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Kingdom Come: Deliverance is pitched as a low fantasy RPG where you play as just “a guy” in medieval times. I’m not usually one to play such games, but Bannerlord (which I still think back to, despite the faults I pointed out) made me reconsider – after all, clawing your way up from serfdom sounded vaguely interesting. Sadly, what I got was yet another “cinematic” experience with frustrating gameplay – and I didn’t even get to the combat. I suppose my run of luck with good games had to end sometime.
You start out watching a fairly lengthy cinematic, which – full disclosure – I eventually skipped because the third slow pan over countryside and second “person slowly walks and greets other villagers” scene wore down my patience for lack of input. Unfortunately, this trend continues into the actual gameplay. After being given a four/five step fetch quest, you’re finally set free of the loading screens and cinematics. That is, until you walk down some stairs, wait for another loading screen, and get a dialogue cinematic. Then, to top it all off, you get a wall of text as introduction to a fairly simple mechanic:
In indie games, I can occasionally forgive clumsy introductions to mechanics – I won’t like it, but it can be occasionally forgiven. Here, though, we’re asked to wait for a loading screen for little apparent reason, watch a cinematic, and read two pages of text to choose a response.
This may seem like a small thing, but it is a microcosm of the whole game (or, at least, my first hour-ish experience). In pursuit of realism, they’ve felt the need to overexplain everything, force you to listen to dry conversations about things we haven’t had the opportunity to care about yet, and give you a laundry list of tasks to complete before you’ve had a chance to familiarize yourself with the world.
Along those same lines, the quest you are given is put into a log and marked on your compass. Amusingly, this game both tells you too much and too little about these quests. Your first task is to collect a debt, and one of the options is to get a lockpick from your friend Fritz to steal the unpaid tools back. Yet, though the rest of your quest objectives are painstakingly marked on your compass, you are given no hint as to where Fritz might be or even who he is. It’s hard to build a picture of a world and care about it when the game both spoon feeds you quest markers and expects you to know where everything is on the first quest of the game.
Perhaps I’m being harsher on this than normal since it has been a while since I’ve played a “cinematic” game like this. But when you tell a story, you don’t start with a history of the world. You start with the needs and wants of your main characters. They hit obstacles, and find out about the world because of those obstacles. Why is this stopping me from achieving my goal? Where did it come from? How can I change it?
Kingdom Come almost does this – I can tell they tried – but then you get dumped into a 90 second cinematic about politics when you’re just trying to get some lockpicks.
Finally, the game has various technical issues. Animations don’t play quite the right way, mouth movements don’t line up correctly, and a myriad other issues. I’m all too familiar with these problems as I discovered when I accidentally hit the ~ key and realized they were running the game on CryEngine. Star Citizen, as an Alpha, is about on par with these issues and it isn’t even close to being done yet.
Sadly, this game must go to Tier Three. I can’t see myself playing it instead of many other games – especially Bannerlord.