Kingdom Come: Dilverance Review

You are neglecting your duties, brother!

Immersion is a seriously open-ended question when it comes to entertainment, especially through the medium of gaming. The various methods and tricks that developers employ to bring the player into the worlds they prepare differ wildly in intensity, intent and effectiveness for sparking the right reactions in the right players. The intent of the immersion we're going to be talking about today throughout this review is the intent of 'realistic' immersion, specifically in the world of the medieval; and realism itself is quite an interesting topic within the world of gaming. Not many high budget games choose to place the goal of realistic depiction above that of being enjoyable to the largest swathe of the target audience; which itself can make Kingdom Come: Deliverance feel like something of a niche property. With it's level of scope, polish and grandeur; it has a very unique space as a representative of realistic tipped games across an industry much more given to fantasy, and that has garnered a very specific kind of community around it.

But I'm going to say it now as a preface; I don't believe that the pursuit of 'realism' is itself a catch all excuse to absolve all design and conceptual wrongs. Now I'm not saying that to be a prelude to my feelings on this game, because I'm going to wag a little spoiler flag and start by saying I actually really liked my time with Kingdom Come and look forward to telling you why, but moreover I want to establish my dissonance with the very specific community of this game and their dogmatic reverence of every inch of this game driven by the common and eye-rolling refrain: "It's realistic!" 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance' was built to play out a fantasy of living in the medieval age with a more authentic lean to the presentation of medieval Europe than one typically sees in fantasy, but it and it's systems are by no means perfect. And 'it's realistic' isn't going to wash away the very real sins we discuss between celebrating the very many achievements that the game manages at the same time. We all clear on that? Good, let's proceed.

Immersion was a giant driving element behind the development team at Warhorse studios as they embarked on the creation of this, their maiden voyage game. One of the very rare examples of a true Kickstarter success story, Kingdom Come started with a promise of a realistic singleplayer RPG set in Bohemia with 'period accurate medieval combat' fuelling the game. There were a great many promises both spoken and implied in that kickstarter, from the episodic format to the multiple playable characters who seemed like they would span the various class and societal boundaries to give the audience a full image of the medieval lifestyle from the duties of an aspiring squire to the expectations of an eligible woman. Not every idea from this stage made it to the final product, but the core of what 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance' would ultimately be was born on that page and lasted to 2018, the release date. Backers ended up getting the meat of the idea that they paid for.

Kingdom Come launched to a bevy of impressions, I'd imagine much more so than even the hopeful developers were expecting. The ever variety-starved moderate-big budget scene of gaming found themselves fascinated by this decidedly different take on the 'swords and honour' cliché that had been dominated by the fantasy genre for so long. Who would ever have imagined that a game which positions itself as being a 'medieval serf simulator' would have itself some actual playable merit beyond the masochistic and historically-inclined? Well, as it just so happens even though the base and heart of this game is grown out of a realistic soil, set in a real period of history and decorated with depictions of real people who actually lived; the narrative still carries the familiar trappings of an adventure story, even in it's most derivative shell. 'Simple farmyard/blacksmith's son thrust on a journey to seek revenge for his murdered parents.' It's a story that has existed for hundreds to thousands of years. Which I don't begrudge, by-the-by. A truly realistic medieval story would just evolve nothing but navigating various highs and lows of squalid peasantry until some horrible illness finally crept up to put you out of your own misery. These more fictional and fantastical trappings of storytelling are much more entertaining to work with!

One of the great triumphs of this game is it's prestation, which is simply gorgeous in it's depiction of a medieval portion of Slavic Europe. The muted colour of the forestry and country dotted by rustic and rural villages populations. This is very much the mud and mortar sectors of medieval society, the same sort of stuff which lay at the foundation of the Witcher franchise, at least until Netflix got ahold of it and decided they wanted to turn it into more generic fantasy fluff. These visuals are half the struggle to immersion, with the other half being the incredible work on the user experience. Hearing the clanging of heavy armour as you trundle through the woods, watching the dark swallow up everything at night creating some truly spectacular night-time stealth moments both throughout the main quest and dynamically, and feeling that claustrophobia of a full face plate over your eyes as the corners of the screen become blurry and indistinct; all of it sells the illusion of the medieval role beautifully. And the fascination with historical accuracy, and even more with teaching that history to an audience, starts in the building of that simply beautiful world, beyond just the impressive fidelity which feels to me like the exact way I wish 'The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion' actually looked, and how it looks in my lying memories. 

