Dungeons, but no dragons. Mazes, but no magic. Kingdom Come: Deliverance may remind you of open-world fantasy games of the Elder Scrolls variety, but this medieval adventure is not about wizened wizards, ancient curses, or sinister necromancy. Creative Director Dan Vávra from Warhorse Studios suggests that I think about Kingdom Come as "Braveheart the game, which means majestic castles, armored knights, large open fields, and political intrigue, set in a vast emergent world." It was clear early in the demo Vávra recently led me through that any ideas I had about arcane spellcasting and howling ghouls should give way to thoughts of a real landscape from the Holy Roman Empire.
Role-playing human history may not sound as delightful as playing a master of the magical arts when you first consider it. Is pretending to be Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace as fun as conjuring skeletons and zapping monsters with lightning summoned from the skies? I'm not yet sure just how fun Kingdom Come will be to play, but I don't doubt the depth Warhorse is digging out for it, or that it will give you the space to properly stretch. Expect to don period-accurate armor and clothing, learn actual combat and fencing techniques, and set course for real-world castles recreated in detail with the assistance of architects and historians. Take on a role such as warrior, bard, or thief, and direct your destiny using various skills and perks.
You even need to sleep and eat if you want to keep your strength up, and food will go bad if it sits in your inventory too long. There may be no balls of lightning to conjure, but these elements all seem like a good foundation for an expansive role-playing game. Vávra himself says, "We're trying to mix the freedom and mechanics of Skyrim, the setting of Mount & Blade, the storytelling of The Witcher, and the combat dynamics of Dark Souls in a single gorgeous package."
Even at this stage I can see Kingdom Come's 14th-century gorgeousness. As I watched the hero character make his way to a stone fortress upon a grassy hill in first-person view, I delighted in the density of the surrounding forest, and the credible way its trees of varying heights created a natural pattern. The path of stone, timber, and dirt looked well-trodden, as if thousands of men and horses had followed it. Later, when the hero interrupted a banquet in progress, I marveled at how flickering candles warmly illuminated the room's lush crimson wallpaper. And through it all, I was impressed by the expressive facial animations, which reminded me of those in Ryse: Son of Rome. As well they should: Kingdom Come: Deliverance is built upon CryEngine, the same technology that powers Crytek's Roman revenge tale.
Majestic castles, armored knights, large open fields, and political intrigue, set in a vast emergent world.
Of course, combining the best of all possible RPG worlds is no easy task, and a rather unrealistic goal at that. For instance, can Warhorse really create a lead character as fascinating as The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia? I don't know quite yet, but I can tell you a little bit about Kingdom Come's leading man. He's a young blacksmith whose village was burned to cinders by an invading army, and he was saved by a courageous young woman--the miller's daughter. Now, he has recovered from his injuries and sought out the feudal lord to repledge his service. The demo gave me no sense of this blacksmith's personality, and offered no hint of his struggles or passions. But at least he had something to do: investigate the crimes of the local bandits who had attacked the lord's stables and left both men and horses dead.
First things first, though. You can't go toe-to-toe with bandits without at least a little protection and a blade of some sort. As the hero headed to the local merchant, Vávra explained the workings of 15th-century society as interpreted by Kingdom Come. As in an Elder Scrolls game, characters all have places to live, and they go about their day-to-day lives. But that daily cycle will have a number of variations--hopefully enough that the game will avoid the rigidity of Skyrim citizens' clockwork behavior. Says Vávra, "If you try to mess up the poor people's lives, for example, if someone goes to the pub every evening and you kill the bartender, they won't be stuck or not know what to do. They will have a different routine, they will react to this event somehow, and everything should be very natural."
Vávra finished his explanation just in time for our hero to choose some armor, and for me to learn more about character customization. You can mix different types of armors in layers, using both chainmail, plate armor, and other types of material to provide protection against different types of weaponry. And of course, as the son of a blacksmith, you are adept at crafting and sharpening your own weapons, but be careful: you can actually damage your own sword if you're sloppy. Now, equipped with proper armor and armed with a newly sharpened sword, it was time to investigate the crime.
We're trying to mix the freedom and mechanics of Skyrim, the setting of Mount & Blade, the storytelling of The Witcher, and the combat dynamics of Dark Souls in a single gorgeous package.
