Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Aww come on man. I got a kick out of the “African American” part, considering there was no America in that time period. I thought it was clever.

I’d be impressed if that much thought had gone into it, but given that they have simply blackfaced a white character I have my doubts.

It’s also a clever jab at how most of the media views about “diversity” reflect only American values, which effectively means there’s no real cultural diversity - only different hues of “American”.

…I thought that was the point? They were in several ways illuminating the lack of intellectual or moral rigour in some of the clamours for ‘diversity’, in this case that people wanted a ‘token black’.

The ‘token black’ trope is that of a lazy stereotype hastily thrown in to render something immune to criticism on lacking diversity.

I wish I could believe a troll was capable of that level of satire and wasn’t just being a dick for the sake of being a dick.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt given that he has the intellectual capacity to know or figure out how to replace textures in a video game.

Isn’t a variant of the trope that of an already created character who is hastily cast with a black actor?

I.e. blackfacing a character.

I understand what the author was trying to say (I think), but it is a jarringly bad representation of theories of history.

It wasn’t a review that I would expect to make it into an academic journal, certainly, but it is way more sophisticated than what you usually see written on or about historical videogames.

You picked up a bit of a straw man there too, like comparing bleeding with leeches to penicillin as a treatment for appendicitis. A more nuanced choice would have been to contrapose E. O. Wilson and S. J. Gould.

I don’t know enough about Wilson vs. Gould to tell if it would have been appropriate (my understanding is that Gould argued against Wilson’s theories, but that the signature theories of each of them are currently well-respected). My point was that a) the Great Man theory is not something serious historians currently credit, even if it lives on in some veins of popular culture, and b) social history is not really about seeing the world through the eyes of a single “peasant” who plays an important but invisible role in key events (that’s just Great Man with a more-inclusive view of who the great men can be), it’s about seeing the world through the lens of broad forces like economics, shared myths, cultural conflicts, and so on.

So this a demanding title? Anyone playing it ultra-wide on a 1070 by any chance…?

This loading differential seems baffling. Two minutes on PS4 to reach the main menu, but 1 second on PC SSD?

I agree with you to a point: Warhorse chose a vertical slice of that kaleidoscopic depiction of the Lower Middle Ages, and it is a partial one. That was their artistic license on the subject matter. I respect that.

I don’t agree with discarding it as just another take on the Great Man theory. Any choice of POV for a first-person videogame like this would have been “partial”. Having an immersive game like KCD but where the POV would be shifting between a diverse cast of characters would be great, indeed. Dragon Age 2 did that, but in a Fantasy setting… I didn’t love any of the Dragon Ages, but I think DA2 will be probably the one we will remember of the three in 20 years time, and because of that.

All of those forces are depicted very realistically in the game (just from one POV):

  • Cultural tension between Slavs and Germans, European and Asian peoples
  • Religious tensions that outline the impending Hussite religious movement and the Reformation
  • The way the world reacts to you changes as the NPCs perceive your economic status
  • The tension between the chivalric ideals and the realities of the world is right there
  • The verities of Feudalism are put on the table for everyone to inspect and a stark reminder of the reasons to develop universally applicable Bill of Rights

I think all that is a valuable contribution, and I am finding myself to appreciate the game more because of this than because of the actual gameplay (which I find very compelling, btw). Beyond the mini-games, there’s also the meta-game, which is to decide how to deal with those forces.

Yo mike, I think you are vehemently agreeing with him, as he said the player character is a nobody, making the case that this puts the game on the social-history side of things.

I agree with everything you just wrote - my criticism was of the article author’s jarring misrepresentation of history as a discipline, not with the game’s take on history. I mean, in a video game you are going to play as one person and that one person is going to have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of events in the game. It would be really cool to see a game that tried to explore the idea of social history (or cultural history) and push you into specific courses of action because the broader forces at play make that your only good option, but it’s not clear if that concept would come across in any real sense unless you could play the same situation again with different social forces at work.

The game can be a good depiction of history while still focusing on one person’s journey, but it isn’t social history just because the main character isn’t a king, and there is no Great Man vs. social history debate going on - that’s a 19th century conflict that’s long since been settled.

You just outlined there and awesome game concept @ravenight - there seems to be an audience interested in historically immersive games.

\o @schurem @ravenight was kind enough to expose again his point and this time I got it. Cheers guys!

Less a game than an interactive documentary, but this is worthy of including in this thread because:

a- it’s raison d’etre is historical
b-it’s also Czech.

I’m sensing a new hot/big thing in gaming, with KCD being “historical,” (quoted here to illustrate historical being used in the marketing, not questioning the authenticity of the history presented…) and ditto Asscreed.

More bugs in action:

@ravenight is pretty much correct in terms of history as a discipline; no one follows Carlyle any more and social history is complex. Whether that’s here or there is for anyone to decide on their own I suppose.

Every RPG pretty much is a “Great Man” theory in action. Hell, D&D was explicitly created with that in mind, with the player characters being exceptional actors who could affect the course of history, etc. while everyone else but the people they fought were pretty much powerless.

Question: is the game open like Skyrim where you can just ignore the main quests and go exploring, improving yourself or it it much more tightly linked to actually playing through the story?

You can do whatever quite a bit, though some things are timed. Like if you wander off in the middle of a mission for days, expect to get your ass chewed for being AWOL.