OPEN WORLD REVISIONISM
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Around the time that Kingdom Come: Deliverance was released, the
evolution of open world games was reaching a state of stagnation. You can say
the genre had resorted to inbreeding. Every release borrowed from the competition, recycling the same game mechanics to death. The
general consesus seemed to be that "we've reached perfection, let's exploit the formula until the players tire of it".
Kingdom Come: Deliverance entered the scene and showed a different way
forward. The game encourages - heck, almost forces - the player to take it slow and relish in its world, opening up
the experience to confounding realism. Taking place in early 15th
century Bohemia, somber music elevates the experience of walking or riding in
first person through green, rolling landscapes. The heavens aren't lit by rosy,
grandiose horizons but represented as a natural, photorealistic azure blue.
The beauty feels natural, not forced.
Not only the presentation, but the gameplay, dialogue and story also feel
authentic. Surviving, learning your craft, earning money and making your way
in the world is as much a part of the experience as the storytelling and
setting. Money is a constant issue, and you have a number of legal and
illegal ways to earn a few groschen.
You also need to eat, rest, maintain your clothes and armor, and even take a
bath once in a while. Otherwise, people will respond poorly to your
appearance. If you keep your food in your saddlebags for too long,
it'll spoil (unless it's dried) and you'll get food poisoning when you eat. It
cuts almost no corners in simulating the life of a peasant in 15th
century Bohemia.
Players familiar with the early Elder Scrolls-games -
Daggerfall and Morrowind in particular - should feel at home
with the good role-playing systems. If you want to improve your swordplay, you
fight with swords; if you want better prices at stores, you practice
bartering; by running and jumping, you can improve your athleticism and so on.
As a result, every activity in Kingdom Come feels meaningful, like you're
making progress even whilst boozing or picking mushrooms in the forest. When I needed a safe way to practice my sword skills, I made sure no-one was looking and attacked cattle grazing the fields. It also gave me more meat than I could carry.
Presented as a rags-to-riches storyline, you become part of a medieval tale of
politics, betrayal and warfare. Your alter ego is Henry, the son of a
blacksmith, who sees his whole existence upended when his home village is
raided and burnt to the ground by foreign invaders, with his parents killed in
the process. A brigand clobbers him down and steals the sword his father had forged for a local lord, sir Radzig.
With the lost sword as a MacGuffin, Henry travels the lands on a chain of
errands for lord Radzig, whom he feels aligned to, since his father was his
employee. Something sinister is brewing among the nobility and the clergy, and
you're the lord's assigned agent, sent to investigate things. You'll visit
several towns, villages, mines, murder scenes, bandit camps, a monastery and,
if you so choose, partake in an orgy alongside a priest.
Beforehand, the prospect of playing a medieval open world felt off-putting to
me, due to of a lack of fantastical elements. However, Kingdom Come turned out to be full of interesting content, thanks to the high quality of the writing. While it
doesn't quite equal the level of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it has some memorable storylines and characters. Henry, the protagonist, is a fine one, although
his often kind and humble demeanor doesn't match your actions whenever you,
for instance, rob someone.
When it comes to NPC:s, Theresa, his love interest, is a fun tease and they
have a few sweet scenes together. Hans is another good ally. He's the spoiled
soon-to-be lord of the land, who starts out antagonistic but grows closer as
the game progresses. Others I'll leave for you to find. What I like most is
how the characters speak and behave according to their social status. A
peasant speaks of worldly things in thick dialect, noblemen speak eloquently
on broader topics (until they get shit-faced).
The storyline is intriguing, with overall great mission design that gives you
free reins in how to solve them. Most of your skills come into play, and
for once combat is quite rare and occasionally skippable. Instead it is
dialogue-heavy, and thieving prowess goes a long way. Also, the game has rich
systemic content simulating medieval life, both in the settlements
and wilderness, which can be exploited. Everyone has a day-and-night cycle. To gain an advantage, Henry might
wanna consider poisoning the food in bandit camps and wait for them to eat
before sneaking inside.
