Kingdom Come: Deliverance

"Frō the highest spire of contentment,
My fortune is throwne,
And feare, and griefe, and paine for my deserts, for my deserts,
Are my hopes since hope is gone."

 

John Dowland - Lachrimae Pavans / Flow My Tears

 

 

Help, I have a tapeworm! And consumption! And I never learned how to read!

... however, I do brew a mean moonshine.

But first, fun fact:

Back around Y2K when I was playing Counterstrike (which is the only time to play Counterstrike) one of the sniper rifles (no, not the inexcusable one) lacked a targeting reticle unscoped. Presumably that was meant to make it harder to aim. Which it did. So I just grabbed a marker and daubed a little green dot in the middle of my computer screen. Low-tech but effective.

Interface handicaps can only go so far, is what I'm saying.

I don't know what exactly I was expecting from Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I bought it while nostalgic for Morrowind, then heard it might be something like Thief, installed it to stave off my craving for Bannerlord and gritted my teeth through the first twenty hours making unflattering similes to ELEX or GreedFall. Now I'm leaning more toward Miasmata (carrying my weight in flowers) and my opinion will change again once I get back into fighting. Partly it's my own fault. Jaded old wolf that I am, I dove blindly right into hardcore mode relying on my accumulated metagaming expertise to keep me safe, and I would not recommend it for a first run. Deliverance functions according to quite a few unusual or annoying mechanics, some hyper-realistic, others merely idiosyncratic.

 

From the start it becomes obvious that half their budget must've sank into cutscenes. After a brief tutorial letting you learn how to talk to NPCs, eat apples and click to swing your mighty fists of Bohemian fury, you're tossed into a horrendous clutter of cutscene after cutscene after cutscene, interspersed with do-or-die tests of pressing buttons you're just now being informed exist (like galloping) or fights you have no idea whether you're even supposed to win or not before the next cutscene triggers. Even outside of cutscenes, every single thing seems to trigger some overwrought animation: talking to merchants who have no dialogue, zooming into an alchemy bench, taking hold of a ladder to climb it, everything takes twice as long as it should. The little herb-picking animation, because it briefly, disorientingly flips your point of view, is even actively counterproductive in hardcore mode for reasons soon to be discussed. And, once you get your mutt, Mutt, you'll be clicking through even more unnnecessary animations for his uncanny knack for getting underfoot. (Though, admittedly, if you're ever had a dog, that's just truth in advertising.)

The over-scripting also extends to NPC interactions. At one point I heard a guard order me to stop for a routine stolen goods search... from the other side of a fence, his pathfinding apparently insufficient to navigate a 180 turn. By the time I figured out where he was and made my way to him, he was already attacking me for resisting arrest.

The absolute worst of it is melee combat. Archery, meh, the lack of a targeting reticle isn't too limiting, and I've hunted a couple of rabbits already. But for melee, instead of FPSlasher weapon swipes they wanted to institute a system of Mortal Kombat "moves" which play out when you time your button-mashing correctly. The result, however, interferes far, far more than it responds. Weapons inflict quite a bit more stopping power than you might be used to (which is great!) but combined with the overextended animations means you'll be stuck watching your screen get knocked around two seconds for every second of active gameplay while your mouse and keyboard might as well be unplugged. Even in the tutorial, if an enemy gets too close while you're running away your own movement slows to allow him to hit you as part of a pre-scripted combat action. Worse still, the target-lock system tends to automatically refocus to the latest enemy to hit you, and while having to split your attention can be challenging, having your attention split for you is just infuriating. Most perplexing, target lock is in this case utterly gratuitous, as unlike GreedFall or ELEX, KCD actually boasts perfectly workable (if not quite Portal-level) physics. It certainly doesn't help that while you can rebind basic movement keys, this apparently doesn't extend to some interaction commands defaulting to Q, E, F and Z on the presumption you'll be using WASD.

 

Apropos, what the hell is this recent obsession with real-time target-lock?!? While necessary for RTS and workable in TPS, in FPS the very notion is self-defeating.

Anyway, if you're just hoping to swash your buckler in a satisfying manner, you might be disappointed. This game shines elsewhere... many elsewheres.

 

I'm not particularly crazy about the hero of the story. I rarely enjoy pre-made characters, and I especially don't want to be 'Enery the eighth, I am I am! You do however get plenty of options to develop your 'enery as you see fit, according to both a "main level" advanced by quest completion and separate leveling of stats and skills based on your actions. Everything from riding to half a dozen combat skills to stealth-related and social perks... though unfortunately it seems that just as in The Elder Scrolls, being able to level everything to max will render any role-playing moot by mid-game.

