Kingdom Come Deliverance 2was one of the highlights of Gamescom 2024—we rejoin Henry on his continued quest from the first game, although the developer leading the session was keen to stress that you don’t actually need to play the first game to enjoy the second one. “We’ll include a quick roundup of the events of the first game,” he tells me, which strikes me as a bit odd. For anyone that’s played the original, you’ll know that a lot of stuff happens… around 40 hours of stuff, in fact.
Which also leads into the news that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is about twice the size of the first game, approaching 100 hours of content across the main story and its sprawling side quests. If the demo I played at Gamescom is anything to go by, these sidequests are also far more than just ‘go here’, ‘get that’, or ‘rescue this farmer’s goat.’
Henry is accosted in the street by a swaggering German swordmaster and immediately the two begin fighting. The developer leading the session tells us to please fight the man, rather than walk away or ‘remain silent’, as Kingdom Come has a lot of branching narrative options that would’ve spoiled our demo if we’d chosen a different path. Their duel is interrupted by the local swordmaster guild who promptly tell us off for swashbuckling on their turf.
Rather than get too downbeat about this, Henry saves the day with some quick persuasion techniques, before you and the swordmaster retreat to a local tavern to plan your next move. Henry is going to steal the guild’s sacred sword. It’s a stealth mission. Everyone’s favourite, and definitely the best kind of mission to show off a game with such cool fighting mechanics. As expected, my stealth skills were lacking and my brain barely functioning—this was the last day of Gamescom after all—and the events unfurled poorly.
Henry blunders into the guild house, stumbles around knocking things over, then manages to get upstairs, where he is spotted by the leader of the swordmaster guild and chased down the street. At the gate he finds a horse, which he steals from the stables, and then rides off into the countryside. It was pretty good timing, really, as the demo was coming to the end, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to find at the end of the road. Likely something I wasn’t meant to see.
The entire side quest had full voice acting, multiple choices to make, and probably a more interesting ending if you actually managed to successfully steal the sword. It’s the sort of quest that gets you hooked for 40 minutes and makes you forget what the hell you were meant to be doing in the first place. Immersion is the aim of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and the detail of the city streets was only slightly marred by the wooden movements of some of the NPCs. Otherwise, it really does transport you to 15th century Bohemia.
I spent a lot of my hour playing just wandering around the city. I knew I was meant to get on with the quest and see how it all played out, but an open door here, or a staircase up to the walls over there, and I just had to see what I could find. I imagine it’s in this exploration that side quests will reveal themselves to you, but I’d explore just for the vistas over wheat fields or the hidden rooms underneath a church.
If you enjoyed the first game and just want more of Henry and co having an adventure through a not-often explored period of history, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is more of the same—a lot more of the same.
