i did not like kingdom come: deliverance, so here’s my unpublished review from 2018 about it

There are some games you just can’t put down, and other games you’ve agreed to write about, so even if you want to put them down, you can’t. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is both of these games.

The assignment started simply enough: I was supposed to write about the latest Kingdom Come: Deliverance DLC, From The Ashes. Easy peasy, right? Most expansions are usually some kind of short side content that you can crank through in a few hours. If you’re lucky, you’ll get something like The Secret Armory of General Knoxx for Borderlands or Point Lookout for Fallout 3 that are well worth the money, replete with quests and adventures that make the expansion recommended. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up with something that’s less than an hour long and does nothing new with the game.

The good news is that From The Ashes is long. It’s really long. But I’m not sure that makes it worth playing.

Most expansions I’ve played are siloed off from the main game in some way, but From the Ashes is tied into the main quest. You have to reach the halfway point in the campaign, fighting a battle at a town called Pribyslavitz. Once you’ve defeated the bandit Runt, you’ll need to make your way over to Talmberg, the place you spend the night after your harrowing escape at the start of the game, and find the guy in charge, Sir Divish. Divish will task you with returning to Pribyslavitz, finding his Locator (a man whose job is to survey and plan towns), and bringing him home safely.

This is the most complex quest in the expansion. You head to the location, talk to a bandit, and try to convince him to free the Locator, who he has kidnapped. Or you do what I did, sneaking into the camp while the guards were asleep, knocking them out, one by one, until… suddenly a guard notices and decides to attack. No matter what. Kill three guys and you’ll get attacked, regardless of order or placement.

For all its pretensions at being a realistic game, Kingdom Come isn’t. When the director Daniel Vavra laid out his goals for Kingdom Come in a blog titled “A Lesson in Cartography in Potato Land,” he accurately described how so many modern RPGs are structured.

“You accept the quest and set out from the town gate. The mystic mountain Lohen is precisely 150 metres from the gate and is about 50 metres high. All of the inhabitants of the city are either retarded, blind or crippled if they have not managed to notice it for centuries. After an approximately 30-metre walk to the mountain, you come to ‘no man’s land’ and are attacked by bandits. During another 120m walk to the peak, you also notice an ancient fortress Rumloch, a secret dungeon of doom and a bandit hideout. At the peak of the mountain, you kill a one-hundred-metre dragon by beating its foot with a rusty sword and drinking potions. Then, you rob the corpses of the imperial army (all five) and on the way back to the castle are killed by a wild boar. Welcome to an average RPG.”

In his blog post, Vavra continues to explain how he wants to make a realistic world, what that would mean, what it might look like, and so on. He can be forgiven for not reaching his goals entirely — this was written when Kingdom Come was still in the very early stages of planning, so it’s understandable that the idea and the game would not be completely identical. I’ve made games before, I know that no idea survives development intact.

But this desire for realism became a promise to the players, and that promise stuck around through the game’s development. It was there in the marketing. It was there whenever people criticized the game. It was, I believe, an admirable goal.

So, there I was, sneaking through Pribyslavitz, trying to take out the bandits without giving up my hard-earned Groschen (that’s the game’s currency). I knocked out a guard sleeping near a fire first. Everything went well. Then I killed him in his sleep, but of course you can’t just kill a man in his sleep until you unlock a skill to do that, because Kingdom Come is a realistic game, and everyone knows you can’t stab someone in their sleep until you open up a menu and click on a button to learn how. I moved onto the next tent and did the same. Even though they couldn’t see me, no matter what I did, someone would begin shouting, the third guy would wake up, and I’d have to fight both of them.

Through tedious trial and error, I found that I would always be caught, even when I was really well hidden in the dark, and I couldn’t figure out why. It seemed as though Kingdom Come wanted to be challenging, not realistic. Eventually, I discovered that if I took out the third guy first, then the second guy, and then only knocked out the first guy but didn’t kill him, I could sneak up on the one sentry by the fire and choke him out. Then I could go back and stab the third guy, and that would successfully clear the base.

