Kingdom Come: Deliverance might just be the true medieval experience historians and enthusiasts have been waiting for.
The team from Warhorse Studios walked us through a guided presentation of what’s new in the E3 2017 build. US Community Manager Rick Lagnese and PR Manager Tobi Stolz-Zwilling lead the charge for this hilarious and informative session.
At first glance, it’s clear the Warhorse Studios team dedicated plenty of time to polishing their in-game visuals and attention to detail. Taking place in medieval Bohemia, or what is now the modern day Czech Republic, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a story driven, open world, first person RPG with a focus on permanent decision making and multiple routes to complete quests. The creative director on Mafia 1 and 2, Daniel Vavra, brings a lot of expertise working on narrative focused, cinematic games to Kingdom Come. You’ll start as the son of blacksmith, looking to avenge your mother and father after a terrible series of events occur. Layering all of this, is a political civil war between two kings, King Sigismund of Hungary and King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia. While there is one definitive ending, the choices you made during the game will affect the cutscenes you’ll encounter as not one play through will be the same.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is also very difficult from a gameplay standpoint. There is no class system, but rather points spent on attributes like strength, vitality, etc. In the E3 build, our quests were rather less fantasy driven and more grounded in the minutiae of medieval life. We were tasked with running errands to forge a sword that your dad is smithing. With no breadcrumb trails to follow, it’s imperative to use the map and talk to the townspeople in order to complete quests. When tasked with collecting debt, we witnessed the first glimpse at the game’s conversation system. Success in this aspect will defer to your speech and intimidation skills, and while we can technically fail conversationally, the quest can still be completed through other methods or through an outright fist fight. I also realized there’s multiple layers to the conversation system, as the type of clothes you wear can impact the responses from different castes, like a nobleman.
There is a lot to uncover from our time so we’ll focus on the dice mini-game, which can be used for leisure or as a method to solve quests that involve payment. You can also cheat in dice, but risk the chance of being caught and hurting your reputation and triggering Kingdom Come’s crime system. We ended the presentation with a look at the combat system and a medieval skirmish which demonstrates how difficult fighting other iron-clad combatants will be. During combat, up to six different ways to attack and defend can be used with various tactics such as a feint to trick combatants. Here I learned that there the AI can be unforgiving and smart so it is wise to execute a strategy that catches an opponent off-guard otherwise you’ll easily be double teamed. In the skirmish, the type of armor can also impact your field of vision as heavier armor can be harder to see through.
While I’ve only touched upon a couple of points, there’s a lot to unearth about Kingdom Come: Deliverance that requires a longer play through session. For more details, you can check out the developer walkthrough below which goes more in-depth into the quests, fighting, skirmish, and recent developments.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance releases February 13, 2018 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