You'll come across many of the trappings of medieval life depicted in a manner that naturally introduces their role and perception in society without having to read through text boxes like modern Assassin's Creed relies on. There are historical context entries as well, but the environmental storytelling sinks deepest and last's longest. You'll discover the stigma of criminality that hovers, arguably justifiably, around the Millers of the land, hear and interact with the stigmatised executioners and their assistants, track down the ostracised herb-women, considered witches by the standard of the day, and have the law of 'holding a torch at night to avoid being associated with villainy' drilled into your skull. With the strength of the real-world backing these world elements up, the cohesion of this medieval society and the manner in which it operates and functions clicks perfectly in the head of player, selling the illusion of the working clock of the world with a seemingly effortless deftness.

It's almost a shame, then, that there's no natural role for the player to fill within this society. Perhaps that would be leaning too much into a world simulation style of game instead of an action-RPG, with the player character (Henry) being able to get a part time job blacksmithing, or Inn-keeping, or integrating himself into the medieval world in order to make ends meet- or more likely the period-accurate payout for these jobs would be so pitiful that no sane player would waste their time with them- but it does make the player feel just that bit apart from this otherwise coherent and cohesive world. The game expects you to make that all important Groschen by killing and looting, completing quests or stealing. In that manner, the game bears a strange resemblance to some Sandbox RPGs out there like Kenshi- no real job, make money how you can. An odd fit in an otherwise 'married-to-realism' conceptual.

To that end I suppose I can hone in on the way in which the game attempts to create the 'daily life' of a medieval peasant serf for the player to experience; through it's levelling. You see, a peasant of the age would be defined by their ability to do literally nothing except for their chosen trade in life. And for whatever reason Henry grows utterly allergic to the forge after the intro to the game meaning that he is incapable of quite literally doing anything else whatsoever. When you start off at 0 for all your skills in Kingdom Come, there is no exaggeration there; you literally cannot do most anything competently. From swinging a sword to firing a bow to brewing a potion (the game has potions, we just choose to ignore that with the 'realism' debate, and I'm fine with the exception) or even read. Yes, reading is a skill that needs to be specially sought out and paid for otherwise every written word in the game will come out as utter gibberish to the player. I really like the way that words only start to untangle themselves as you become more proficient, until you can perfectly decipher flowery death threats written against your liege lord like an actual pro. I only wish the game made a greater point of highlighting how significant a serf who can read actually would be, most of the time Henry hands off letters for his betters to read despite being fully able to parse them himself, but going the extra mile to even create that system in the first place indicates a special dedication to the spirt of authenticity. 

And leading off of that, perhaps the most central of the systems that Warhorse worked on and wanted desperately to get right is that of the medieval combat. Promised in the kickstarter, the way that combat was designed to play out needed to be authentic to the style of the age, meaning studying and adapting the German medieval fencing techniques, largely based around defensive strategies, into a gameplay system that was challenging and fun to play. I cannot stress that last bit enough, it's so easy to lean on creating a complex and true-to-life system whilst completely shirking making it feel fun on the otherside. (Sure, maybe someone who doesn't know how to properly work a type of weapon is doomed to miss a lot, but that doesn't make it fun gameplay to stand around swinging and 'phantom-missing' your spear for hours on end- Morrowind!) And did Warhorse manage to create a competent and elegant combat system after their certified effort towards this one system most of all? Yes and no.

It's here where the real friction with the community will start to flare up, as the reflexive 'It's realistic!' cries force themselves out of people's throats before the actual issues have finished flushing through their skulls. The duelling combat mechanic of 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance' is delightfully skillful and fun to play around with- when everything works- but a lot of the time, everything doesn't work. Before I get into it I should provide context; Henry starts off as a fool with a blade who swings too slowly to hit anyone in a real joust. Improvements only come from training, and I don't mean a montage, nor do I mean a specified period of the game's story in which the narrative sits you down and lays out how much you need to improve in order to be effective. You need to carve your own time out of the main story (Which is itself a problem for reasons I will touch on later) in order to train in mock combat for hours. That is real-world hours, by the way. It took me a total of 2 hours, not all in one go, swinging fruitlessly in the ring before Henry's stats were levelled up enough to be any sort of use in combat. And if that sounds like it slips the bounds of 'realistic for immersion' and falls into 'realistic for tedium'... yes, it does. 

