Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Roundtable (with Tom Bissell, Liam McIntyre, & Matthew Seiji Burns)

Kirk hosts a roundtable discussion of Medieval Peasant Simulator 2025.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Hello, everyone. Kirk here, as promised, with a special bonus episode for you all, a Thanksgiving treat. A little while back on the show, I mentioned that I had been playing and loving a role-playing game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. A bunch of people had written in over the course of the year to tell me that I should play this game, that I would love it, saying that it was just the kind of grounded, narratively complex, and frictional game that I'm always saying I like. I finally listened to them, I installed it, and I quickly fell in love with it. I found myself falling under this game's weird spell. So thanks to everyone who recommended that I play this game. As I was playing, I was talking with my friends Tom Bissell and Matthew Seiji Burns, two writers I've known for a long time, each of whom had also been playing the game.

• 0:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Tom, many of you will know, he's an author, a literature critic, he's a video game writer, he's written now and everything from Uncharted 4 to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter to Gears of War. Lately, he's been working in TV more, and he wrote the final three episodes of the tremendous second season of Star Wars Andor. We actually had him on TripleClick just recently to talk about that show. Matthew, meanwhile, will also be familiar to longtime listeners. He's been, I guess, on the show many times, going back to the split-screen days. He worked in various development roles at big studios in the 2000s and 2010s. He worked on series like Halo and Call of Duty before joining Zachtronics, where he wrote and continues to write music and did narrative design and writing

• 1:28Kirk Hamilton?

  for a number of those terrific games, those machine-building puzzle games that they make at Zachtronics. He also wrote and directed the visual novel Eliza, which is great and kind of predated ChatGPT, but it's all about AI-driven therapy, and it's really more relevant than ever today. It'd be a great one to play, I think, really thought-provoking, and just a really nice game. Matthew's recent novel Process is also really cool. It was my one more thing recently, and I really enjoyed that book. So I was playing this game. I was talking with these two guys and I realized that I really wanted to talk about this game on TripleClick in a substantive way, like have an actual conversation about it, not just rant about how it's really cool for a while during a one more thing. It's just such an unusual and interesting game.

• 2:12Kirk Hamilton?

  It demands conversation. There's so much to talk about. And sometimes this just happens on TripleClick. You know, one of us gets into a game and the other two hosts just don't have time for it, or they're not interested, or whatever. And that's fine. I mean, that happens. It's not like we're gonna start making episodes like this all the time. This is just kind of one of those stars aligning kind of situations where Tom and I were chatting and we kind of just came up with the idea of, hey, why don't we just record something ourselves with Matthew, talking about this game? And then Tom said, oh, you know what? You should have my friend Liam on as well. He and I played through the game together. He's really funny. He'll be a great guest. And I'm like, huh, Liam? Okay, who's Liam? And he says, oh, Liam McIntyre, the actor. And I'm like, oh, okay. So Liam McIntyre

• 2:54Kirk Hamilton?

  is a well-known actor. He played the lead in Spartacus Vengeance. He's been on TV. He's in a lot of video games and animation. He does a lot of voice work. You'll hear why he gets hired for a lot of voice work the minute he starts talking. And he'll actually be playing Logan himself in Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game. So I said, sure, that sounds great. I'd love to know what Wolverine thinks of this game. So the four of us hopped on a Zoom call and had the conversation you're about to hear.

• 3:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Now, what is this game? Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 came out earlier this year. It was developed by the Czech studio Warhorse Games. It's already been a big success. Per Warhorse, it has sold 4 million copies as of November. It is dedicated to an unusually grounded story set in 15th century Bohemia, which was the name of the region of Europe that we now know as the Czech Republic. You play as Henry of Skalitz, the same character from the first game, a squire and bodyguard to Hans Capon of Perchstein, an annoying and occasionally annoyingly charming noble.

• 3:55Kirk Hamilton?

  The two of them are on a diplomatic mission that quickly goes incredibly wrong. After the prologue, you will find yourself naked and penniless with only your wits to get by, but then, over the course of the next many dozens and dozens of hours, you'll build Henry up to be a master swordsman, famous blacksmith, a spy, a thief, and a diplomat who plays an integral role in a series of increasingly complex conflicts between the regional lords and the forces of two boring kings: the current rightful king, Wenceslas the Fourth, to whom Henry and Hans are loyal, and the Hungarian Sigismund of Luxembourg, also known as Sigismund the Userper. Both of those kings, of course, real people. This whole thing really happened. The backdrop is real, even if some of the specific characters are amalgams or are fictionalized.

• 4:42Kirk Hamilton?

  As for the gameplay, it is a first-person action RPG. It feels a little bit like Skyrim, just in the basic movement, the way the world is all simulated. It's a little bit like Red Dead Redemption 2 in its groundedness, its slowness, its dedication to historical realism. And it's a bit like The Witcher 3 in its massive script, its sprawling and ambitious story, and the constantly surprising side quests. They never go where you're expecting. There's always some new complication, and each of them is very well-written and entertaining. All right, that is enough from me. Before we get started, I want to play my three temporary co-hosts introducing themselves, just so you can know who each guy is, though they all sound very different. And I do want to note that Tom recorded on AirPods, because

• 5:25Kirk Hamilton?

  that's what he had, so his vocal quality isn't quite on the level. And actually, if you compare the way that his recording sounds to Liam's recording, you could see just what a difference it makes if you have a really great microphone, and also if your voice sounds like Liam McIntyre's.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm Liam McIntyre. This is Tom Bissell.

• 5:43Kirk Hamilton?

