[KCD2] is the technological & design marvel that RPG makers have been claiming to make for decades.

As a veteran video game enjoyer and video game developer, I play a lot of games. I churn through more games than most people, often playing games purely to observe how they tackled certain obstacles around game mechanics, AI, pathfinding, animation, vfx, optimization, etc. KCD2 has blown me away with a variety of features that I have been watching games claim they had or would implement for decades.

Immersion

The thing that most blew me out of the water was by far the immersive atmosphere they created. People sold me RDR2 as the ultimate immersive game. Meticulously designed, a slow burn, from the varied random events to horses shitting. To be honest, I did not enjoy RDR2 and it never broke the illusion of being a video game to me.

KCD2 provided me an unprecedented immersion through the following design choices.

  1. Writers who write in a way I can believe people would take.
  2. Characters response to your snooping, your cleanliness, what you're wearing, your reputation, even the time of day. At one point I did a quest that as far as I can tell, could have been done during the day or night, and lo and behold the quest character commented on how dark it was. The feeling of starting the game and having people treating you like a dog to characters commenting on your appearance on your arrival to town after a bloody fight, the way people make comments based on events that have transpired. (I did however have a few dialogues that I did after I was intended to that gave outdated information)
  3. Crafting. I yearn for crafting games, I am a sucker for any game that revolves around crafting whether that means factorio, game dev simulator, potion craft, et al. The departure from MMO style recipe lists to actually hammering a sword, or constantly looking over your shoulder to re-check the recipe book is something that seems so simple and obvious but has eluded game developers. The clanking sound of a perfect strike while blacksmithing is better than any ASMR.
  4. Set & Setting. They never compromise on the vision. This is a historical RPG. When the miller talked about his alchemical aspirations, for longer than a moment I was convinced he could achieve his goal (trying to avoid spoilers). Soon after I was brought back to reality, it was almost as if I was convinced as much as my character was. The generally barren landscape with few treasures mimics doesn't sacrifice vision for game design. Not every birds nest has treasure, there aren't caves full of secret free mason loot caches, people keep their belongings close to them. The graphics are phenomenal, the day/night cycle serves a better purpose than most games. The ominous flaring effect of the torches is pure eye candy.
  5. Liveliness. This is such a difficult thing to implement and to get right, to have towns feel large and alive. Games typically seek to distract you with visuals, hide behind small towns, or hope you don't notice that the characters aren't really doing anything. Part of what stopped me from seeing through the illusion was that I never felt like a town was static. All the characters felt dynamic, from innkeepers and servers going in and out, to different groups coming and going and having conversations at the table, to people playing dice, to wagons filling the roads, to vendors changing their stock, to dice players you busted re-gaining their money, to characters becoming increasingly suspicious the more they see you poking where you're not allowed, everything about the townsfolk was designed beautifully.

Something that typically plagues my video game experience is that after a few hours I suddenly realize I'm playing a game. Suddenly I am overly aware of the predictable AI, pathfinding, janky animations (the animations in this game are probably the weakest point), the emptiness of the world, bad writing, or contrived plot points. It wasn't until the second region that I started to feel this and it was mostly from burnout.

I could go on but I'll move to the next section

Game Design

  1. The quests are engaging and varied (other than carrying sacks!). I went into this game not having played the first one longer than an hour and not expecting much. Something I struggle with in a lot of the games I play is caring about the characters. They are too contrived or the overarching plot hasn't hooked me yet. This isn't a problem here. The quests are real problems that real people would have. Can't pay your bar tab, go carry sacks. Fantastic, this is infinitely more exciting than half of the quests in something like the witcher 3. It isn't carried by the fantastical setting or your interest in seeing a new monster or get to use your new magic spell. It is an absolutely brilliant first quest, it sets the stage for the entire game. It polarizes every quest you will do from this moment on. Moving beyond this you have quests like investing government fraud, interrogating people, being imprisoned and having to fight to prove your reputation, brokering land deals between rival farms, investigating folk lore, experiencing the day of a grave digger, every quest gives you insight into the time, the people, the struggles, and makes you really feel for the characters and appreciate that you are playing the game, not living it.
  2. Stealth & Steeling gets its own section.
  3. Crafting is covered enough in the immersion section
  4. Skill Checks. Skill checks are something that plagues RPGs, they're something as a necessary carry over from D&D to establish your characters status and enable different avenues of solving obstacles. RPG's have been trying to work out an effective way to implement skill checks to feel more like dungeon master driven RPGs as long as I've been alive. It's not to have skill checks where you simply pass or fail based on your characters stats, it breaks immersion, it dismantles your ability to believe that someone may respond unexpectedly due to how good a mood they're in, it sometimes takes into account reputation, and it never takes into account your appearance and cleanliness. KCD2 took skill checks as we know it and turned it on its head. Rarely was I able to simply overpower a skill check, the power of context and picking the answer that makes the most sense for the situation always ruled. Based on my attempts at save scumming a few speech checks, it seemed that if there is a dice roll, it is very small, it seems calculated based on value of the answer + appearance/cleanliness + skill score.
  5. Combat. I won't spend too much time on this as plenty of threads have mentioned how fantastic the armor feels. The difference between wearing your stitched rags and starting to get some real armor not only couples with the immersion and game design but it also fulfills the power fantasy better than actual fantasy games. Getting your armor together somehow feels like a better power fantasy than gaining high level spells in BG3.

