Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 preview: Bohemia like you

Loading into Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for the first time, one thing becomes immediately clear - the team at Warhorse is bigger than ever, and that directly translates to the studio's latest project.

While the original game was developed from a small office in Prague, Czechia, developer Warhorse has grown from a team of under 90 people to well over 250 for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Bigger never guarantees better, but in the case of this team's latest project, it certainly feels that way.

I was recently invited to spend some time with the team at Warhose in their home country of Czechia, and after four hours of hands-on with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, I left with a warm feeling about the game that I've not felt about an RPG since the launch of Witcher 3.

Picking up the pieces

Our gameplay demo started off with the opening three hours of the game, which we were allowed to play through completely unadulterated. It picks up the story almost exactly where the first game left off, with Henry and Sir Hans on their way to deliver a letter to the city of Kuttenberg.

Warhorse explained to me that if the first game was about Henry growing from a boy into a man, then this second game is the tale of him exploring his way from manhood to becoming a knight. While save files sadly don't carry over, early dialogue interactions let you influence your starting RPG stats.

It's tastefully done and feels like an immersive compromise for what I can only assume are technical limitations, with the first game still confined to the last generation.

Shortly into our hero's journey, something happens that I won't spoil, but our two protagonists are left stripped of their gear. This brings them back down to basics and provides a perfect opportunity to tutorialise new players.

I was told that you don't need to have played the first game to enjoy KCD2, and I can completely believe it. While I started the first game with the best intentions, I never made it to its conclusion. After the first three hours of the sequel, I was completely up to speed with what makes Henry and Sir Hans tick, what their mission is, and how the basic mechanics of the game work.

Learning how to wield a sword, understanding that conversations have consequences, and other intricacies like life simulation systems, potion brewing, and stealth are all covered in-depth. Before you know it, you're thrust into a completely new open-world section of Bohemia, with all of its 1403 Cryengine 3 visual glory to explore.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

To put Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 down as more of the same would be a bit of an oversimplification. While it bears much of the same DNA as the original, a lot of that has been refined into a game that feels as though it's been created by a much more cohesive team.

For one, the whole package feels far less clunky than I remember the first game feeling. You can still see your body beneath your POV, but you no longer feel as though you're wrestling with yourself to walk or look in certain directions. Mantling over objects is much more reliable and speedy than before, too.

That polish extends to pretty much every other area of the game. Sword combat almost feels a little easier, with attacks much easier to telegraph and, therefore, deflect. Different weapon types also have different attack patterns, which opens up a new layer of variety to combat.

UI elements and menus are also much cleaner and easier to navigate. They retain that musty tome aesthetic but are far more functional and readable than before. Overall, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 felt like a game I could have played much more of, whereas the amount of jank in the first game regularly made me consider shelving it for a bit.

Perhaps the biggest addition to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the introduction of crossbows and early firearms to Henry's arsenal of weapons. I was able to use a crossbow in the early stages of my play session (and in real life at the preview event, which was a bit wild), and they certainly seem to be an excellent way of dealing lethal damage from a distance.

However, my time with the crossbow was very brief, and I wasn't able to get a feel for how these new weapons will affect the flow of combat or how rare the ammunition will be in the world. On that topic, Warhorse Studios told me, ​"Kingdom Come: Deliverance won’t suddenly become a shooter," comparing the new ranged weaponry to a sort of "ultimate weapon."

The impression I got was that Warhorse is keen to expand upon that RPG fantasy of being able to curate Henry into the character you want him to be. If you want to go all-in with a bastard sword and cleave the competition in two, go for it. If you prefer to use your tongue as a weapon and weasel your way out of situations using words, that's also a completely viable option.

Kuttenberg, the Big Apple

All of these gameplay options were demonstrated beautifully in an hour section that we played following the opening three hours. Set much later in the game, we were dropped into the main city of Kuttenberg, the biggest settlement that Warhorse has ever created for the series.

Now called Kutna Hora in modern day, this is where our preview event was taking place, and we were able to appreciate the lengths the team has gone to in recreating this gorgeous corner of the world. It earned its wealth thanks to dense silver mines found beneath the city, and as such, it is the centre of civilisation in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

The quest we played involved a quarrel between a travelling swordsman and the local Fighter's Guild, who took issue with a traveller for practising swordsmanship outside of their ranks. Both Henry and the swordsman hatch a plan - if the Fighter's Guild displays their ceremonial sword on the wall of the town hall, it means they're open to challengers, and Henry will be able to put them in their place, fair and square.