  And this is Matthew Sagey Burns. All right. With that, let's get into our conversation about Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

• 5:54Kirk Hamilton?

  All right, guys. Welcome to this special episode of Triple Click. I'm so excited that you're all here and I'm very excited to talk with you about this game.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Excited to be here as well. This is the most absolutely not so game that I've probably ever played in like probably about 50 years. Well, not maybe not that many years, but a while.

• 6:09Kirk Hamilton?

  So Tom, you and Liam played this game together. Can you just describe to listeners a little bit how you played it? Because like Matthew and I played it like normal people hunched over a computer in the darkness alone, but the two of you actually played together. How did that work?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  I had heard a lot about how wonderful the game was. I think I watched Scale Up's review and I tried the first Kingdom Come. I'd heard it was weird. I heard it was very obtuse and kind of hard to get used to and I bounced off the first one real hard. But the Scale Up review I watched and I thought, okay, this sounds pretty interesting. So I proposed it to Liam. Liam and I kind of have a running date where, you know, once or twice a month, he comes over and we play something till three in the morning. And we fired up Kingdom Come. And I remember we were like, this is kind of remarkably interesting and really strange. It doesn't feel like anything. I think the joke we made is that if you thought Red Dead Redemption 2 was too fast paced, this is the game to

• 7:07Speaker 02

  really go to. And we, Liam, back me up. We kind of hated it at first.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  It was aggressively what it was. Like, I don't think I've ever played a game that was so unabashedly like, you're getting this experience no matter what. There is no amount of playtesting that we will do that will change our mind. It was just, look, I haven't played a game like this since Control, where for the first two weeks of playing Control, I actively hated it, every moment of it. I started playing it off and on and I was like, I can't, I just stop playing this. I hate this, until it magically clicked at some point. And this was the same, Tom and I, we'd set up these times to play the game and then, so we'd sit down, we'd play it for 30 minutes. You would walk endlessly through a forest. Nothing would happen. You would see an encampment and you're like, oh, I

• 7:58Speaker 01

  know how RPGs work. Let's run to that. It's an empty encampment. There must be a quest. There's no quest. Why are we doing this to ourselves? And we did that for way too long and we interchangeably, we'd be like, we gotta try something else. And we'd go to like Power Wash Simulator or something. And then inevitably, it was so committed to itself. Once you started to invest, the sunk cost became, you know, enriching and it became better and better and better the longer you invested in it.

• 8:28Kirk Hamilton?

  A rare case of the sunk cost fallacy, helping you discover something wonderful.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  The same thing happened to me. I like, I almost quit as well. And the only reason I stuck to it was because Tom told me that I should, that I should keep playing.

• 8:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  But it was like that opening, it's like, it's, I was like, am I watching a Kojima game? It is just, it's just, it's talking at you for like 20 minute blocks at a time. And then, isn't that first mission where you really get to do something, you just pick up a bunch of flour or something similar and walk it into like a storage claw? And you're like, okay, here we go. And there's like, all right, thanks for that. Here's 20 more minutes of like backstory. And you're like, wait, whoa, that was it? Unbelievably like incredibly brave way to start a game.

• 9:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that is definitely true. This is a very unusual game. I think anyone listening to this, I'm guessing that a lot of people listening to this will already know what this game is, what Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is. At the same time, I think we could probably explain it a little bit, aside from just it is a historical medieval role playing game. So I thought one way that we might do that would be to each tell like a specific story of something that illustrates how unusual this game is. And I'll start, this was something fairly early on in the game. You two are describing, or all three of you actually are describing these like incredibly, the period of the game where you have like nothing, you're naked, you're running around in the woods, you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing, which can go on for a very long time, depending on how directed you are and how

• 9:56Kirk Hamilton?

  fast you are about like going and talking to the blacksmith who gives you a place to sleep and gives you some clothes, or just wandering around in the woods, which I did for a while. But um, once you kind of get going, especially with the blacksmith, who is one of the kind of main quest givers you go to talk to, he gives you somewhere to sleep, he kind of gives you a job, you get a little bit started. And then an early quest that he gives you has you going to another town, you kind of talk to the officials of that town. And I, I went and did this, this was a kind of standard side quest for this kind of a game. I talked to them and they say to me, okay, we're going to go out and we're going to figure out where this crashed down wagon is, and we're going to find these guys that went missing. We can't ride out now, so we're going to ride out in the morning.

• 10:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Come find us and then we'll go. So then I think, okay, cool. Great. And then I go off and do seven other things and play for another few hours. And then I come back and the guys are sitting there. And I'm like, hey, all right, can we go? And they say, we already went. Why didn't you show up? You know, we got up early in the morning. We were gonna go check it out. And you weren't there. So we went and did it. And then they explained to me the entire rest of the quest as it would have happened if I had been there. And I realized like, oh, so with side quests of this game, if they tell me to do something on a timeframe, I have to do it. You would think I would have learned, but then actually, multiple times in this game, that has still gotten me where I'm supposed to go find something and I'm too late and someone finds it before me, because time matters in this game in a way that I didn't realize. So that is my one unusual thing from this game.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  I haven't experienced this personally, but I was reading some other people's experiences of the game. And one thing I didn't even consider was like, there's different points in the game where you have to have like a charisma off with someone, where you know, someone you've got to embarrass people, or whatever it might be, or like try to show off in front of people. And apparently, you can, you know, you can, you'd poison their food the night before, and then the next day, they will be incapacitated and not show up themselves, or, you know, steal their clothes and they'll have nothing to wear. And I was like, that's, oh, my God, you can do that? That's mad.

