Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a role-playing video game developed by Warhorse Studios. It is set in the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, with a focus on historically accurate and realistic content. The game released in 2018 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a single-player experience with a few branching quest lines and a highly interactive world encouraging emergent gameplay. Kingdom Come features period-accurate armor and clothing, combat techniques, and real-world castles recreated with the assistance of architects and historians. The game will also contain period music recorded by Czech masters that were taken note for note from medieval song books.

The development team includes developers that previously worked on Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven.

Tropes used in Kingdom Come: Deliverance include:
  • Big Badass Battle Sequence: The final game makes it possible for the protagonist to get involved in these, which also include castle sieges.
  • Creator Provincialism: The developers are Czech, and the game is set in 15th century Bohemia.
  • Deadly Decadent Court: There are corrupt and conniving nobles aplenty just as there are sympathetic ones.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: Given that Kingdom Come aims to be historically accurate, this is all but expected.
  • Disposable Bandits: Kingdom Come: Deliverance, like most open-world RPGs, features bandits the player can slaughter for gear and money early game. Taking on a whole camp directly isn't advised, even late game, but compared to the forces of the invading army they're easily disposed of.
  • Doomed Hometown: The game kicks off in one.
  • Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: While pushed primarily toward stealth, the design of A Woman's Lot pushes Teresea toward archery more than melee weapons for fighting. She has many chances to level up archery in her prologue, and she is never taught the critical ability to counter blows.
  • The Dung Ages: Averted. Life in those times may not be exactly comfortable by modern standards but it's not filth and hovels either.
  • Fantastic Racism: There are significant tensions between the Czechs and German-speaking settlers. Which is Truth in Television, given how what is now the Czech Republic had sizable German communities living alongside the Czechs for centuries until 1945.[1]
  • Fantasy Gun Control: The game is set in what will be in a mere 16 years the area of the Hussite Wars, where guns were common, and the in-game history codex admits there should be some kind of guns present, but they're entirely absent.
  • Flynning: Averted. The combat aims to be historically accurate.
  • For Want of a Nail: The game's suggested to invoke this, wondering whether one man's actions can decide the fate of an entire kingdom.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Almost anyone who appears in the prologue (and/or the alternate telling of it seen in A Woman's Lot) can be killed if the player is crafty enough and willing to grind their stealth up. This does nothing to stop these characters from appearing alive afterward.
    • Theresa can become a fairly strong warrior during A Woman's Lot if a player works for it, since her skills grow at exactly the same rate as Henry's. The main obstacle is that most of this DLC is relatively linear, and most enemies are relatively strong compared to her starting stats.
    • After "The Prey", the game says time has been skipped. All gameplay indications, including the in-game clock and item spoilage, clearly show it hasn't.
  • Grey and Gray Morality: In a similar vein to The Witcher, much of the conflict going on in-game is this.
  • Holy Roman Empire: As Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time, its presence looms in the background, especially in the form of German settlers and soldiers.
  • Kickstarter: Part of the game's development has come from crowdfunding.
  • Milestone Celebration: The developers marked the 700th birthday of Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
  • Politically-Correct History: Thoroughly averted, with Word of God even expressing how much the devs abhor this trope. The game's meant to portray Medieval Bohemia authentically, with all that implies. As a result, don't expect many female warriors or people of different ethnicity other than those who actually lived in Bohemia at that era.
  • Political Correctness Gone Mad: Defied. Vavra calmly refused to cave to pressure when social justice warriors and others tried stirring controversy regarding the lack of "people of color" in the game.
  • Prolonged Prologue: Large segments of the prologue were cut to be repurposed in the alternate telling that starts A Woman's Lot. The length of the prologue (which is either a tutorial or on-rails for most of it) is still frequently cited as one of the game's bigger faults.
  • Reality Ensues:
    • Simply waving a sword or spear around is a guaranteed way of dying early on.
    • The game in general tries to present 15th Century Bohemia as authentically as possible, with all the brutality and Values Dissonance that implies.
  • Retraux: The in-game overview map is designed to resemble a medieval manuscript page. While the music is taken virtually verbatim from Czech song books dating from that era.
  • Scenery Porn: The world of 15th Century Bohemia is as beautiful as it is brutal.
  • Shown Their Work: According to head developer Daniel Vavra, much effort was place on making the game as authentic to the period and place as much as possible.
  • Spiritual Successor: The game is this in a sense to Mount & Blade.
  • Storm the Castle: Castle sieges appear in a few plot events. With the castles themselves based extensively on their real-world counterparts as they would have looked in the 15th Century.
  • Succession Crisis: What helps set off the game. The old king is dead, and the new one's brother has decided to claim all Bohemia for himself.
  • Take Your Time: Despite the proceeding quest giving an explicit orders and time to start it after the proceeding quest is completed, starting "The Prey" can be put off for as long as you like. In-fact, it should be since it's very dangerous for its placement in the story and (bizarrely given an informed time skip) forces the player into a quest that is time sensitive when it's completed.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Despite being raised son of a swordsmith, Henry starts with no skill in repairing weapons. He also starts the game illiterate and needs to find a tutor to learn how to read.
  1. Particularly in the parts of Bohemia/Czechia historically known as Sudetenland.