Creative Director Dan Vávra
It stands to reason that a developer called Warhorse would feature warhorses in its flagship game, and venturing forward involved mounting a steed and trotting into the surrounding territory. You can fight your enemies on horseback and use your steed as a pack mule if you need additional inventory space, but warhorses are also competent combatants. Horses have their own AI, and Vávra compares equestrian behavior in Kingdom Come to that of Shadow of the Colossus, though at this stage, Kingdom Come's horses don't move with any of the elegance of SotC's Agro.
Getting to the stables took some time. Kingdom Come gives you a lot of space to traverse, but by the looks of it, a lot of that space is pretty but void of life. "Our goal is to not make the world as populated as in some other games, so there will not be a dungeon or a castle for 200 meters, or some fight or monster or something. We try to concentrate quests in hubs; in the city, there are several quest-givers, there are some quests around the city, and then you can move to some other location that is not so close. But on the way there, if you go from the main streets, you may find out something interesting, but it's not that easy to find. That's our goal."
I'm left wondering whether Kingdom Come will offer any notable exploration value, or if the vast landscape will go underutilized. I laud Warhorse for sticking so closely to their mission statement of authenticity, but if Vávra is right--if it isn't easy to find something of value off of the beaten path--then what's the point of crafting a vast world to begin with?
The quest did at least lead to something worth getting excited about: combat. Our hero approaches his target, and the two swordsmen fight. The first-person action is cut from the same cloth as games like Chivalry and War of the Roses. Controller prompts indicate chances to riposte, block, and punch your opponent, but the combat looks organic enough; it's certainly not a quick-time-event-driven mashfest. Oddly enough, the enemy soldier does not fall after a lunge that skewers him directly through the abdomen, and I notice that this encounter has been dragging along for some time without victory. I am not sure if this is a quirk of the build or a matter of game mechanics, though Vávra assures me that battles will involve more than one combatant, which comes as a relief. Without the otherworldly elements we typically associate with fantasy games, Kingdom Come needs other elements to convince me of its potential to be epic, and large-scale skirmishes might be the ticket.
The first-person action is cut from the same cloth as games like Chivalry and War of the Roses.
"We think that books and movies have changed," says Vávra, "and people grown up, and their heroes have evolved with them." The action heroes we know today were not the action heroes our grandparents knew, even if they went by the same names. "This is fantasy today," he continues. "I think that it doesn't need any comment, and we think the games are still in their adolescence. And we would like to change that." More lofty goals from a team that clearly believes in its ambitious project, which is due for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One sometime in 2015.
Vávra admits that Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a hard sell to publishers. After all, how big is the market for a fantasy game that isn't that fantastical? I'm willing to bet, however, that the Mount & Blade audience is ready to believe in this particularly down-to-earth fantasy. Kingdom Come may not feature any magic, but that doesn't mean it can't be magical.
Take a look at this trailer for Kingdom Come: Deliverance and hear from the game's creative director about the game, the people behind it, and why the game is on Kickstarter.
There's a special kind of fear that aliens can tap into. They are often unknown, unreasonable, and unrelenting. Many 4X strategy games are strongly tied to real events, people, and cultures in human history, but some of the best games in the genre are set in space against powerful and hostile alien races. Pandora: First Contact is one such game, and it takes heavy cues from games like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. While it is meant to be a respectful tribute, Pandora is laden with awful design choices and a confusing mishmash of old and new mechanics. The pieces that stand up are pulled directly from other, better games, and the original ideas aren't developed well enough to carry the experience.
Pandora: First Contact opens with a smattering of people desperate to find a new Earth after decades of environmental destruction. The most prosperous societies have each launched their own expeditions, loosely representative of several modern-day nations and ideologies. These groups form the different factions and have their own vaguely defined play styles ranging from brutal, polluting industry to hyper-religious zealotry. Unfortunately, while they are thematically distinct, none of the factions stand out. Besides how the diplomatic options are phrased, and a few starting bonuses, they are all more or less the same. In my games, playing as the super-scientific faction wasn't terribly different from playing as the environmentalists. All of the units are the same, and the victory conditions are far too limited for any of your decisions to have much of an effect. There really is only one correct play style: extreme aggression.
Pandora borrows heavily from the works of Sid Meier, but it's missing too many pieces.
