rubbish about the save system making the game challenging or immersive, is all rubbish, people want to trust their progress, we want to know (and trust) if we do X, a definitive save will be creative. Nothing ruins immersion faster than losing an hour or game play due to bugs.
Love what the game is doing, on so many levels, when it works… but when it doesnt I seriously wonder how they can be legally allowed to release a full price game in such a state. Its such a shame because when it works its gloriously brilliant.
Yeah I guess I’ll keep waiting for the price to drop (or a generous sale)
Repeat after me.. “I promise not to buy at release a game promising the world from a smaller studio”
They fixed the save system so you can save when you exit the game meaning you don’t have the problem described in the article about losing progress if you have real life commitments.
Veeeeery narrow use-case, that, with the save being deleted on load. If you then die to a bug or daring to experiment, you’re still back to your last quest checkpoint, bedrest, or magic fucking potion that makes you drunk -because immersion, right?
It’s still a bone-headed design decision implemented for no reason beyond deliberate inconvenience, celebrated by the neckbeards who don’t want plebs to access ‘their’ game.
Quick-saving mods are where it’s at, and the game is insufferable without them.
Was implemented as an iron man feature so your choices and actions have consequences instead of letting people save scum.
Exactly. Mandatory iron man hurts the game and makes it a worse experience for many players.
Instead of being like other games who actually respect your time and give you the choice of iron man that people gush about in recommendation (eg: XCOM), they’ve stubbornly stuck to this bone-headed design decision as some kind of barrier to enjoyment, limiting the audience for no good reason.
And while that would be a bafflingly self-defeating design choice even if the game DID function properly enough to justify pig-headed levels of inaccessibility, the unfortunate reality of the studio’s incompetence/hubris is that this needlessly exclusionary problem is compounded to several orders of magnitude by the prolific manifestation of immersion-shattering unfairness in the forms of psychic, teleporting guards who can see through walls or NPCs who either shoot into the sky or fall into the depths of the geometry mid pick-pocket/combat/discussion.
Harsh reality is this: they didn’t make a good enough game to justify being such assholes about saving. It’s simply not worth the random punishment. Unless you have no life whatsoever, of course, and losing several hours of your life at a time to glitches is your idea of a fun ‘challenge’. I imagine such deranged individuals enjoy the unique challenge of driving with clamps on their wheels, as well.
Guess the game just isn’t for everyone and that should be fine.
I stopped playing when the dude training me how to pickpocket called the guards on me for pickpocketing. Also the lockpicking is by far the worst I’ve seen in any game. Sure, ok, realism, lock picking is hard. But on the flip side, a game is supposed to be fun. Not being able to even finish the tutorial for lock picking because it’s so hard and can’t get any more lock picks is ridiculous.
seems like this review was pre-patch 1.3
It appears so. I accept that this review would have taken the author a while to write however I imagine it should be common practice to keep an eye on updates that may have been introduced prior to posting the article otherwise it is already outdated and inaccurate.
I wouldn’t expect a reviewer to complain about the processing speed of a Pentium processor these days, its an outdated CPU from an outdated era. So please don’t even confess to us that you are still running games on hard drive architecture from the same era…