This was frustrating. It was tedious. Without manual saves, it meant that I would routinely get caught, wait to die, and start the process over. Could it be a bug? I’ve encountered dozens of those, including one where a wagon teleported in front of a gate and everyone in the entire level died, including me.

You might wonder why I didn’t simply fight all four guards. Well, that’s because it’s nearly impossible. After some grinding, doing a lot of quests, reading a lot of books, and training so that all of my individual stats were over level 10, some enemies still give me a run for my money, and it’s not entirely clear why. One guy might go down after a few good ripostes while his identical-looking friend can tank me for minutes.Waiting to pull off a riposte can still make a fight stretch on for minutes. Kingdom Come wants to be realistic, and of course it would be unrealistic for you to fight a lot of men at once.

There’s just one problem: this is boring.

Kingdom Come wants to be realistic, and it is, but sometimes it isn’t. Early on, if you pick a lock, you are told that if it breaks, a guard will investigate. This appears to be the case no matter what you are doing; it does not seem as though sound propagation is taken into account. If you break a lock on one side of town, a guard will walk all the way from the other to arrest you. If you pick a lock successfully, as quietly as a mouse, while someone is sleeping, they will immediately wake up, stand up straight look at you, and ask what you are doing. There is no way to pick a lock while someone is snoring in a bed next to you. Kingdom Come won’t allow it. Kingdom Come seems to value user-unfriendliness more than anything, even realism.

Once I rescued the Locator, he said we should get some sleep. We did. Then we began the next quest, where we walked through a forest, he mumbled about where things should be, and I followed. Because Kingdom Come endeavors to be realistic, this takes exactly as long as it would take if you were actually there, in a forest, walking around with a complete stranger who’s deciding how to lay out a village, only you can’t chat with him as you go, you have no choices to make, you just have to walk around for twenty minutes listening to him babble. It’s not fun. It’s not meaningful. It’s not even realistic, because you could at least communicate with the guy if it was real life.

As humans, our lives are short, temporary things. We must use our time wisely. So, in our fiction, we cut out the parts that don’t matter to get to the heart of the things that do. We don’t need to watch someone walk up two flights of stairs; if we show her walking, or even looking, towards those stairs, then in the next shot, she emerges from the stairway, we understand what happened. We can’t spend 84 years watching Benjamin Button’s life story when 166 minutes of movie will do.

Games don’t respect player time like that. They’ve always been about pursuing fidelity. For years, they showcased their graphical enhancements by touting their realism. Later, it was physics. Now, we’re seeing a growing interest in systems that emulate realism. There’s a lot of beauty in that; it’s fascinating to visit other worlds. I grew up wanting to go to Narnia, and video games are the closest thing I’ll have to ever visiting another world.

But I’m still a human being. I still have a human lifespan.

This year, I almost died because of a heart condition. I’m acutely aware that I don’t have a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. When I play a game like Kingdom Come that makes me traipse around the woods with so many of my senses dulled, I feel like my time is wasted. The pursuit of realism doesn’t value the player’s human existence, nor does it value their body.

Games average around 16 different inputs. Even games on a traditional keyboard, which has 144 or so keys, tend to use a limited number of them because it’s not practical to expect players to constantly reach over and tap backspace or insert keys while playing. We look through a television or monitor into the game’s world. With a traditional 16:9 display at a proper distance, this offers around 60 degrees of horizontal vision.

The human body has around 650 muscles, 206 bones, and eyes that offer about 180 degrees of vision. Our brains are remarkable processing engines, allowing us to locate sounds and smells with a high degree of accuracy. One doctor I knew insisted that our ‘sixth sense’ was a real thing too, our brain interpreting signals from the weak magnetic field that everyone has.

Games are, in so many ways, so much less than the human experience. There is no way to perfectly replicate the human experience in a video game. When I walk, I do not think about which muscles to contract or relax, I simply start walking.

