In an effort to create an immersive version of medieval Bohemia, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 goes all-in on down-and-dirty detail. Sometimes that’s historically motivated, like the need to carry a torch at night lest guards think you’re up to devilish deeds in the dark. Other choices are there to make you think more rigorously about the game mechanics you tend to take for granted in other games, like sword fighting, which is reimagined here as a taxing directional dance. Still others, including the groups of people you meet and the languages they speak, are included in an attempt to faithfully represent the world and its varied cultures.
As much as I respect this approach, and as much as I’m enjoying KCD2, medieval Bohemia is just not my favorite place to hang out. I like the way the game brings it to life, but I would rather see so many other eras brought to life in this level of detail. Like, how about the future?
Interestingly enough, the game that comes the closest is Bloober Team’s Observer, which takes place in a cyberpunk version of Krakow, Poland — not far from Bohemia.
Fiddling In The Future
The joy of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is how its focus on small details ends up having big emotional payoffs. When crafting a simple potion is a labor-intensive process, pulling it off well feels satisfying in a way you won’t feel in games with simpler crafting mechanics.
It makes me think that a skilled developer could craft something just as detail-oriented and immersive, but set in a grimy future. Like the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it could be a more modestly scaled game, aiming for cyberpunk vibes without Cyberpunk’s scope. Give me a couple dense blocks of mega-city and let me go wild.
Let me hack into mainframes in a way that considers the physicality of the technology, rather than abstracting the process. Hacking is a reliably fun minigame in open-world games — Star Wars Outlaws‘ Wordle-inspired break-ins are a particularly good recent example — but they rarely have anything to do with the object you’re supposed to be cracking.
I’m thinking of something more in the vein of No Code’s Stories Untold and Observation, games where the make of the tech is a key part of the storytelling. In both of those games, you need to take time to get to grips with each new piece of technology they put in front of you, and rarely get help in the form of tutorialization. You just have to sort of fiddle with each PC or security camera or microfiche machine until you begin to understand it.
No, that’s not a typo. Observer and Observation are indeed two different games.
Tactile Design Isn’t Limited To The Past
KCD2 has plenty of tutorialization and illustrated guides to read through, but its approach is similarly driven by the objects you are interacting with in-world. You put sacks of herbs on your shelves and scoop handfuls of them into a bowl to grind them down with a pestle. You take baths so that people won’t think you’re disgusting and low class. You get arrested if you sleep in someone else’s bed. It’s a borderline fetishistic approach to realism, sure, but why shouldn’t a game be extremely devoted to the thing it wants to be?
I want to do that in 2085. Fiddling with my flying car’s gear shift. Mashing my cricket ration into a gloopy paste before ripping open a packet of chicken flavoring. Thunking wires into a client’s head so they can jack into a synthetic dream. Pressing right on the thumbstick to position my vibroblades to block an opponent’s laser ninja stars. Okay, this is a real amalgam of sci-fi tropes and they probably wouldn’t all work together in one game. But I want to see that degree of verisimilitude devoted to an imagined future, not just a distant past.
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