But what about that feeling of reward when your training pays off and you can actually engage in combat? Well... there is a sweetspot to progression. Around about the 10th level for all your combat scores, the combat works pretty well in Kingdom Come, with appropriate challenge and reaction possibilities that makes fighting a really intense endeavour, I'll touch on the mechanics of how it works shortly. Yet after not too long of being in the sweetspot you start to tip in the other direction, where suddenly Henry starts to hit too strong and cut through anyone in no time at all. This problem coincides with difficulty scaling and gear scaling, but by the end of the game you pretty much become an unkillable tank as long as you don't get surrounded, because this game's combat absolutely falls apart with more than one opponent. What happens to the cries of 'It's because the game is so realistic!' then? See, the excuse isn't as evergreen as some people think.

When it's working, combat works thusly: you lock onto an opponent and navigate a direction radial which decides what direction you wish to strike from. Bad positioning might block off certain possible attack directions, and once you've unlocked the ability to deflect, the middle of the radial will flash up a green shield whenever the enemy is attacking. Which is surprisingly forgiving for a game as hardline in some of it's other systems as this, but I suppose Warhorse wanted to try and counter balance the general sense of disorientation one feels in any 1st person combat system. That disorientation is an intentional feature for this game, however, particularly in the way that weaning helmets obscures you peripherals in a risk-vs-protection trade-off that is really effective in the immersion department.

Blocking an enemy is pretty much made totally redundant once you unlock the ability to parry, which you unlock in the mandatory combat training in the first chapter, so that feature is sunset-ed pretty quickly. And parrying better fits the eb-and-flow of a one-on-one duel, given that the straight blocking has absolutely no viable block-and-response timing windows to it, like a Soulslike game might have. Swings can chain together into specially animated combo moves using unlockable perk combos that require a successive string of hits that most enemies will interrupt almost immediately. (But when you do hit a combo, it feels so good.) And there's a highly exploitable mechanic where blades will lock up if you get too close letting one player hit the other-one out of the lock for cheap stamina damage. This can be spammed endlessly to cheapen pretty much any fight, especially if you take the early perk which makes you automatically win every such 'lock-up' showdown, but if you're playing by the rules and fighting as the game wants you to; the Combat system is truly fantastic. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay scenarios themselves often exceed the scope of the combat system.

Because you see, this system cannot handle multiple combatants. And though the apologists will scream 'REALISM' when you mention it, citing how fighting more than one person in real life would be nigh on impossible, the truth is that this system's inability to even fluidly process multiple combatants is an immersion breaker. The sticky lock-on system will have you staring at the wrong guy off fighting someone else whilst several over enemies surround you fully. The lack of any sweeping attacks makes it impossible to keep a crowd at bay to buy any opportunities, so being surrounded is just literally a 'roll over and die' moment. And the 'lock up in close proximity' system makes you incapable of even swinging if there's people around you, which even the AI even hung up on. I've had at least one moment of being smothered by a group of ten enemies who all couldn't even swing because they were clumped together and so we just had the world's angriest hug until other allies showed up to split up the mess. A supremely intelligently crafted combat system just melts into something no more impressive than Oblivion's chop-stick sword swinging in large crowds. Which is why it's so baffling that this game relies on large crowds so much in the later acts and that big battles are literally the entirety of the final few major missions!

It's not just the AI which can sometimes get iffy either; this game is still full of bug even after all these years. Crashes, key objects falling through the earth, inventory button locking up, NPCs losing all interest in their task and wandering off into the middle distance during a scene where they are supposed to be doing something, and even on curious occasion I witnessed where a couple of sieging NPCs who decided that the best way to carry a ladder up to the castle walls was to leave gravity behind and walk on air, before mounting the ladder in the sky leading to nowhere. (After which they had a Wile E. Coyote moment, remembered gravity was real, and fell to the earth.) Some of these bugs are harmless, others far less so. The save system, for instance, takes cues from a hardcore survival game and limits the ability to save unless sleeping in an owned bed (of which there aren't a great deal in the game) or using a specific expensive perishable resource. Which makes it so annoying when you crash unexpectedly and have to do twenty minutes of progress again.

