The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a game I enjoyed and respected, but didn’t finish.
A 2018 release by Warhorse Studios, the title launched in a buggy state, with gameplay that straddled an uncomfortable line between realistic and tedious. Performance on my machine at the time was rough, and I encountered several outright broken sequences that prevented me from progressing.
After a few patches, the game achieved strong success and a hardcore following, but I never found the time to go back and finish it. Yet I always respected what the developers had attempted.
In a world of cookie-cutter fantasy games, Kingdom Come stood out: an open-world game in the tradition of Bethesda titles or more niche RPGs like Gothic, but set in a historically accurate Bohemia in the early 1400s. Your character, Henry, was no knight or hero – simply the son of a blacksmith, thrown into an adventure by the chaos of war. Every bit of progress Henry made was hard-won; every single lowly bandit was a deadly foe.
February 2025 saw the launch of the sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (abbreviated hereafter as KCD2). I’ll cut to the chase: KCD2 is everything a sequel should be and has great design lessons to teach anyone looking to build an open-world RPG in 2025.
It’s an amazing experience, with most of the technical issues that plagued the first game shaken out. It’s also much bigger, and – in a world where so many publishers are afraid of losing a mass audience – sacrifices none of the complexity or special sauce that made the first title a cult hit.
plenty of adventure beneath
its calm and bucolic surface.
A Clever Opening
KCD2 opens in media res, during a castle siege. Before long, we’re flashing back to the protagonist, the steady and likable Henry – more or less when and where we left him at the end of KCD. Henry, a man who straddles the uncomfortable space between the peasant and noble worlds, is a servant to the likable but deeply flawed knight Hans Capon, a character loosely based on a minor historical figure.
The young lord has a knack for getting Henry into trouble. Events quickly spiral out of control, and Henry soon finds himself in an unfamiliar area, bereft of resources and injured.
It’s at this point that the first glimpse of how different KCD2’s design philosophy is becomes apparent. Most game sequels would gloss over setting your character back to ground zero, the traditional “level 1 noob” start wearing rags and fighting with a stick. KCD2 is smarter than that. There’s a story justification for Henry’s plight – a severe injury, and an ambush – and the game does not fully reset Henry to his lowly status from the first game.
In the original KCD, Henry couldn’t fight at the start of the game, much less read. He had the skills that the son of a village blacksmith would naturally have. In KCD2, even after his injury, Henry starts out a bit better off, with a dozen skill points to spend and starting stats that make at least a one-on-one fight viable, if not easy.
The game sidesteps the typically thorny sequel problem of needing alternative paths to support what players did in the first game. Key decisions are referenced in early dialogue, but players can respond in any way they like, defining Henry’s previous experiences but not limiting the character’s current choices. It’s an elegant, low-impact solution that keeps events from the first game relevant but avoids weighing down the new story.
There’s an elegance in both the systems and the story here, an attention to detail that most designers brush past. If you’ve played the first game, Henry – who rarely if ever feels like a traditional fantasy hero – has fantastic character continuity and consistency.
The Mundane Becomes Profound
Far more so than games like Skyrim, Dragon Age, or Baldur’s Gate 3, KCD2 is about living Henry’s life in medieval Bohemia.
Two robust minigames – blacksmithing and alchemy, relegated to minor side activities in Skyrim – take the lead here. Each is a time-consuming but ultimately rewarding effort in itself, deep games unto themselves with several steps and the possibility of making mistakes that will waste resources or result in a bad outcome. Henry – and the player — must actually practice to get good at making swords or brewing potions.
KCD2’s alchemy is engaging
and genuinely satisfying.
But that’s not all Henry does. There’s hunting and cooking; there’s an excellent dice game to be found at the inns and taverns that dot the small villages. There are archery contests and light thievery (with a deep crime and punishment mechanic).
And there is plenty of combat – the robust system at the heart of KCD2. Stumbling across a pair of bandits on the road would be a quick fight in most games; here, at least in the early going before Henry finds his footing, it’s a life or death struggle, a series of parries and thrusts and counter-moves until one party or the other finds an opening.
The combat in the first game was a primary selling point, and the sequel delivers plenty of improvements. Fighting feels more fluid; animations are better; the dance of death is more intricate. A swordfight can end quickly if you get the drop on someone, or stretch out for several tense minutes against a skilled opponent. It’s a systemic masterpiece that rewards improvement in both Henry’s RPG statistics and the player’s skills.
Over the Next Hill
Is KCD2 perfect? Not by a long shot. Though it’s a far better technical effort than the first game, it needs a patch or two.
In the early going, I hit several quest bugs and quirky moments of scripting failure that took me out of the game. To the game’s credit, it’s attempting some fairly ambitious open-world mechanics. Its quests seldom fail outright, and it’s possible to stumble on solutions before you even know the full context for them – and for the most part, the game handles these situations smoothly and robustly.
What’s hard to convey is how compelling it is to explore the world of KCD2. You’ll meet lots of interesting characters on Henry’s journey, and his story is compelling, with plenty of twists and turns. But the world of medieval Bohemia is the real star.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years walking my family’s rural land in New Hampshire. At times, traversing KCD2’s environments comes close to replicating that experience in video game form. As you wander the woodlands, pastures, and trails, on your way to the next sleepy village, everything comes together: audio design, visuals, and the feel of the terrain.
leads to an herbalist’s hut. I got
very familiar with this route.
These are not the overdesigned Disney ride landscapes of Dragon Age. These are fields and forests where it feels like real people live. The dev team poured their passion into every corner of the world. The result, a combination of verisimilitude, historical setting, and complex mechanics, is unique in gaming.
In recent days, a couple of funny back-to-back stories caught my attention. First, an EA executive was giving a postmortem on the sluggish sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and opined that the logical conclusion was gamers wanted more “shared world experiences.”
At the same time, KCD2 – an unapologetically unforgiving and defiantly single-player experience – sold a million copies in two days.
There’s a lesson there that even the most illiterate and superstitious peasant from Henry’s time could probably figure out.
The Scree Games blog is appearing less regularly than usual in 2025, but new content is typically posted on Tuesdays, with a repost on Medium on Wednesdays.