Civilization has often been lauded for allowing you to seek scientific, cultural, military, or even diplomatic victory, and each of these routes is supported by an entire system of mechanics that help support that path. These systems connect with one another and can be attached or separated, giving you an enormous amount of freedom in how you play. Those choices are meaningful because they are symbolic; they represent different and distinct ideologies. Pandora, too, has "different" victory conditions, but none of them are well developed. There is a scientific victory that amounts to having 75 percent of all possible research items complete. To achieve military victory, you have to take control of over 75 percent of the planet's populace. Unfortunately, the mechanisms by which you accomplish these conditions are nearly identical, and there's virtually no way to stop a player who's nearing victory. The element of choice and the ability to consistently have any efficacy or agency in the game is totally subverted by this design.
The planet of Pandora is crawling with aliens when you first touch down, and it takes only a few turns for those forces to turn aggressive; unlike the barbarians from Civilization, these creatures are absolutely everywhere and are much, much stronger than any of your starting units. For example, a unit of marines has a starting combat strength of 2, while aliens range from 1 to 18, with 2 and 8 being the most common. How well you handle these early foes determines how much land and resources you have to work with in the mid to late game.
While it is meant to be a respectful tribute, Pandora is laden with awful design choices and a confusing mishmash of old and new mechanics.
Sadly, ignoring them isn't an option. Even if you never attack the aliens or show any sign of aggression, at a certain point they begin attacking you. Expanding and fortifying your armies, and then raiding alien hives for their massive cash reserves is the only way to play. Any land you don't grab for yourself is land a future opponent will use against you, and any aliens you don't kill feed the resources and experience of your rivals. This design choice forces the game into a two-stage system. The first stage is rapid expansion and extreme brutality against the indigenous aliens, and the second stage is focused more on developing the land you've claimed and steadily pushing back against enemies. While the first stage might be frustratingly limited, the second is fundamentally broken.
In better-designed 4X games, much of the mid- to late-game conflict stems from resource scarcity. You need a specific plot of land that an opponent has; this causes conflict, which then buttresses the final stages of a match. In Pandora, land is certainly important, but expansion is agonizingly slow. Even on the fastest setting, with the exception of a handful of rare tiles, there's absolutely no scarcity. Aside from mountains, just about every tile can be converted into every other kind, and they don't carry the bottlenecking effect that's common in other games. Without scarcity, there's very little to fight over, and the monotony of expansion across hundreds of same-y tiles wears down to tedium very quickly.
Classic sci-fi homage.
In place of a varied and interesting landscape, Pandora has a fairly robust unit upgrade and operations system. As you progress technologically, you have access to a wider variety of weapons and equipment for your various units. For example, initially your legions of marines only have access to their basic machine guns, but once you develop the flamethrower, you can bring marines back to a city to refit them with the latest gadgets. This is typically done for a significant cost, though, and can become overwhelmingly expensive when upgrading masses of units. Additionally, at each new stage of technological development, you also gain access to advanced versions of every unit. The colonial marine, your bread and butter, later becomes the assault trooper. After you've unlocked the next stage, it's often more practical to simply send your old units to their death at the hands of a foe and just start production on the next batch of souped-up soldiers
To cut down on some of the banality of this cycle of production-upgrade-sacrifice, you can set your cities to crank out new units with the upgraded tech. This costs extra production time, but typically that's much easier to manage than trying to purchase all of the upgrades outright. Unfortunately, there's no system or mechanic allowing for the retrofitting of old units with new gear via production capacity, nor is there any way to take an old unit and make it into one of the newer variety. This is probably intended to be balanced by the experience system, which can dramatically enhance the combat effectiveness of older troops, but that loses relevance in the mid to late game because of operations.
Without scarcity, there's very little to fight over.
Operations can range from nuclear strikes and satellite scans to field training missions. They are produced much like standard units but are immediately consumed upon use. These field training missions are ridiculously cheap, particularly in the late game, and I often had one city of mine constantly producing them. After I finished a new batch of troops, I'd march them all to my most forward base, dump 10 field training missions on them to max out their level, and then let them heal up for two or three turns before marching out my legions of tanks, airplanes, and marines to conquer whatever stood in their way. It's much faster and less risky than trying to naturally level up fresh recruits, and it always ensured that my warriors would be at the top of their game.
At the end of the day, unit management is bogged down by a plethora of underutilized mechanics. Instead of adding to the gameplay, they simply encourage you to abuse other systems to circumvent the poorly designed interface. That seems to be par for the course for Pandora. There are a lot of neat ideas here, but none of them pan out. The game's creators clearly adore 4X strategy games in general, and Alpha Centauri specifically, is clear here, but Pandora: First Contact is not a proper tribute. I want to love Pandora, I really do, but nostalgia can't fix a game that doesn't work even at the most basic level.
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