One of the more disappointing aspects of the game for me was the way in which Warhorse decided to handle telling the narrative of Henry's story, with problems more in it's latter half than at the beginning. It starts off so strong, relying on old, but effective, clichés to set off the journey and clearly laying out the key overall objectives. In fact, throughout the entire game you have a secondary main quest objective called 'Vengeance' which is there quite literally just to remind you the names of everyone you need to kill in order to resolve the starting conflict. For the first act the narrative frames itself around this and leads you along this path with a spectacular boss fight at the end which may have been this game's single best moment. (Single enemy boss fight duels should have been a stronger overall focus; they're when this game practically sings.) And then from that point onwards the narrative spiderwebs off into something totally different and distracted, where Henry just sort of loses his focus and goes off hunting bandits all over the place until he just happens to stumble upon something tangentially linked to his search for vengeance again. It's quite scatter-brained for the second act and that's just how the story rides on until the credits.

Oh yes, did I not mention? This game only has two acts. The finale of this game offers quite literally no resolution to any of it's threads, ends with an exceedingly weak gameplay siege that serve only to present another aspect of the medieval fantasy and leads off to an exceptionally flaccid feeling cliffhanger. How Warhorse thinks it's going to stretch a finale act off to the extent of an entire sequel I do not know, nor do I know how they're going to justify resetting everything Henry has learned and trained to do throughout the first game, because the general poor scaling of RPG systems means there's no way this Henry can go through another fifty hours of gameplay in an entertaining fashion. He'd be a unkillable god squashing ants, where's the fun in that? The community has dribbled over itself to try and explain this in the most eye-rolling manners; my favourite being "This is how it goes in life, sometimes things don't get resolved, it's realistic!" Mistaking 'unsatisfying storytelling' to being 'realistic and totally mature writing' has got to be one of the most painful things to read for me, as a lover of great story writing. Kingdom Come's finale isn't some insightful subversion of traditional storytelling tropes, it's a dud cliffhanger totally reliant on a currently still-being-made sequel to be anyway fulfilling. A great game can have it's sequels and sequel bait, but the first story needs to be competent enough to exist on it's own and be enhanced by the next chapter. The only way in which Henry 'evolves' throughout the story of Kingdom Come: Deliverance', aside in his combat competency, is by perhaps learning a shotgun lesson about 'honour' literally in the last hour. Well, that and the twist.

I need to talk about this twist because I literally face-palmed when they pulled this teeth-grinding cliché plotpoint out of the pot. Now again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using clichés in storytelling, they are repeated so often because of how compelling and interesting they can be but whether you're using a cliché because the potential you see it can have for your story or just pulling it off the shelf as an afterthought, the important distinction lies in the execution. The twist of 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance', ultimately, invalidates a great deal of the effort and struggle you go through in order to 'earn' your station throughout the plot, and in return it offers practically nothing at all to enrich the story. Every proceeding major event in the story would have played out exactly the same whether or not this twist was in the script. Even the major character relationships don't shift a whole lot, characters continue to treat each other in same general way that they did beforehand, and that's without counting the lack of reactivity which means certain characters still refer to you in a manner they really shouldn't considering the nature of said twist. (Or maybe Sir Capon is just an insufferable dick, I have no idea where the supposed 'friendship' between you and him is supposed to blossom from.)

But whilst we're talking about it, let me air my other grievances with storytelling of Kingdom Come. For the vocal work the team employed several actors and voices that might not by region accurate per-se but work well enough; and then there's certain members of the cast who stick out like a sore-thumb. Sir Divish, for instance, sounds like he is voicing a man twenty years younger. Also, there's a certain dryness to certain character scripts which makes it sound like when a character is describing historical events they're literally just reading their own Wikipedia page. I understand there's a strong educational aspect of this game and I actually really appreciate it's quirks in that department, aside from the character writing. (Writing in personality whilst mentioning the historical events shouldn't be considered some crime against history.) Also, most of the side quests are pretty inconsequential and uninteresting both in their narrative and what they ask you to do. I played a few but quickly ran out of steam to try the others. I tasted at least two quests in every city, so if anything truly special is tuckered away somewhere, I can't find it.