• 11:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Someone was saying you can poison, I believe you can poison a horse's food, like you can poison an apple and feed it to a horse, and it makes the horse die. Am I right? I might be making that up.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Sounds right.

• 12:08Kirk Hamilton?

  It's the kind of thing that is at least possible in this game.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  I think for me, it was the mission where you have to give someone diarrhea to beat them in a horse race.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  When I thought, okay, this is pretty special. And I remember early, there was a mission where it seemed like pretty straightforward, go get something and bring it back. But somewhere along the way, I was offered a kind of side hustle. And I don't, forgive me for not remembering the particulars, it was a while ago that I played this. But I remember there was some side hustle that came up, and I wound up completing the mission in what felt like a pretty unusual way. And when I came back to the quest giver, they talked about The unusual way that I completed it. And then I remember just thinking, oh, my God, like it it knows when you don't fulfill a mission under the traditional auspices of mission fulfillment. And then it knows to comment on it.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  And then it's it's it's got enough variety in the actual script where it's able to to to roughly guess. You know, not only did you do it in an unorthodox way, it it it it hints at the way you accomplished it. And I remember thinking, oh, boy, this feels like a game. It's really worth digging into and messing with. And and I wound up poisoning a lot of people's horses. I was I would sneak into an enemy camp that I couldn't beat traditionally while they were all asleep. And I'd poison their wine jug. And then I'd just go crouch in the woods and wait and watch them wake up in the morning, have their morning wine. And then they'd all pass out. And then I would come kill them all.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  It was like it it it just doesn't operate like any other game I've ever played.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Hmm. Matthew, how about you? Yeah, it's so reactive in that way that you were just talking about, Tom. And and people will comment on you as you as you walk by, what what status you are as well. And so the thing that I'll always that that happened to me throughout my playthrough is that when you take a bath or use any kind of bath house services, it just automatically takes all your clothes off. And then it doesn't really tell you that it does this. So you're like, oh, thanks, thanks for the bath, you know? And you run outside and you start running through town or running through the woods. And then you'll be walking through a village and somebody will be like, hey, you should put some clothes on. Like, what are you doing? And you'll go to your inventory and you'll be like, oh, that's right. I forgot I I forgot that like when I take a bath, it just takes your clothes off.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  And it doesn't really remind you it just it just like. Is kind of a joke, I think, maybe on the part of the developers that you have to like, remember to do these kinds of things. I was telling Kirk that that happened to me and Kirk said, "Well, I always remember to put my clothes back on after that."

• 14:52Kirk Hamilton?

  I shouldn't overstate that. I do forget sometimes, actually. I fall for it sometimes and realize that I'm walking around in a towel.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  We just had that thing as we played last night where we were walking around and we accidentally drew a sword and went up to like a tree or just a person wandering around the roads between cities as they tend to do. And they just aggressively like, "Put that down, put that sword down right now." And you're like, "Whoa, all right, buddy." And then when you say, "All right, that's a much better way to behave." And you're like, "Dude, I saved a kingdom. Do you know who I am?" And it was just that, but it was, they have so much variety in that same interactivity. That's that real feel, the world feels, its banality, I guess, makes the world feel more alive. I think a lot of games tend to tiptoe towards the line of just regular stuff happens,

• 15:43Speaker 01

  but it's not exciting, so they have to fill it with other things. Whereas this game has so much, it's just, it's not quite a life simulator, but it is as close as it can to just be, you know, walk around and stuff that would happen will probably happen and stuff that wouldn't happen probably won't happen.

• 16:00Kirk Hamilton?

  I think there's really something to that in that, you know, I mean, Matthew, you said maybe they're playing a joke on the player, but really I think that each of those little things you have to do, that you have to remember, even just having to eat or, you know, I don't know, take a bath or clean off your clothes, those kinds of things, you put them all together and it kind of lowers the peak excitement level that this game can really have. Or like, the possibility space kind of lowers until you're just in what feels much closer to the regular world. Like, if you think about a game like Skyrim, the most exciting thing that can happen to you in Skyrim right at that moment could be like a dragon flying out of the sky and then suddenly you're like fighting a god and like shooting it out of

• 16:42Kirk Hamilton?

  the air, right? Like, the possibility for excitement is really, really high. So as a result, when you're doing little boring stuff, there's like a huge level of contrast. Where in this game, most of the time, the most exciting thing that can happen is like, maybe you get in a fight with a bandit or like two bandits and the violence isn't like that exciting. It's sort of weird. So most of the time, it's like attenuated the level of excitement that you can have. And so all of those little fiddly things don't feel like distractions. They feel... Like pretty vital parts of the game. And then when you're doing something like you're at a wedding and you're sneaking alcohol up to some guys that you think probably shouldn't have that alcohol, like it feels kind of exciting because it's the most exciting thing you've maybe done in that hour. Does that make any sense?

• 17:23Speaker 02

  I have a theory on this, all this stuff. It's a game about decisions in a lot of ways. And it's a game about the choices that you make on a moment to moment basis matter and the choices you make within the story matter. So they've designed the game, there's technically, you can kind of scum save your way through it like you would with a traditional sort of RPG. But because saving is kind of a pain in the ass and because you need to actually make or buy the potions to do the saving and they're expensive.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Can we talk about Savior Schnapps after this? I have a whole lot to talk about with that. Go on.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  So it discourages the kind of, oh, I fucked that up. Let me try it again, gameplay that most games like this sort of rely on. And because of that, every decision you make, even drawing your sword, feels really weirdly consequential.

