It’s not true that skipping the first installment of Kingdom Come: Deliverance won’t affect your experience with the sequel. So many questions arise at the video game’s beginning. What’s with Pa’s sword? Why is a nobleman like Hans Capon so patient with you, an ordinary commoner? Why is this letter you’re delivering with him so damn important? Who are all those Cumans, Wenceslaus IV, King Sigismund, and Istvan Toth? Besides, if you skip the first installment, you risk missing so many good jokes. Sacra!
Yes, I have bad news for newbies: you can’t even imagine how hard it’ll be to survive in the merciless world of the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia in the early 15th century. Nevertheless, the main character, Henry, from the mining village of Skalitz, is no longer the completely inexperienced son of a blacksmith he was in the original game seven years ago. Old dogs remember that at the beginning of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, one of the main goals during the first ten hours was to find a decent outfit instead of the torn and dirty underwear your character was wearing.
In Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, we begin our journey as an experienced lad in shining armor—a nobleman, as they say. Oh, wait… after the first plot twist, random guards pour a bucket of shit on him, once again condemning players to wander the world in dirty underwear.
Daniel Vávra, the creative director of the game and a living legend of the gaming industry, is well-known for torturing gamers since 2002. He’s like Hideo Kojima or Hidetaka Miyazaki but with his unique brand of perversions. Having gained experience as a graphic artist on 1999’s Hidden & Dangerous, a hardcore tactical shooter where we had to lurk in sniper-packed swamps and tunnels during World War II, he began his professional ascension as the game director and lead writer of the first Mafia (2002). In other words, he was the guy who forced us to repeatedly replay the same chase and gunfight segments without proper autosaves. If there are games more hardcore than Soulslike ones, they are surely Vávra-like.
The most significant aspect of Vávra’s projects is harsh realism. For example, in Mafia, the car physics are so life-like that you must accelerate to make it up a hill in your old Bolt Ace Coupe. In 2009, after working on Mafia II, he left Illusion Softworks, now known as 2K Czech, and formed Warhorse Studios with Martin Klíma from Bohemia Interactive in 2011. The Kingdom Come: Deliverance series became the quintessential representation of Vávra’s ideas, partly mixed with the approach of Bohemia Interactive, which is well-known for the hardcore open-world military simulation series Operation Flashpoint and Arma.
Did you enjoy working as a common cab driver in the first two Mafias instead of participating in Hollywood-style chases or monotonously loading boxes at the docks just like Marlon Brando did in On the Waterfront? In Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, you’ll have hundreds more chores, from basic needs like eating, sleeping, and bathing to hunting, smithing, and boozing.
Thankfully, you don’t have to, for example, feed chickens or do mundane errands for your father as in the DLC A Woman’s Lot from Kingdom Come: Deliverance; however, everything you might perceive as the boring part of gameplay in the first installment of the series—or in any game in general—is multiplied here.
Did you hate washing your character after every dirty job to slightly raise Henry’s charisma in dialogs? Here, you have to maintain hygiene for looks and stealth so enemies won’t smell you from a distance. Other characters will refuse to talk to you if you reek like a walking sewer. Remember the Money for Old Rope quest, where you had to work on a grindstone for seemingly never-ending minutes to dull the executioner’s sword? In the sequel, there’s now a completely new blacksmith minigame—or, let’s call it, a simulator.
Thanks to the over eight million units sold of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and the number of employees increasing from 131 in 2019 to 250 by 2024, Warhorse Studios made us suffer twice, thrice, and even four times more. As mentioned, the sequel will teach you a very tough lesson, so you won’t take all the commodities acquired in its predecessor for granted.
That is to say, you’ll go all the way down the food chain in no time, forced to begin your journey with the same privileges as a medieval turnip farmer—which is to say, none. This common game design decision or trope of stripping a character of their abilities in many gaming sequels (look, for example, at Destiny 2 or God of War II and III), combined with a vastly larger open world, makes the first dozen in-game hours feel authentic.
Henry’s Goals in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
The sequel’s story picks up where Kingdom Come: Deliverance left off: Henry and Sir Hans Capon continue their travels to Trosky Castle with one simple goal—delivering a letter to Bohemian nobleman Otto von Bergow. This move is intended to shed light on whether he is on the side of Sigismund of Luxembourg, the King of Hungary, or Wenceslaus IV, the King of Bohemia, in their struggle for the reign of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. You’re siding with the second guy, by the way.
Somewhere in the background, Henry’s personal goals, left unfulfilled in the first game, loom—catching his parents’ killer and finding the sword made by his father. Fans will be delighted to see Father Godwin finally showing us what he’s capable of on the battlefield in the prologue. The story progresses slowly from a simulator of rural intrigues and investigations to a grand fantasy blockbuster.