From here, the result of the quest is your oyster. You could rat out the swordsman to the guild and tell them the whole plan, currying favour with the guild yourself. I chose to try to sneak into the guild and steal the sword, which seemed to be the most interesting way for the quest to play out.

With the guild swarming with fighters during the day, I chose to enter under the cover of nightfall to maximise my chances of pilfering the sword unseen. After lockpicking my way through, I made my way up the stairs to the leader's chambers. However, I made a rookie thief mistake - I left the front door wide open.

Before I knew it, one of the guild members had awoken to investigate the draught that the open door was letting in, and he immediately devised that there was an intruder in the building. I was able to make it out of the place unspotted, but because I'd put the guild on edge, they had searched their place from top to bottom and spotted that the sword was gone.

As such, when I displayed the sword on the side of the town hall that next morning, they instantly accused me of foul play - completely correctly, of course. Instead of instantly failing the quest, this added a new wrinkle to my story. A tournament still took place against the guild, but Henry and the swordsman were to compete completely without armour, while the guild was allowed to plate up.

While Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 might not have multiple endings like other RPGs in the same vein, it seems to have extremely good chops when it comes to individual quests playing out in different ways. Warhorse later told me that if I didn't stand up for the swordsman in the early stages of the quest, then he'd be banished from the city entirely, and I'd need to complete several additional steps to get the quest back on track.

Speaking about how branching paths will play a part in KCD2, PR Manager Tobi Stolz-Zwilling said, "The choices really vary. They can range from small outcomes in quests to bigger decisions that could lead to the death of your comrades.

"But instead of focusing on multiple endings, we are concentrating more on the different ways to navigate the world of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. I think that’s what KCD is generally known for—we don’t guide the player by the hand but instead offer them a toolbox of ways to solve quests.

"While some are rather straightforward, others can really put you and Henry at a crossroads. You can’t change history, but you can have an impact on it."

Outdated attitudes

While I loved most of what I saw from KCD2, some areas of the game still give me pause for concern. The overall package packed some serious production value, but there were still a few buggy elements that I came across which hindered my progress. They were only small in the grand scheme of things - scenarios like needing to stand in an exact spot to interact with an NPC, or dialogue options not triggering when they were supposed to.

These few scenarios are likely why the team at Warhorse has delayed the launch of its game until early 2025, allowing for a few extra months to iron those creases out. What the team might have trouble patching out is some of the slightly outdated attitudes towards women that appear to be represented in some facets of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

Several times during the demo, I felt a little uncomfortable with how the game lets you treat the women of its story. For example, the opening hours have Henry and Sir Hans sneaking up on a group of women at a lake in the hopes of finding them bathing. This is how the game teaches you how to use stealth, which felt more than a little predatory. 

Similar themes were evidenced in a later sequence when the first woman with a real personality shows up, only to be wearing a slightly revealing outfit that I'm not entirely sure fits within the 'historical accuracy' that the game claims to be representing.

There's an argument to be had that the title could be representing the patriarchal attitudes towards women in a way that's accurate for the period. However, it does feel that the writing is written more from a male-gaze perspective rather than anything to do with respecting historical culture.

When asked directly about how these themes are represented in KCD2, Stolz-Zwilling said the goal "Is to provide an authentic and immersive experience that reflects the societal norms, attitudes, and customs of medieval Bohemia," including "the more complex and sometimes uncomfortable social dynamics that existed."

Final Thoughts

Of course, we only saw a small snippet of KCD2's gameplay. Four hours out of a proposed 80 to 100-hour RPG epic is a drop in the ocean, and there’s plenty of chance for the game to contextualise its representation of women in a more uplifting manner.

I'm keen to see much more of Warhorse's next project. From what I've seen so far, it's drastically exceeded my expectations, taking what fans loved about the first game and running as far as it can with it. Let's just hope that it can stick the landing.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is set to release on February 11, 2025 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. Preview access to KCD2 was provided by Warhorse Studios and PLAION. For more on the game, check out our developer interview.