• 18:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  And I really admire how the consequentiality goes from your choices as Henry, the character whom you inhabit, to whether or not you remember to put your clothes on, to whether or not you remember to eat, have you slept enough, do you sell, how quickly you sell stolen goods. Like it takes a long time for the heat to fall off stolen goods before you can sell them again. It really discourages the kind of mischief making that you do in other RPGs. And it makes you really think, God, boy, I could go steal that thing, but visible town could be in an uproar if I do that. And its mechanics, more than any other game

• 18:52Speaker 02

  I can think of, really enforces the idea that what you do matters.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I think nothing sums up my experience of the game with Tom than Savior Schnapps as an idea and how it affects the game. Like from the, from the get go, you're like playing this game. It's egregiously benign. It's, it's just, it's unsympathetically plain in its, its delivery. It's, everything is very-

• 19:17Kirk Hamilton?

  You're walking through the woods and nothing is happening.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Nothing, it's just, it's a so real world. You're not getting gored by an animal randomly or having some boss fight or a dragon flies. You're just, you're just walking around and that's it. Maybe you played dice.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  A wolf might attack you.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  A wolf might attack you and that's a nightmare because they're impossible to beat. Anyway, but like, so then you have a limited resource of saving, which is I guess the only real part of the game that you're like, okay, it's probably outside of the, of the regular world, but, but it's, so the concept of Savior Schnapps is like you have a limited resource of saves, fine, which also enforces part of that philosophy that Tom's talking about, about living in the world and not finding ways to break it like you do most RPGs. And, and when, you know, you save again, that's the only way and the only way you can save a game, except this is very rarely when you complete a quest or something like that. So you could be, as we did during our hate playing version of that period of the

• 20:14Speaker 01

  game, like we finally got to some small, important mission in a different town. And after multiple tries, maybe 10 tries, because the combat is also so opaque and hard to understand to begin with. And eventually when you master it, you feel like a god. But you finally, we finally beat whatever ruffian or rarely regular dude we've had to fight and, and felt like kings for the first time in the game, probably. And then Tom just absolutely beelined it across the countryside and ran straight off a cliff and died. And we had to go back about two hours of gameplay and I was, and we were both like, we're never playing this again. It's impossible to do that again. And then, so at the, because at the very start, you meet that woman, you end up staying with that, I can't remember

• 20:58Speaker 01

  her name, that you stay with, um, your sort of first. The healer. And, and yeah, the healer. And she shows you the, the, how to make potions and all that stuff. And that is again, an impossibly complex, it involves like a, like a sand timer and all these kinds of things. And you're like, why is this so hard? And you have to collect resources, but then they, if you walk around with them for too long, they degrade and you can no longer use them. So just the process of saving the game is a nightmare and impossible and inscrutable. And getting a save potion is so hard to master, but that we just never did until an event like that happens where you just lose two hours of progress because, you know, a rush of blood. And now Tom, as we play, has to have, is it 25 Savior

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Schnapps at any given time? Like, I had to, I had to talk him down from making more as we were playing last night. But I'm like, we've only got a couple of hours. We cannot spend all of those hours crafting Savior Schnapps. And he was not very happy with that decision, I don't think.

• 21:57Kirk Hamilton?

  That's funny. Savior Schnapps is kind of a mechanic that can stand in for a lot of things about the game, where at first, it feels really thrilling and it's this really frictional thing. You only have a few of them. You have to really plan your saves out. And then over time, I just, I found at least, because you can quit and it will save as well. And there were times where I would just quit and save and then reload the game to get a free save.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Wait, what?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 22:22Speaker 03

  If you quit, it saves?

• 22:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Am I blowing you guys's minds?

• 22:26Speaker 03

  What?

• 22:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, you can save and quit and it does the same thing as a Savior Schnapps and saves at any point.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  I didn't.

• 22:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Tom, does, does this reduce the amount of Savior Schnapps that you think you need to carry around?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  I thought it says you'll just lose your progress.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Matthew, did you, did you know you could, when you quit, it saved? When you quit to the main menu, it does save in one slot, a single slot.

• 22:47Kirk Hamilton?

  There's a save slot that's just for when you quit and it's, it's save and quit. You don't have to. You can just quit to the menu without saving if you don't want to save whatever just happened. But so I would abuse that, but that's like, it's kind of a crappy thing to do. I mean, you guys are playing in a way better way by really embracing Savior Schnapps, only because, you know, you have to quit the game and get back in. It totally kills the rhythm and I actually appreciate the restriction that Savior Schnapps puts on you. But then again, like now that I've played more, I have so much Savior Schnapps. It's so easy to save. I've like bought beds in every single inn and have infinite money because I'm so powerful. So there's this really significant curve with this game where once you get through the part we've been talking about,

• 23:26Kirk Hamilton?

  like the intro and really just the first act, it, it stops being like broke medieval peasant simulator and it starts being rich, powerful medieval knight errant simulator. And like, it kind of, the narrative also kind of opens up at that point, like the main storyline. And it gets much more, there's a lot more intrigue. You're playing much more of the kind of, you know, manipulating different lords and trying to, to actually shape the outcome of this region. So that's actually an interesting part of this game and something that I think we should talk. About and kind of emphasizes that for all that we're talking about these parts of the game where you're walking around in a field where like one pack of wolves is the difference between life and death. You finally get a halfway decent sword and it's the most exciting thing that ever happened. You're constantly at the alchemy, you know, station trying to just brew up more stuff.