Traveling at first on foot through the landscapes of Bohemian Paradise, full of forests, villages, and tiny towns (recreated from real places ), you feel how insignificantly small your character is. This feeling is nowhere near what we experienced in Skyrim or Breath of the Wild—especially when you arrive at the main hub, the city of Kuttenberg, which is so much bigger, more detailed, and alive than The Witcher 3’s Novigrad that it was moved to a separate second area. So we have two open-world maps now instead of one.
Initially, you must walk vast distances without a horse, fast travel, proper weapons, or even saves. You constantly fear that some passing cutthroat with a rusty sword might knock you down. To make matters worse, if you look like a regular vagabond or beggar, people will treat you accordingly.
Having no money to pay for a bed or food, you’ll be forced to steal, gather, and sell trash for a few groschen or take on odd jobs, gradually making your way to the top… once again. Doesn’t that remind you of something? Yes, Charles Dickens! Whom Vávra also seems to have read very carefully. With his focus on hardcore realism, his projects are about working your way up from the bottom and coming of age.
This is seen in Mafia, where your character goes from a regular cab driver to a prominent mobster. Mafia II: he starts as a World War II veteran mired in debt and climbs to the peak of the post-war criminal world. Little by little, as you become more and more successful in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, you slowly move from total desperation to a deep sense of satisfaction.
In the beginning, every bit of the game feels hostile to players, especially if they aren’t familiar with the basic rules of this universe. The biggest roadblock is the sword combat system, which demands that you properly swing your weapon in the right direction, parry, defend, and counterattack as in actual swordplay.
At first, it could be a nightmare, but players who master the swordplay can say they have played something more hardcore than all those FromSoftware-ish cute little button-mashers for toddlers. Thankfully, this game’s mechanic has become more balanced and smoother than it was at the first game’s release, so slicing bandits into salad pieces can be fun now. The next challenges, which are crucial to overcome, include lockpicking, pickpocketing, dice, alchemy, blacksmithing, and archery (including hunting), with the latter significantly improving.
Speaking of improvements, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the ultimate version of the first installment, which, from a technical standpoint, was a total buggy nightmare at release and remains clunky. For example, even seven years after the first game’s release, your character can quickly get stuck on a fenсe or wipe out a whole bandit camp with a single bow, becoming invincible by squeezing yourself between the bushes.
That said, the sequel can readily be compared to, er, Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 or No Man’s Sky’s Worlds Part II update regarding the amount of work the developers put into fixing past mistakes. This time, serious bugs are hard to find—I only stumbled upon a few NPCs stuck in trees, and that’s all. The overall gameplay experience is polished: the annoying first-person animations from the first game are now much slicker, the controls are far more intuitive, and the frequency of autosaves has significantly increased.
The funniest and most paradoxical moment is related to optimization. Like the first game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is developed on CryEngine. Despite this, it looks amazing and runs perfectly at max settings—even without having to fork out for an RTX 5090 GPU. At the same time, its predecessor’s frame rate still drops even on high-end PCs. All these screenshot-perfect landscapes of the medieval countryside look astonishing, astounding, awe-inducing—and you don’t even have to suffer for it, as was the case with the first Crysis.
Warhorse Studios, a relatively small and young studio, has proven to the industry that it’s possible to make a huge, 100+ hour open-world sandbox with a Game of Thrones-worthy 2.2-million-word screenplay not with a $200 million budget, standard for AAA games, but with only around $41 million.
When Henry finally gets a horse, figures out how to earn some groschen, masters the art of swordplay, and begins to crank out dozens of phials of saviour schnapps that allow you to save the game anytime you want, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II transforms from a hardcore Eastern European version of Dragon’s Dogma into a AAA, Ridley Scott-level blockbuster with a very engaging, well-directed story and meticulously crafted side quests, full of drama, action, and profound dialogues.
Just as The Witcher 3 set the standard for narrative depth in every big open-world RPG a decade ago, Warhorse Studios’ new project has raised it exponentially. After Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, it’s no longer enough to fill every possible side activity with drama—now, the entire game has to immerse players in its world, packed with countless well-developed details.
On launch day, Henry’s adventures sold over one million copies, making a profit for the studio. Yet, considering all the praise for the game’s technical and narrative quality, one of the most crucial parts of its success is its meme-worthiness.
If you see a lot of memes about any game’s release, it most likely means the game is successful. Daniel Vávra, who is ever-present online, knows exactly how this works. Apart from its deep storytelling and uncompromising, George R. R. Martin-flavored plot twists, every hour of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is imbued with lightweight humor, cunning irony, and fart jokes that have spread across social media, giving the game extra viral PR and securing its place in the annals of gaming history.
To paraphrase from the first game, referring to the dark times of the Middle Ages and the bravery of knights, may the Lord watch over the brave souls of Warhorse Studios, especially in these dark times.