Kingdom Come - RPG Codex Review

On top of the things mentioned before, KCD is full of interesting systems and simulation aspects. Aside from the deep combat system talked about earlier, there is fairly deep NPC behavior. At night, NPCs go home and sleep in their beds, taking off their day clothes. If they must go out, they will walk with torches or candle lamps. In the morning, they have breakfast in their homes and go outside, typically to their workplace. Farmers work the land, blacksmiths pound on metal, millers carry sacks around, and guards patrol the streets and roads. In the evenings, men often go to taverns and drink or play dice games. Women sweep the houses or streets. There are a lot of little custom touches that really make the world feel alive. There are even dogs and pigs walking around, or lounging under the sun. The AI is also good enough to run away from trouble, raise an alarm if it sees you doing shady things, close and lock doors when needed, and other such things.

There is an in-depth stealth and subterfuge system. You can sneak by staying out of sight and hearing, which is affected not only by your stats in the relevant skills, but also by what you are wearing. Put on soft, dark clothes, and you will make virtually no noise and blend into the night. Try sneaking in a suit of plate mail, on the other hand, and you will make enough noise to bring the entire Cuman army down your way. Correct clothes can also serve as a disguise, allowing you to enter hostile areas, for instance wearing Cuman armor will let you infiltrate an enemy camp in one of the main quests. You can also perform sneak attacks if you catch an enemy unawares, and there is an interesting lockpicking system in play. To navigate it, you move the mouse around until finding the lock's sweet spot, and then rotate the lock with the D key, while at the same time using the mouse to keep the sweet spot moving so that it stays in the same place relative to the rest of the lock. Not exactly rocket science, but it's probably the most interesting lockpicking system I've seen so far in a game.

There is also a very interesting and deep charisma system. It is affected by many factors, such as the quality of your armor and clothing (a shining suit of plate will impress people a lot more than peasant rags), your deeds and stats/perks, whether or not your clothing and armor are repaired and in good condition, or torn apart and covered with dirt and blood, if your weapon is covered in blood (this helps to intimidate people), when was the last time you bathed, and other such factors. The humorously designed perks add to this in various ways. For instance, there is one perk that makes your character more attractive to the opposite sex if he doesn't shower a certain amount of time. On the other hand, the stench is so strong, that your stealth is reduced by 30%.

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all of these issues can be overcome with the wonderful world of PC mods. All you need are 2-3 mods really, which customize many numerical values affecting combat, and then you can even modify these mods to your own liking. I will link some of the better ones at the end of the review. The basic idea is to go from the vanilla combat to something that more resembles a true medieval sword fight, with just a few small changes:

- Remove Masterstrike from both NPCs and the player.
- Change the likelyhood of NPCs using different defensive techniques: increase parry chance, lower regular block chance, to make NPCs more challenging and to make combos harder to pull off, as they would be in real life.
- Lower damage gain from skill increase to prevent the player from becoming too powerful.
- Remove the slow motion effect whenever you land a parry, as it breaks up the flow of combat.

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance is Skyrim for adults

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It is best played on Hardcore mode, and with the mods that I mentioned above.

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joxer said:

I usually like codex' reviews as unlike IGN&co. the author doesn't write about a game they didn't play, but this one is a dud.

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lackblogger said:

Why is mainstream important to you as a marker for anything? Barely any games we talk about here enter the mainstream in any serious way & when they do they tend to get more divisive than the ones who don't even bother trying.

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lackblogger said:

Piranha has loyal fans for all its games, like Vogel games it doesn't need mainstream attention & would probably suffer a loss of core favour if it did. With regards to KC: D, what aspects of it do you expect a mainstream audience to find attractive? If it was a mainstream title then it wouldn't be like it is, surely?

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lackblogger said:

Is Witcher 3 now your personal benchmark for attributing the extent to which those 'dumb gamers' either 'dismiss' or 'embrace' the latest Eastern European addition to the world of gaming? If so, graphics and hype. And most likely less people on these types of forums that care about them. Or you think maybe they should have included lootboxes?

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