• 24:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Or like me, I mean, I did a lot of farming. There's a lot of kind of podcast, like listen to a podcast and just do archery for like an hour. My strength slowly goes up. Like, there's a lot of that at the beginning and then the game actually becomes a very different game halfway through. And I'm kind of curious how that was for the three of you. Matthew, how was that arc for you as you were kind of playing from the first act into the second act?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I definitely spent like the first couple of hours just dying at every opportunity because you're so disempowered when you start the game and anything will kill you immediately. And so I was like, I don't know how I'm supposed to like afford anything or like get anywhere. So what I did was I just spent maybe like two or three nights, like real, like real nights, just playing the game and brewing potions. Just, just like I spent like the first like 10 hours of gameplay, just like in, in that hut brewing potion after potion. And then I would bring them into

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Walter Whiting it.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would bring them into town, sell them. And then one time I spent like, like an hour or two brewing potions and I was going into town to sell them and there was a bandit there and I just

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Just died, no save and just gone. And I was like, this is it. I'm done. Like, I'm not playing this anymore. And then I was like, well, I, I'll play. Okay, fine. And then the next day. And so once you kind of like bootstrap yourself into getting some money and then like knowing that you can get money for stuff.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  It does kind of start getting a little bit easier and it starts kind of turning into a little bit, I want to say like more of like a normal RPG.

• 25:49Kirk Hamilton?

  I think that's safe to say.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  By the end, you know, because you're, there's like a little bit more emphasis on just like. Quest stuff and, and, and things like that. There's a like, there's conveniences you can learn to do to take care of your equipment. Like normally you have to like bring your equipment to someone to repair it. You have to like get your clothes washed and stuff, but then you later you can find like items that'll do it and you can like skill up in doing all those things yourself. So there's a huge delta between when you start the game and then when you finish the game between like how disempowered you feel versus how powerful you feel.

• 26:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it really takes its time getting you to that, too.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  I, I want to say that I never felt particularly powerful because I never really learned how to fight very well. I constantly spent spending thousands of, of coins on, on repairing my armor because I didn't bother to get the perks to learn how to do any of that stuff myself.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Well, I was a ring in for a couple of weeks, right?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, whenever I got to fight, I couldn't pass. I just called Liam at like nine 30 at night and go, can you just please come over and beat this guy for me? And I couldn't, I just, it took me 30 to 40 hours to get the hang of sword fighting. And then I finally got it. But every consequential fight in the game, Liam basically did.

• 27:08Kirk Hamilton?

  In fairness, the sword fighting system is maybe a, one of the weakest points of the game, in my opinion, anyways. It's, I think it's really cool what they're doing. I think it's really well designed and I love that directionality plays a role. I'm to explain this to listeners who have not played the game. When you're in a sword fight with a guy, you get a kind of new reticle that floats over him and it shows the four cardinal directions, left, right, up and down. And then depending on which weapon you're using, you kind of pick your swings. So if you, I'm playing with a controller. It's, it's fine with a mouse and keyboard, but I'm playing with a controller. You kind of flick the stick to the right, the right, you know, arrow lights up on screen. And then when you hit the trigger, Henry will swing from the right. And then depending on where your opponent is holding his weapon, he'll maybe be able to counter you or master stroke you and hit

• 27:53Kirk Hamilton?

  you immediately. And there are a lot of, there's a lot of kind of strategy to the position of your weapon and to reading the position of your opponent's weapon. And that's really cool, especially because the master stroke, which is a kind of an. Immediate parry that always works. Basically, if you time it right, you hit their sword and then stab them really quickly. Like, that is a very effective way to get through sword fights, at least if you're a swordfighter, which my Henry is. I like that all in theory. There's just kind of like a floatiness to it. I think like the sticky friction, to use Tim Rogers's term, or like, whatever you want to call it, the physical feel of the combat, for me at least, doesn't quite gel. And then as a result, I always feel like one step more removed from the combat than I want to. But I'm curious, Liam, it sounds like you're a defender of the combat, so maybe you feel differently.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Is it Mort Hau? Is that the game that has a similar kind of combat system?

• 28:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, I don't know. I haven't played that.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a couple of like swordfight simulators where it is more based on, you know, stances and positioning and more of the puzzle of a swordfight.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Liam is an actual master swordsman, just to throw that out there.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  That's probably a stretch, but I know how to swing a sword around a little bit from Spartacus, but um.

• 28:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, okay. So you can swordfight in real life?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Don't spread that around. My biggest fear after that show was that people would just walk up to me in the street and be like, "Want a swordfight, mate? Think you're tough?" And I'm like, "I did not."

• 29:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Slap your face with their gun.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, on guard, sir. And I was like, "Good lord." No, but I, you know, I know a little bit about it anyway, but it just, it wasn't even so much the realism, because I agree, like, as a, it didn't feel weighty and heavy, but it was much like everything. We'll get into the concept of Gustav, which we imagined as a character, as a, as a production team member, whose job it was to say, "That seems too fun. We should take it out," as, across all of the game.

• 29:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Gustav?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, Gustav.

• 29:38Kirk Hamilton?

  He's just looking over everyone's shoulder.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. He turned up, he's like, "I don't know, I think, I think someone might like doing that. Take it out."