This game also has a very strange relationship with timed objectives, where one of the key marketing boast was the fact that 'everything happens in real time', meaning that if you go off and do something else, you'll miss some big event in the story and suffer the consequences. This isn't quite true, but the 'implication' that it is will string you along at the beginning of the game desperate for a free moment to explore, do side quests and, most importantly, train necessary skills to be able to actually progress through difficult moments in the game. You're constantly being told about how you have to go here and must attend to this man there without any point of you being given your own time. Eventually you're supposed to come to the realisation that 'Oh, I can actually hold off reporting this for several weeks so I can enjoy the open world. Thanks for never telling me that, game!' But then, surprise surprise; sometimes there'll be quests where you absolutely do have to be there on time or face an entire village dying of some plague you never knew it had when you accepted the quest! Being told you have to wipe a bandit camp off the face of the earth before it strikes out and causes a massacre? No time limit, take your time. Being told to interrogate some guy in a village somewhere? Of course that has a time limit, everyone is about to die of the plague; hurry up! There's no indication of one extreme to the other and it constantly makes you feel cheated out of experiencing the game because you just wanted to enjoy not having the main quest hanging over you for one errant moment. (Or am I supposed to be googling every quest I accept to make sure it's not timed? 'Cause I don't play my RPGs with Google open, sorry.) 

One last story related gripe; for reasons I'm choosing not to go into, there is one mission in which you join a monastery, and it has to be one of the most annoying quests in the whole game. The thing is, I really do understand what the team were going for with this. A total handbrake change in pace and direction to depict the life of a Monk as totally distinct from the outside world. A schedule beholden only to the monks, a strict daily routine based on herbalism and book work, it's essentially a prison sequence morphed to fit into the shape of the time period. On paper it sounds like an actual stand-out sequence, and when squinting at only the times where it worked, I really like reliving those memories; but in practise it was a nightmare to endure. There's just not enough avenues to really lay a string of intrigue and complexity behind doing your objective and breaking out, it's obscenely straightforward barring adhering to a genuinely non-functioning schedule that will see you receiving punishments unjustly for standing around in a suddenly restricted area for one second too long. In a way, it is somewhat the point for this section of the game to be restricting and frustrating, but clearly the developers did not plan out to make this a totally miserable headache of an experience. If only everything worked as it should...

Lastly there are the DLCs which all expand upon the base of the game in refreshingly different ways. The Tourney brings great one-on-one duelling, taking great advantage of the combat system in it's best form. 'From the Ashes' is a basic city building to sink your funds behind, but lacks in the 'transformative scope' that I think the team were going for; you can't base your playthrough around such a character-deprived city space. 'Band of Bastards' was a quite fun chain of side quests with a lot of action and very personality-loud characters whom I enjoyed being around. A Woman's Lot is really the only must play DLC however. Putting us in the shoes of Theresa as she navigates the last days of Skalitz, turning the helplessness of those first few hours as Henry totally on it's head as you play a stealth scavenging experience that I only wish lasted for longer than it did. Really a strong highlight that I came away from wondering why it was that Theresa didn't have a presence in the main storyline. And the DLC with Capon? The game literally holds the ending hostage until you complete it, which made it really hard for me to enjoy a literal 'road block to completion' side quest with the world's most asinine 'best friend' character. 

Summary

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a gorgeous and sprawling medieval role playing game with the ambition and presentation of a AAA game behind it. Unfortunately, it suffers for the scale of that ambition with bugs, jankiness and a general play experience that starts to buckle under it's weight in the later parts. What this game does well it does exceptionally well, and it's easy to lose yourself in the incredible realism-based immersion; but those heights make the jabbing pains of the faults sting even harder. It hurts because I feel like if this game were polished up to the standard of a Nintendo title or one of those Sony published titles, this would easily be a legendary game. I guess my only friction is deciding if the jank is bad enough to rob that designation from it. I'm recommending this game, no doubt about that. Though you need to be an RPG lover who is okay with dedicating some time before having the fun they signed up for, this game is an experience that everybody who likes these genre titles needs to play; but its issue poisons the otherwise fantastic meal. I know that Warhorse's follow-up is going to patch up the sore-spots and be absolutely legendary, but the game in front of me now only earns a frustrated B+ grade on my arbitrary grading scale. For a first game, Warhorse studios hit it far out the park and I'm practically enthused to see wherever the team decide to go next, both for this franchise and beyond.