Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 live launch coverage – Reviews, performance analysis and all the latest news
Suit up—we're going to medieval Bohemia.
Ignatius the sheep is the GOAT
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has plenty of great characters, but none of them have stuck in my mind quite like Ignatius the sheep. I do not know who decided to get a voice actor to record his replies, rather than using the realistic animal noises that you'll hear throughout the rest of the game, but it was a sublime choice. I would die for Ignatius. In fact, I have died for Ignatius. Defending him from a pack of wolves until my last breath. I love you, little buddy.
"It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool videogame."
Ahead of tomorrow's launch, we spoke with Warhorse's global PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling and senior game designer Ondřej Bittner about the series' focus on historical authenticity. In the first game, which is largely set in rural Bohemia, this led to most of the stories being focused on white, Christian characters. The only exception were the Cumans, Turkic mercenaries, who were largely presented as barbaric raiders. Coupled with game director Daniel Vávra's conservative views and support for Gamergate, this led to KCD being characterised as a champion for "anti-wokeness"—this was despite the protagonist, Henry, being a relatively progressive character, given the historical period.
But Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's change in setting, where we get to explore a much more cosmopolitan city, Kuttenberg, allowed Warhorse to explore a more diverse set of characters, while also digging into the Cumen mercenaries, who are no longer simply villains. Unfortunately, this has inspired right wing reactionaries to attack the game for becoming "woke".
"Several years ago, we were branded differently," says Stolz-Zwilling. "Now we are branded that way. It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool videogame."
Warhorse has employed the same historical consultant since it first started developing KCD, but now that it's an established studio with more resources and a well-known game under its belt, its been able to spend more time digging into the history of Bohemia, with helps from universities, museums and academics.
"Everything makes sense. Everything we put there was double and triple checked," says Stolz-Zwilling.
And it makes even more sense because of the larger scope and the urban setting that we get to explore in the game's second half. Kuttenberg was one of the most important cities in the Holy Roman Empire, a location where people from all over Europe and beyond came to learn and trade. And during this time of civil war, with mercenaries and soldiers flooding in, its denizens are even more varied.
"Because there's a city, there's loads more effort to show how these people actually view the world, which is, I think, way more important than showing their fashion choices or or how they look," says Bittner. "It's how they view the world and the society around them, which is predominantly Christian and Czech-speaking. I think that it's important to not just include these people, but their vision of the world, which can sometimes feel lacking in games or media that call themselves diverse."
Our OG Kingdom Come: Deliverance review
We published our review of the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance back in February of 2018, seven years ago. It was a bit janky—Warhorse started developing the game with only 11 people—but had the scope and the looks of an RPG from a much more experienced, and larger, studio. We were pretty impressed at the time.
Kingdom Come is a mess of bugs, and there’s the constant feeling that independent developer Warhorse is biting off more than it can chew. But there’s a charm to its scrappiness, and it does enough interesting stuff that I’m willing to tolerate the creaky framework struggling to prop everything up. It’s one of the most satisfying, rewarding roleplaying experiences I’ve enjoyed on PC for a while, but the inconsistent performance and the game’s tendency to completely break does test my patience from time to time.
We ended up giving it a more than respectable 84%. And in a few hours you'll be able to see how the sequel shapes up.
20 hours with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review is coming later today, but in the meantime why not check out what our reviewer Josh thought about his first 20 hours with the game?
I've rumbled with Cumans because I chose the wrong outfit; had my painstaking plans of attack disrupted by roving NPC caravans; gotten embroiled in fights that turned into grand, violent katamaris as more and more people joined in to help or hinder me; and lamented my lack of save-game potions more times than I can count. It's tremendous fun, with all sorts of bizarre variables feeding into the emergent adventures I get into. With about 20 hours in the game so far, I've barely made a dent in the main quest, so preoccupied have I been with poking at the world and seeing what reactions it spits bac