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And so I felt like he was like, "Ah, look, this combat, we'll have, we can't, we don't have time to develop a more opaque, harder to understand combat system, so we'll have to go with this one." But, um, but again, like the game itself, first time you play it, you're like, "I have no idea what this is. This is madness. It's impossible." And then... The puzzle of it, for me at least, as I started to understand it, became fascinating. Instead of usual games like Spider-Man or something, or even like a Bethesda game where you just attack a guy mercilessly and hope to maybe block occasionally or counter. There was a real like, it felt more authentic to combat of the time,

• 30:29Speaker 01

  which was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait some more. See him reposition, reposition yourself, wait, wait. Ah, okay, there's my shot. You know, or I'll block that one, dive away, duck in, attack him, block, counter that. He's foolishly tried to attack me on this side. I'm prepared for that. I'll master strike you. And then there was combos you could learn and integrate, which were very hard to pull off. But because the combat was hard and strange and unusual to your conventional, like, you know, square and triangle kind of, you know, combat these days. It meant that I got good at a single battle, like with one person, and that was, I felt like I'd really done something. Like I'd really outthought my opponent out. You know.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And but then you'd face like two or three opponents, and it was near impossible because you couldn't do that to so many people. So you try to funnel them in places. And I don't know, I felt like it offered a very different way to appreciate combat than most, almost all games that I've played, certainly in that space have provided. And much like the rest of the game, was just a little bit weird enough to make you go, okay, let's do this.

• 31:40Kirk Hamilton?

  No, you know, and I can't, I can't disagree with any of that. I mean, that's totally true, and it is so different, and it's so specific, and they are trying to do something, you know, tied to reality in a way that's really cool. And I really like all of that. Speaking of tied to reality, Kirk, it sounds like you did archery quite a bit? I did, yeah. Yeah, just like the archery competitions. And That was gonna kind of be my go-to for combat for a while, too, which was really useful, except that it takes so long to switch weapons that I would see some bandits on the road and get off my horse and like get out my bow and they wouldn't see me and I'd think, okay, hang on, hang on. And then I'd kind of line up the one guy and I'd shoot and it would

• 32:22Kirk Hamilton?

  clearly do a lot of damage to him, like he'd be limping. But then he and his friend would start coming for me with their swords. And then I'd have to kind of try to get my sword out and I would just get absolutely got while in the middle of switching weapons. And it just wound up in a kind of yakety sacks, running away, you know, getting my sword out so I could turn back around and try to fight situation. And then in those early, in those early hours, like you were talking about Liam, I mean, even taking on two guys is pretty much suicide. So, but anyways, yes, to answer your question, Matthew, I, I did a lot of archery at first and I still do the competitions, but I don't use it that much in combat anymore.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  And you were okay with it? Cause I had, I had problems with like, first of all, there's like no targeting reticle or anything like that, right? It's just, you're just there with your bow or your crossbow, if you're using a crossbow and lining up the target and like accounting for the dip of the arrow and everything, you just have to eyeball it. There's no help at all.

• 33:16Kirk Hamilton?

  I like that a lot. It doesn't give you that drop off reticle that you get in so many other games where there's, you know, arrow drop off. I really got a feel for it. It's the kind of thing, I mean, I've shot, I don't know how many, some embarrassing number of arrows now because like I said, I just would spend an hour listening to some podcasts and just shooting. And I got so good at it. I mean, I just, you just get a feel for it. But it's cool because it kind of feels a little bit like real archery where you, you know, you're not, there isn't a reticle in my eyeballs. Like when I'm doing actual archery, you do just kind of line it up a little bit up into the left from where you're holding the arrow and then you let it fly and see where it goes and then kind of adjust from there.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  I can hear Gustav saying that. There's no reticle in real life.

• 33:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, Gustav definitely has some thoughts on the archery.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I know in my heart that a designer put the reticle in and he was like, what, hey, whoa, whoa, hang on.

• 34:05Kirk Hamilton?

  What is that?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Take that right out. Take that right out now. Tom and I, we desperately tried to make gunpowder work. I don't know if you want to talk about that, Tom. Where for the same reason you were like, let's waste a guy, let's just go like Tony Montana, Tony Montana, you know, let's just kill a bunch of dudes with guns. And it just never quite worked out the way we wanted it to.

• 34:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, no, man, I mean, so to explain to listeners, there are guns in this game. Technically, they're like kind of portable little cannons. These are very prototypical firearms. That's like a stick with a little barrel on the end that has, it's like a little cannon that you're carrying around. I watched that combat tutorial video. There's a lot of great tutorials on this game on YouTube. By the way, if anyone is playing this and wants to get some great tips, like people will tell you things that you can do that the game does not explain very well. Like related to blacksmithing, related to combat, a lot of things that you aren't really taught in the tutorials. And then one, it was this guy being like, oh yeah, you can totally use a gun in combat. And it showed him using it and just the amount of setup time, like lighting the fuse and then the fuse is burning down and he, he kills one guy and then he has to put it away and get out his sword.

• 35:11Kirk Hamilton?

  It was an incredibly cumbersome process.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  It's like 17, 17 seconds to reload that thing. It's just some crazy.

• 35:21Kirk Hamilton?

  No, you get one shot. It's an opening gambit kind of.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  What was that mission that we had, Tom? Where we were in the, we were in the underbelly of the city and like the sewers or whatever. And we had that fight, we were, we were trying, oh, what was it? We were trying to get something from this.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  It was the tax guy. It was, it was the tax guy's ledger or something.

• 35:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, I have that quest right now. I haven't done.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  And we were trying.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  There were eight guys in the tunnel and we, that was like a three night engagement where we were just trying to get past a single fight. It was really bad.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Cause we had all these schemes, which was like, we had it, we'd set it up, we'd drink all the potions, we'd set up the cannon ahead of time. Invariably I'd be like, it's not that button, it's the other button. Have to start up again, drink the thing. Is this pre-savior snaps as well, where we had like a terrible save point and we couldn't improve on it? So we had to drink the, so every time you'd be like, is this the one? Should we be bothered spending the next five minutes drinking potions in the hope that we actually get somewhere? But then again, because the game is so horrifically hard, that when we did get there. You know, I don't know if I have had a rush like that for, you know,

• 36:29Speaker 01

  in games for so long, because it is so mundane. But when you do succeed, because like you said, like the, they've lowered your kind of range of emotions in a way. When it does spike, you've gone from like hunting foxes and being, you know, a regular person to these moments of true sort of regular human triumph as opposed to superhero triumph that you so get so used to in these games.