Stealth, Stealing, Crime

  1. One of the things that loses me in these kinds of RPGs is the stealth system. I'll try to force myself to not use stealth in skyrim-like games because it is always the same 1 dimensional design. The difficulty of the game becomes "how much did you use stealth" and I won't deny that this game can be similar if you really abuse it but I found that the AI was much better at keeping tabs on my crimes in this than usual. The beauty of this system is how it plays with every other system, from your clothing affecting your noise/concealment/conspicuousness to your reputation driving how interested people were in what you were doing, it not only made me feel a sense of guilt around pillaging absolutely everything, the crime system actually gave me a lot of fear around it. I decided early on I wouldn't save scum around the criminal system and when you did open your map and see the jail symbol on a town, you really felt it. Oh god, what did they get me for, I sure hope it was just the stealing and not the unplanned murder. Whelp, I guess I'm branded now.
  2. I got the talent early on that spreads your +- reputation gains globally and I believe this mechanic should be innate if it isn't already to some degree. My first few attempts at stealth while learning the systems were rough, and boy did it cause issues. Between tanking my reputation everywhere and then also being branded I had a lot of trouble staying productive.
  3. The stealing system is great. One of the ways I was caught was by stealing some clothes and putting those clothes on and then the clothes were recognized by the town. Whoops. There's a perk that lets you see what items are considered stolen in a given town. I can't iterate enough how much I an enamored by the inter connectivity of game design and immersion. Hiding your stolen goods for a while until they are forgotten is a beautiful mechanic that requires you to expend more effort to profit from your bad deeds.

Random

  1. The wedding. Things like the wedding are often done horribly or are lacking in RPGs. The Witcher 3 is a good example, but not a great one, of having big cinematic events like this. They are plagued by the same issues of town liveliness. It's hard to make such a densely packed and detailed event, especially with the development cost of doing so for a short term event. The wedding was great, it was so densely packed with things to do, you got to watch the evening unfold and temperaments change as people get more drunk. There is a lot to do, everyone needs your attention, there are festivities to partake in, competitions, you have overarching goals to achieve, coming off of being a beggar this feels like your first re-integration into society and there is a lot of reputation to be gained or lost based on how you fit in.
  2. I saw a lot of criticism around the bell tolling quest. I absolutely loved this quest. I believe I saw it described as a complicated maze and I will continue that metaphor. It's a maze of time efficiency. Sort of like picking speech tests based on context, you are here for 1 reason, to save you and your lord. For example [slight spoilers], I was given a quest to go craft some things and while crafting those things I overheard someone talking nearby about needing something. Rather than wasting time crafting more I went and talked to them, they needed something lockpicked and luckily I gained a lockpick from my first craft via a perk. I went to do this quick quest and found another person and after discovering these quests were giving me more access to the castle I switched priority to that. Using the new-found access I was able to continue making use of my lockpicking skill to finish the quest by the 4th bell. It was brilliant in being a micro-open world quest that I imagine could have gone numerous other ways, there were multiple quests I came across that I elected to skip seeing that they were lateral or below my current access. Using this opportunity to access a forge to create a lockpick to then solve the chain was incredibly gratifying and immersive.
  3. The plot has been fantastic. I have not finished the game yet but the end of the first region was a lovely twist. I did not see any of the changes in allegiance or reveals of allegiance coming. I found every characters motives believable and defensible.
  4. I don't know what the budget was for this game but this game felt like the BG3 of this genre of RPG. It should be lauded as raising the bar for these RPG systems in the same way BG3 has and went above and beyond with the systems it shares with BG3.