 

Per my wizard / druid preference I opted for herbalism / alchemy and the only mental stat available in these oh so high middle ages, speech. Yes, quite uncharacteristically for lupine old me, I'm playing a charisma-based character. Even my strength stat was built up by an herbalism perk.

I don't mind admitting I did cheat on day 2 and cribbed 2 alchemy recipes from the wiki to make myself some cash... and because the alchemy minigame, where you need to read recipes and execute them by physically picking up and adding handfuls of herbs and boiling them in exact sequence, proved more adorable than expected. KCD's hyper-realism extends not only to physical interactions but to its medieval world as a whole. My first major adventure so far was prompted by 'Enery's illiteracy, quite ordinary for a craftsman's son back in the days of leechcraft. To keep myself awake I boiled myself some 'cockerel' potions (a.k.a. valerian and mint... which are both mild sedatives in the real world, so apparently alchemy in this game is half homeopathy but only half as crazy) then set out... and got jumped by bandits, died and lost half an hour of gameplay.

 

But let's talk about the second time I set out for the village of Uzhitz, where a scribe is rumored to teach the mysterious arts of l3tturz an' riideen. After getting turned around twice in the dark and having to retrace my steps, just at the crack of dawn I finally found myself at a witch's house in the woods, allowing reorientation.

 

In hardcore mode, y'see, you get a map but not your position on it, and you no longer get any indication of magnetic north, leaving you to navigate by landmarks, the position of the sun and moon or even stars, as the sky backdrop features Polaris and Ursa Major in their expected places. Meaning that, counterintuitively, what I found a nonsensical drawback in a game with randomly generated planets and repetitive environments proved, in this game with its meticulously arranged landmarks, a major selling point convincing me not to uninstall after my severe frustration with combat training and overextended cutscenes. And I do mean meticulous.

Smaller than Skyrim but also relying less on random encounters, KCD pays a staggering amount of attention to the decor of old European village life. No dragons or demons here, no fireball slinging or potion-chugging yourself to full health during combat. Fifteen years ago when I was trying to drum up interest in Mount&Blade among MMO fans I tried advertising its factions' loose basis in actual historic combatants like boyars, huscarls, saracens and tartars, only for others to immediately complain "dude, that just sounds like a history lesson" and still others to retort "some of us like history lessons" - and if you find yourself in the second camp, KCD is definitely for you. Not only did Warhorse Studios research old-timey clothing, ranks and occupations, bathhouses, military equipment etc. but painstakingly recreated some of the towns and castles from historic accounts and extant Czech ruins. While it's always possible to nitpick, no reasonable critic could deny that everything from the dung-heaps behind peasant houses to the rapidly-decaying food you'll need to survive to the garishly-dyed snazzy chapeaus of the well-to-do amounts to one of the most immersive games ever made.

 

After finally learning my ABCs I rented a room at the inn and bummed around Uzhitz for a couple of days looking for side-quests. After tracking a horse producing inexplicably prodigious quantities of dung, I heard from His Questionable Holiness the local Bible-thumper that the harmless female picking herbs in the woods whom I'd jokingly labeled a witch really is being accused of witchcraft! So after the witching hour of night I got up, fired up a torch and made my way back to her, stopping on the way to mug a traveler (as one does) of everything on him including his clothes. Having arrived too early at the shroomer's hut, I proceeded to sneak around picking her pockets and burglarizing her (treasure) chest for good measure (as one does) and finally read my literacy primer for four hours until she woke up. Then just as I turned around to return to town, who should amble past, having regained consciousness and resumed his journey barefoot in his underwear, but my dearest chump from earlier.

Fare thee well, good chump. Better luck next time.

(I knocked him out a second time as soon as he was out of the herbalist's sight, just for funsies.)

(as one does, by and by)

 

____________________________________

P.S.: If you do end up installing the mega-super-ultra-director's-dooper-deluxe edition or whatever the hell it is I bought including all DLC, I strongly recommend running Theresa's story, A Woman's Lot, as soon as you exit the prologue. (Ask her what happened to her.) It makes a better introduction to game mechanics than the tutorial itself and doesn't use up your 'Enery's time while you get the hang of things.

Also, you can stop advancing the main quest at the stage where you're supposed to go hunting and go level up.