• 36:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, no, it's very true. I had a, I just did a side quest. I'm helping a lady at the bathhouse in Kootenburgh and you have to fight a duel on behalf of this noble. And in the duel, you, you're fighting against a guy who's in full plate armor and you have no armor, like you're not allowed to wear any. And it's really freaking hard because he takes almost no damage from almost every hit that you give him because he's wearing full plate armor. And it really does kind of, like, it felt like a great triumph when I finally beat him, even though I'm really late in the game and generally my Henry is pretty mighty and I can mess up most guys. So it's, it's very good at putting you in those situations. So let's talk about the story some because the writing and the story in this game, I mean, that's maybe my favorite thing about it.

• 37:37Kirk Hamilton?

  While we've talked about the simulation so much and you know, the combat, like those are really interesting parts of this game, but the story, the grounded historical nature of it, the world building, Henry as a character, there's so much interesting going on with this story. And I think that in particular, because we have Tom and Matthew here, we have like the two writers of The Writer Will Do Something, playing a game with this much writing in it. I got that this game has like one of the longest scripts of all time and also writing of this quality and with this much variance. I'm curious as writers, what the two of you think of it. Matthew, maybe you go first.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  This is something that we talked about a little bit, but like, this game really takes its time with dialogue.

• 38:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  And it does in dialogue, you know, a conversation that almost any other game would whittle down to a couple of sentences because well, we don't need to take that time. This game just kind of luxuriates and just lots and lots of dialogue. They're perfectly fine having scenes go on twice or even three times longer than you would think an equivalent scene would in a comparable AAA game. And you can just get into these long conversations with people about all kinds of, not random topics, but topics that are maybe a little bit tangential to the actual story.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  And it just seems to be a priority for them to have this much investment in that, in the ability to have those conversations.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  I would say the script is never worse than pretty good, and often it's excellent. What I was most impressed by was how genuinely complicated a lot of the game's morality was. I've had this longstanding theory, which I've written about lansely, is that games, a lot of exciting development right now is going on in countries of the former Soviet sphere, Poland, Czech Republic, and the Metro games. Those are all made by people my age who grew up in the shadow of a totalitarian empire.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  And I feel like, I don't think it's a coincidence that Metro and Witcher and this game, they approached the question of human morality from a much more interesting angle than we in the West do. In a Mass Effect game, it's like slap the reporter, kiss the reporter. The moral quandaries they give you are so stupid. Whereas this game and the other games I mentioned, the moral quandaries are a lot messier and darker. And I think it's because if you grew up, and I say this having lived in the former Soviet Union, people who grew up in that environment, Aron writes this, that growing up in a totalitarian system, to be a good person means you're constantly lying and cheating and being dishonest.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  It's a system that just forces a layer of dishonesty on you, whether you're a good person or a bad person. It corrupts you right down to your very atoms. And I don't think it is a coincidence that the children of that, of the children of the children are the people who have the last vivid... Memories of that system at its worst approach human morality from a much more kind of rich and chewy and interesting direction. And over and over in this game, you get a quandary where there's just too bad, too bad choices. And you know, and you feel genuinely awful about about making a decision. Very few games give me that feeling. And why don't

• 41:13Speaker 02

  they give you that feeling? Oh, I've been in these meetings. Well, we can't do this because the player will feel demotivated, or the player will feel like his actions don't matter. Dude, the way players are put on these glorious pedestals, like little children who've eaten all their vegetables, is so infantilizing and dull and boring. And Matthew can back me up in this, I'm sure, that the Western game makers fear of the player ever feeling like anything other than the biggest boy at school, really leads you into just a lot of pretty fucking rote and boring kind of narrative schema. And

• 41:58Speaker 02

  it makes me sad and depressed because we all know games, because of their very interactive nature, they're capable of providing a much brighter, darker catharsis.

• 42:08Kirk Hamilton?

  I think that the two things that you each just said, so Matthew, what you were talking about with like the sheer quantity of the writing, and Tom, what you were saying with like the complexity of it, I think those things are related. There's definitely a feeling playing this game, like, there's just so much writing that as a result, it's allowed to have a lot more texture. Because in something like a Mass Effect, like a Western style game, which I love those games, they're great, but the dialogue comes at you, it feels like rat-a-tat compared to playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Like, and it's a, it's a pacing that I've just gotten used to with video games. Liam, I'm sure this is something that you've encountered as a voice actor, where a lot of the line reads that you're giving are fairly short, if you're in that kind of a game, like anything, you

• 42:50Kirk Hamilton?

  know, with like, a dialogue system, because, you know, each line is just going to be fairly short. It's not going to be a paragraph, the way that it is in this game.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really interesting to me, playing this game for the same reasons that You know, often in RPGs and many games, I suppose, you have a, you know, there's so many dialogue tree options and generally you're like, that's the quest one, I'll do that one. And if I have time, I guess I'll hear about what his life is and what they do for, you know, fun. And it's irrelevant. Whereas this, I felt it was far more complex. And again, speaking to Tom's talk, a conversation about the morality of it, I didn't feel that the choices were always obvious or but then also not like hidden for the sake of it. But also, you didn't feel like each dialogue tree was just like, this is what this one does. This is the functional one in

