Anybody on Kingdom Come Deliverance?
The first one almost made it into my rotation, but not quite.
The 2nd one will be released tomorrow and the review embargo ended today. Looks like an improved version all around. Maybe that lifts it into competition for me?
I own the full #1, but I only played its prologue for a while, mainly because I also had other things to do. I liked it as a medieval 3D role-playing game similar to low/no-fantasy Dragon Age or Witcher.
I wasn't totally in love with the first one. I only put about 16 hours into it before moving on. That hasn't stopped me from pre-ordering part 2, though. :Loser:
I have one and intend to actually install and play it one day.
Friends said the combat mechanic was rough at the start as your avatar constantly misses attacks and parries as he's not yet skilled with weapons. Apparently there's some fight early on against two soldiers that's very tough to get past. That's kind of putting me off starting it up.
I did not enjoy the first one either. I found it quite - boring and the accents grated the **** out of me iirc.
Finished the first one and am looking forward to kcd2. However I did not preorder as a matter of course these days.
I found kcd1 pretty hard going at first because after playing war of the roses I was used to clise combat being player skill based rather than game skill point based. Once you get used to not being able to fight certain people because of skill point deficits until you level up it's bot so bad.
I loved kcd1 because it was a fairly accurate representation of what medieval life would have been like. I generally find though that without monsters that the usual rpg games have it's not for everybody. For us wargamers, it should be heaven. Bringing perspective to medieval wargames.
I played one to completion and it was pretty good. Couple great large battle sequences tied to the main story that were really fun. It involves a pitch battle and a storming of the walls siege. The main story is definitely worth a play through. The early game is a grind for skills, and you can get lost going after endless side quests. I always meant to revisit one, there's even a dlc where you're a sheriff and it just kind of sandboxes on indefinitely.
I'll probably own two at some point, but definitely not day one. KCD1 was pretty heavily discounted as time went on, even being offered for free on epic....so I'll probably be picking it up in 2025 steam summer or Christmas sale. I'm just too busy with current games to bother.
I played the first one all the way through and enjoyed its real-world vibe very much. I found combat quite challenging at first but since then I've played a bunch of AC Odyssey and Valhalla with their somewhat similar timing-based combat and I wouldn't be surprised if I found it a little easier now.
I'm still on an old box, though, and starting to have problems with new games. I probably won't upgrade until the prices on the new Nvidia cards settle down a little, so in the meanwhile I'm more likely to boot the original back up and maybe pick the new one up on a discount later if the reviews are good.
I really enjoyed the beginning of this. It starts out with a refresher tutorial. You're a soldier in the middle of a castle siege. The tutorial then shifts back in time a few weeks, but you're still a soldier, you've got some decent armor and weapons and a horse. This was really enjoyable for me and the story was very engrossing.
Of course, they go an ruin it by stripping you naked and taking everything you've got away so you practically need to start over from scratch. I find this very annoying.
In any event...my first 90 minutes went by very quickly.
Overall, its going to be a very worthy successor and a good game.
For what it is worth, I'm enjoying this one much more than the first title. The story is good. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is very well written overall, the world is impressive and alive and I'm having fun just traveling around and exploring.
I think if you like the era and RPGs, and you don't mind the lack of fantasy content, you probably won't regret getting this one.
Audentes fortuna iuvat!
The first game gets off to a slow start, but that's intentional. Although there is a fair amount of combat, the game is not so much about beating other people up as it is about learning to live in a completely different environment and at a radically different pace. You don't really get a sense of what's happening until you're about fifty hours in, at which point the game starts to really open up.
I generally don't enjoy games set in historical periods because many designers can't seem to get beyond life in a mid-west shopping mall and hackneyed video game conventions. This game is far from perfect, but it makes a serious attempt at reconstructing the feel and texture of medieval life. I took a fair number of medieval history courses in college and ended up marrying a medievalist focused on Benedictine monasticism, so for one reason or another I've been exposed to a lot of the primary source material, often in the original languages. KCD includes an in-game codex which you don't need to consult but would be well advised to study (particularly the parts that pertain to in-game activities). Studying it in its entirety is roughly the equivalent of taking most of an introductory undergraduate course in medieval history.
There are some things in the first game that I wish weren't there. While some of the easter eggs provoked a mild smile, there were a few things (like the trial of a minor character by the Inquisition) that were thrown in as palliatives for a modern audience. But two things about the game stand out as amazing: the combat and the landscape.
The combat was a serious attempt to create a system based on HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts). There a few minor flaws to the system that seem to have been ironed out in the second game, but when you go one-on-one against someone you really need to think about what you're doing (including running away), and the combat moves are largely based on period fencing treatises and consultation with HEMA practitioners. This is the major reason for most complaints about the combat system from people who are used to being the chosen one and spam clicking their way to victory in every combat. If you try to do that in KCD with or without training you'll end up very dead very fast. It's been six or seven years since the first game came out so the approach is no longer unique, but the fact remains if you don't teach yourself how to fight and make your character practice his brains out, you won't get a satisfying result. And that's like real life.
The other thing about the game that is amazing is the countryside. I've spent many hours just wandering around exploring the woods: they're never the same and they're beautiful -- I'd have Ma Vlast playing in the back of my head if the game's music score weren't so engrossing. Should you happen to play the game in Hardcore mode, your current position won't be marked on the map so you'd better remember how to read terrain or you won't have a clue as to where you are. (Most of the terrain, by the way, is real, and there are videos on YouTube that compare the modern places to the ones you'll encounter in KCD, and not surprisingly, the landscape looks pretty much the same after six or seven hundred years).
I've put a couple of thousand hours into KCD 1, and expect I'll probably end up putting even more into KCD 2. The series is essentially a visa for a medieval vacation. That's not to everyone's taste, and there's nothing wrong with not liking it. But there's nothing else out there that even comes close (and I get a big kick out of listening to people complain that transcribing latin texts in the monastery is too hard).