Because we do not have the same fine motor control over a game that we do over real life, most games make allowances. They simplify complex ideas into simple button presses, which replicates how we think about performing those actions, rather than how we actually do them. QWOP, a game where you manually control your limbs in order to walk, does not replicate the experience of walking, it replicates the action.

Kingdom Come, for the most part, seems to want to replicate the actions rather than the experiences of the thing. Controls are a barrier between the player and the game. and the best games make them invisible because they’re trying to put us in the character’s headspace, rather than trying to simulate what the character is doing.

At its best, Kingdom Come does this. It says that, hey, your clothes might naturally get dirty, and if they do, you’ll probably want to get them cleaned, because the person you’re talking to might be disgusted by the smell. So you walk over to a bathhouse, pay someone some cash, and then watch a clock tick by rather than sitting through an actual hour of watching the laundry get done.

At its worst, Kingdom Come makes you watch as your character leans over, reaches a hand out, and picks up an item. It doesn’t make clear when you’re drawing your bow or when you’ve simply run out of arrows. The combat system is needlessly complex, with fights taking ages, and since the game isn’t reasonable with its autosaves, a single death can kill hours of progress. The stealth system is frustratingly inscrutable. One quest saw me walk halfway across the entire game world behind a man on his horse while he talked. It was ten times as boring as it sounds.

And then there’s From The Ashes.

It’s a very simple DLC: you need to have thousands of Groschen to get a town started and built. You do this by looking at a book — which is really just a video game menu that you have to navigate like it’s a book instead of a game menu — which tells you if you have enough supplies to build something. Then you tell the Locator, who sits there and does nothing for a minute, then stands up, walks in an oddly circuitous route to the construction site, and stands still. You have to talk to him again, and he goes “okay, I will build the building.” I guess it is realistic that someone might want to walk you to a build site, but is it fun? Is it meaningful? Is the game enhanced by this? If you could pick the site, maybe. But you can’t.

Then there’s a cutscene, the game informs you that a few days have passed, and the building is now built. Early on, most buildings, despite costing thousands of Groschen, are a drain on your economy. It costs me 235 Groschen per day to keep the town from falling into ruin. I also have to come up with over 8,000 Groschen to get some of the earliest buildings up and running. By the time I’d liberated Pribyslavitz, about half way through the game, I had haggled and penny-pinched my way to just over 3,000. It doesn’t feel balanced or enjoyable where it’s at. I needed 3,000 just to buy stone for the village, and when I got back to the stone merchant with the cash, he’d only do it for 4,000.

It’s a new system added to a rich and vibrant and frequently frustrating game, and I think if you pick it up for a fresh playthrough, and you modded the crap out of the game, or if you only started once the game started paying you a lot, it might be fun.. Right now, I’m not sure I can possibly afford to pay for everything; it costs hundreds of Groschen a day to keep my town afloat, and I’m not making enough money to pull it off. Unfortunately, From the Ashes doesn’t have a lot more going on than the money management either. Fallout 4’s similar city-building system was several orders of magnitude more complex in terms of managing villagers and placing structures.

I love the quiet moments in Kingdom Come. I loved fighting a knight underneath a willow tree at night because he wouldn’t listen to me when I told him that I was investigating a crime, not perpetrating it. I loved sneaking into a nobleman’s bedroom and fencing an illustrated book he owned. I laughed when I beat a man for his lucky cat’s paw in a game of dice.

There are many wonderful moments in the game, but then there are the times when a cart teleports in front of a gate and a mission suddenly tells me I failed and restarts me an hour before, or a guard storms out of a nearby camp and arrests me because I was hunting rabbits, even though I have permission to hunt rabbits.

I’m not sure that From The Ashes is an expansion worth buying, but Kingdom Come is definitely a game worth playing, not because it’s good, but because it has no respect for your time. We learn by failure, so the saying goes, and I think Kingdom Come is a failure worth learning from precisely because it works so hard to be realistic, almost makes it, and in the process, proves that realism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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