Bohemian Rascalry

Good Morning Friends! I’ve been in a bit of a funk of late and been largely unable to stick to a single game for very long. In truth as I have talked about before, I am in a bit of a holding pattern until the start of the new league in Path of Exile. In this interim time, however, I have failed to gain purchase when it comes to actually dive seriously into any game. Over the weekend I started a new venture and so far I am deeply engaged. I’ve talked about imperfect gems before namely in the collected works of the French studio Spiders. I love the Bioware style RPG, but so few studios can really carry it off well and before now I would have ranked Spiders as one of the ONLY ones. Kingdom Come Deliverance is from Czech video game developer Warhorse Studios, and manages to vie for the crown of “Next Best Thing To Bioware”.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is a purely non-fantastical representation of the region of Bohemia in 1403. This region is located in the modern-day Czech Republic and focuses on real-world events surrounding then King Sigismund of Hungary deposing King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia. This is a time period and destination that I personally am wholly uninformed about, but I figure to the Czech home audience this would be the stuff of legend. The game focuses on Henry the son of the Master Swordsmith currently serving as the town Blacksmith in Skalitz. The tutorial of the game focuses on getting you acquainted with moving around this area before the events kick in that brings this section to a close and ignites the key conflict of the game. From there you have a few main story quests to follow and bring you purpose and a huge number of incidental side quests, very few of which are actually marked on your in-game map.

The game map is fairly huge and magnified by the fact that for a good while you are without a horse, forced to walk/run your way between destinations. There is a fast travel system but the destinations are few and far between and largely just focus on allowing you to hop between major towns. Traversal can be a bit fiddly at times because it can be a bit of a challenge to determine which bushes you can pass through and which will ultimately bar your way. Of note, there is a game mod that removes clipping from all bushes that I might install at some point because it can be infuriating trying to navigate a course at times.

The game is fully voice acted and the acting itself varies from “competent” to “pretty great”. The writing as well is pretty solid and seems to be period appropriate. It is deeply weird to see so much early Christianity in video game form, as I am far more used to made-up religions and deities. Of note and this comes up a few times… this is taking place during the schism in the Catholic church with one Pope in Avignon and another in Rome. There are times when it feels like you are given significant dialog options and other times when there is essentially a predetermined battery of options. There are various skill checks associated with different lines, but unfortunately, these have a hidden value behind them and there is seemingly no way of knowing if you are going to pass the check or not before attempting it. Skill in this game is raised through doing the thing repeatedly, and the same is true for speaking… so it honestly is beneficial to run around talking to everyone as there are also hidden quests that can be uncovered in this way.

Where things start to fall apart for me is when we get to combat in this game. There have been a number of times when a well-intentioned game studio has attempted to improve the basic click-to-attack gameplay present in so many Action focused RPGs. A prime example of this is the horribly fiddly combat of the first Witcher game, which for me at least makes it a completely unplayable experience. Kingdom Come Deliverance comes close to this level of annoyance with its direction “star” based combat system. Essentially when an opponent is attacking you, they will be holding their sword in one of six regions: Head, Upper Left, Upper Right, Lower Left, Lower Right, and then a central neutral position. In order to land attacks you effectively have to be attacking in a quadrant that they are not defending against.

This might work better on a controller, but effectively in order to do this with a Mouse and Keyboard, you have to be moving your mouse in a specific trajectory to get that quadrant of the star to light up. This feels awful and even more frustrating is the fact that the AI is really damned good at blocking, dodging, and abusing any openings in your defenses. Getting ANY damage can quickly become critical and there is no fantastical equivalent of the health potion. Even worse is the non-consensual target locking system that glues your viewpoint to a specific target and forces you to use the mouse scroll wheel to change targets when fighting multiple encounters at the same time. I am sure over time someone could probably get good at this mess, but if I had my druthers I would replace it entirely with a standard hack and slash combat system and be done with it. I mean I don’t really play this sort of game for the combat in the first place, I play it for the story.

Thankfully it is at this point that our old friend Nexus Mods comes through because apparently, Kingdom Come Deliverance has a vibrant modding community. While you can’t completely gut the combat system and replace it with something more standard, you can curb the frustrations a bit by making your enemies less likely to block or parry you. You can remove a lot of the annoyances like the fact that saving in this game requires that you have a stock of a specific kind of schnapps. Instead, I added a mod that removed this entirely and allows me to save as often as I like. You might be saying… “but Bel, that is cheating” and I will say yes it absolutely is. Life is too damned short to deal with the parts of games that annoy you, and if I can mod my way out of them… like completely removing inventory management… I am going to do it every single time. Game developers try really hard but sometimes get hung up on some really stupid ideas at times, and through modding, I can fix these “problems”.

Thanks to mods I have more or less pushed aside any lingering frustrations that I had with the game and have been able to just sit back and enjoy the world and the story surrounding it. At this point, I am around eleven hours into the experience and enjoying myself greatly. That said I also feel like I have barely scratched the surface. There are a number of characters that have some nuance in the way they interact with you when their public face is on the line, and how they behave in private out of the eyes of the court. Dealing with nobility is frustrating, especially given that I am very much a low-born trying to run around in circles that are constantly reminding me of my station in life. That said I have already elevated my status to that of a soldier and in theory, I think by the time this game is done I will have improved that further.

I’ve also started down the formal romance/courtship line towards Theresa a childhood friend who also managed to survive the situation at Skalitz. It is interesting because this more or less is following what I would assume formal courtship would have been like back during this period. Essentially every few days I can ask her out on some sort of a formal date, and if I don’t screw that up… I gain a reputation. I assume at some point this will lead to marriage, and maybe even buying some sort of a home. In a lot of ways, this game reminds me of what it would feel like to play in a first-person adventure through a Crusader Kings game. There are some definitely flaws in the game, but for the moment I appear to be hooked.