Combat often feels like a last resort, which is a blessing in disguise because
it is a bewildering mechanic, which relies heavily on stances and combos. You
need to watch your opponent and strike from unguarded angles, while you leave
enough stamina for blocks and parries. I like the idea, but Henry rarely
responds the way I intended (which might just be me panicking). By mastering
swordsmanship, you can unlock deadly combo attacks, but I'm not sure I managed
to land a single one.
What surprised me the most were the few battles of a larger scale, where Henry
follows his fellow soldiers on a bandit camp raid, or another one where they
fight a small army. Not only was it exciting, it worked surprisingly well, as
I watched my fellows fall to the enemy, but no more than they fell to our
superior numbers and skills. It got my adrenaline pumping, and they both
culminated in superb final encounters of different kinds.
The rest of the experience follows suit. A lot of activities you have to do
manually, for instance sharpen your blade, brew potions, pickpocket, lockpick, gambling - it's all represented by a particular mini-game. It's a daring approach, and
a mixed bag. The aforementioned ones are great. Ranged combat is hopelessly
difficult due to a lack of an aiming reticule. Fast travel is a neat idea,
where you follow you character on a map, all the while prepared for an ambush
or random encounter. But it gets a bit tiresome - especially when you run into
a gang of brigands, against whom you stand no chance.
And I think the save system takes it a bit too far. The only way to save is to
rest in an owned or rented bed, which means dragging your sorry ass over to an
inn or a friendly home. A workaround exists in the shape of Savior Schnapps, a
brew that you drink to save anywhere. It makes you drunk, however, and in the
beginning of the game they're expensive unless you take the time to find and
harvest their ingredients in the wilderness.
In other words: this is hardcore. Missions usually have some checkpoints to
alleviate some of the stress, but you might lose a lot of progress unless you
habitually save every now and again. You can rarely relax. It can feel
extremely unfair to lose half an hour of progress because you got ambushed by
three heavily armored brigands during your fast-travel to an inn.
I'd be lying if I said every mission and every hour of gameplay felt fun and
rewarding. Entire gameplay sessions can feel like a waste of time. A few
quests are annoyingly abstruse, as the game fails to clearly point out how to
proceed. One quest regarding dying villagers was left unresolved, even though
I'd solved the case and restored hope to the place. An optional treasure hunt
had really vague pointers. I wasted a lot of time trying to enter the
monastery and snatch a book for a quest-giver, only to find out I could only
gain access further down the main questline.
In the landscape of open world games, Kingdom Come: Deliverance carves out a unique niche for itself by being so relentlessly immersive, for better or worse. In its
finest moments it's excellent; the way you must actually read documents and
interview people during investigations, and make decisions based upon your
research. The questline in the monastery is an amazing example of such
open-endedness. It's possible to get things very wrong, which might affect
things down the line (but not break the game). The game is an aquired taste,
with a high return for people with great patience.
Now on to a touchy subject: Prior to release, Kingdom Come: Deliverance received some moronic backlash
from traditional games media over its lack of diversity. Vice even refused to
review it, claiming the studio lead (history enthusiast Daniel Vávra)
had posted fascist tweets, which was a lie. What, according to them, was the problem? Well, the game has a lack of people of color, that's what - a lack
of black people in 15th century Bohemia. It doesn't make any sense. Some journalist even falsely claimed
the silk road reached all the way from China to Bohemia in an attempt to smear
the studio (it went no further than Turkey).
That is an obnoxious, arrogant approach to criticism. It takes some delusions of grandeur to lecture a native of the
lands (Warhorse studio is Czech), and a history enthusiast at that, on how to
best represent his own history. Such critics are sacrificing journalistic
integrity for the sake of a political cause. When they review - or refuse
to review - a game based on what's missing, rather than what it contains,
the review/statement isn't worth a damn. It is, simply put, unprofessional and
has no place in journalism. And I'm saying this as a leftist myself. Luckily,
Warhorse has since been vindicated.
A good game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance goes beyond toxic political
squabbles to engross you in a dirty, funny, gritty, raunchy, cruel but
nonetheless fantastic historical setting. Its sense of freedom means that you
can play and interpret it any way you want. Although not a smooth ride all the way through, it's a promising first
offering from a studio we need to keep our eyes on.
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