After finally finishing making my Hideous Afterglow series, and being about 2/3 of the way through making a review of the Arcane Dimensions total conversion mod for Quake 1, I've been having another attempt at playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
If you missed out on it, KCD is an attempt at a super-accurate depiction of life in 1400s Bohemia (around modern day Czechia).
Everything goes to shit because the lazy and incompetent King Wenceslas IV is kidnapped (for the second time) by his half-brother Sigismund of Luxembourg, who starts razing villages and castles for silver and treasures to fund his army of foreigners he's using to subjugate the country in a bid for the throne of Bohemia.
You play as Henry of Skalitz, a blacksmith's son whose village is a victim of Sigismund's army, and you get to enjoy a really mechanically deep and thought-out Roleplaying Simulator, which does have a little bit of jank even after a plethora of updates but scores a 9.5/10 on the immersion front from me.
The game doesn't give you a good indication of when would be a good time to go out and do some exploring and levelling, so I went and searched some forums to find out when I wouldn't be restricted by obligations and time-pressure. After stealing a ring and needing to avoid the authorities in a particular town for a couple days, I made an effort to actually spend some time in the countryside and pay more attention to the world, and it's resulted in me already finding a few things I didn't know about, like adopting a dog, which even has its own related skill via 'Houndmaster'.
Everything is absurdly deep.
The game comes with a Mass Effect styled Codex of everything from world events, to the nuances of Feudal society, to explanations of branches of Christianity and the tavern games people played.
The simple act of talking to someone takes into account things like what you're wearing and how dirty it is, their position relative to you in the social hierarchy, your reputation in the given town, and even just people's attitude based on what's happening in the town or world. It's not about rolling dice and hoping like it is in Fallout 3, it's something you need to be autistic about.
Combat is brutally hard at first, as you don't even understand how to hold a sword properly. Getting someone to teach you means you'll be able to understand things like attack direction and proper blocking, and progresses into perfect parries, dodging and combos.
Even eating food can be kind of complex, as you need to think about spoilage what with refrigeration not being a thing, and weighing up hearty foods being 'Nourishing' while also making you ever so slightly sleepier. Alcohol effects work over time instead of instantly and leave you with a hangover, giving you a sweet spot in which you can exploit increased stats before the downsides kick in.
Hell, you
can't even fucking read at the start, with books just being silly jumbles of letters until you get a scribe to teach you and then spend time practicing it yourself.
By all means it's not a perfect game, there's some animation jank, really bad lip sync in both cutscenes and in-engine, and you'll see some small stuff besides like people slightly clipping through if they walk beside each other. It's very unforgiving, and the save system might turn a lot of people off - there are SOME autosaves, but generally you can only Save On Exit, on sleeping in a bed you "own", or by using a consumable alcoholic item. But if you're the kind of RPG autist who wants to play a game where you
play a specific role in a totally different very immersive and accurate setting, then it's worth looking into.
And there's no coons or soyshit. This is medieval europe, if these people saw a melanated individual they'd think he was a demon or something, and when people praise a female character it's because she actually is a good bitch within the events of the game and not because muh tokenism.