• 43:41Speaker 01

  the game. And there were these are just fluff, essentially, or, you know, color. It was just like, so I felt more inclined to look through the stories and enrich myself with those stories.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Because it is, it's rare in these games, you know, in my experience, making them, certainly in the Western AAA world, there is, I guess, a prevailing sense that players want to get back on the sticks and get back into the game as fast as they can. And I mean, I'm interested, that may be true to a degree. There may be actual, I guess, part of that whole struggle is, you know, art versus business, is that there probably is real metrics saying that a game that's being brave, like Kingdom Come, will turn off a lot of players for the exact reason where they're like, oh, click, click, click, click, click, click, let's get back to stabbing somebody,

• 44:38Speaker 01

  which is a shame to me, because I love telling stories. And a lot of the games that I've done in the past, there is that sense of like, let's keep this moving, and let's just be succinct and get the player back into the action. So they can start feeling like the hero and the protagonist, and not part of this world in a more, you know,

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Discreet sort of sense where I feel very much that Henry very much feels like one person in a very big world, not the person in a world made for him.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  You know, and so there's a joy in that. There's a certain joy and you need, you need this.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 45:16Kirk Hamilton?

  That's definitely a similarity this game has with The Witcher 3, which is always something I appreciated about that game that Geralt of Rivia is like, he's a very powerful guy. He's an important figure, but he's also kind of the guy next to the person, like he's helping the emperor, you know, his, he is helping the woman who's gonna help save the world. Like, he's always kind of in the background. And that winds up actually being a more interesting story than he is the chosen one who's gonna save everything. And yeah, Henry, I mean, certainly, like, Henry is not even, you know, noble, like, he is, he's kind of the, as elevated an everyman as there can be, and then that really puts him in an interesting place in the story. And, you know, related to the pacing, the dialogue, I should mention something.

• 45:57Kirk Hamilton?

  I played this game in a kind of distinct way, at least for me. I turned off subtitles but played in English. So I had to listen to everything. Like, I couldn't skip through dialogue. So because, as we've mentioned, there are these conversations where when another game would have one or two sentences, this game will just go, and then Henry will ask a follow-up, and then the character will keep talking, and then someone else will interject, and then Henry will talk, and like, that's one dialogue interaction. So I just sit there for a long time, just watching them talk about this guy and how, well, we thought he was actually working for, you know, Wenceslas, but he wasn't really, he's actually this other guy, and like, he knew my father, but then it just goes and goes and goes, and I have to pay attention and listen. And I'm finding that by not having the subtitles, I just can't

• 46:41Kirk Hamilton?

  do the thing I sometimes do, where I'll skip through dialogue, and as a result, it's really grounded me in the writing in a way that I've at least found, found very cool. Matthew, I think, so you've been playing with the Czech audio track? And I'm curious what that has been like.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  I played the entire game in Czech with subtitles.

• 46:59Kirk Hamilton?

  So how was that?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  It was, it was great. I mean, I, I, I kind of missed out on, on some, like... You know, when like someone just kind of passes you by and they have some ambient dialogue. I just, I don't know what they said.

• 47:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Right.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  But man, it was great, actually. And I recommend it because it was just so, I don't know, it just felt right. Especially those, like in the main quest, you know, those swarthy guys you you collect together to do this really dirty job. They're all drunk and swearing at each other in an Eastern European language. It's perfect, right? It just feels right. And kind of all of the, all of the other language stuff, too, is still in the other languages. So, you know, not only is there Czech, right, but there's German, there's a little bit of Italian later on.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  And then there's an entire, no spoiler alert, I guess, but there's an entire huge conversation in Latin, in ecclesiastical Latin. Because you're doing a thing with with priests. So just, I don't know, like that whole, it was part of the immersion for me to be in that world. To just have this language around me, even though I didn't, I didn't understand a single thing about, you know, what they were saying.

• 48:22Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny, it's kind of the opposite to the approach I take, only because you can only read the subtitles to get the information. And yet it's also immersive, right, in its way. And yeah, it's funny, I mean, in the English track, a lot of people have English accents, which kind of grounds it in the familiar fantasy of England. Because so much fantasy, especially like Arthurian, you know, legends and just a lot of games that I've played are set in England during, you know, medieval times. So to be, hearing those accents kind of keeps me in that familiar place. And I do have to say, Tom McKay, the actor who plays Henry, is so

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 48:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Great.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 48:55Kirk Hamilton?

  It's such a good performance and like the facial animations along with his voice acting are just endlessly great. And I really love him. It's actually really similar to what Doug Cockle does as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3. Like the performances are different qualitatively, but they fulfill a similar function in how they elevate the game.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, what I love about Geralt and about my Henry at least, because Henry can be somewhat different depending on how you play him.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Geralt is a tough guy. He's like a badass. But whenever he deals with women or children or animals in the Witcher game, he's so gentle and he's just so lovely as a character in that way. And I love how Henry has this, like, seems like fairness means something to Henry and just decency means something to Henry and, and like.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  We had a Skola, we had a Skola, didn't we?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, my Henry, I built, it was an intellectual and he was an agnostic. And he was the lone agnostic in this world of Christianity. And I always had my Henry voice skepticism for the church's positions and whatever it came up.

• 50:00Kirk Hamilton?

  There's one, you know, he has the little animations, like there's the one he does like this. There's one where he's like this. And anytime he's doing it, he's like backed up with his, I should describe to listeners. He's backed up, like, holding one hand in his elbow. And he has like a finger under his chin, kind of. And it's when he's about to say, well, actually, and there's the best lines of dialogue always come when he's like in this, in this pose. Some, some people in our Discord were talking about this and they were totally right. It's very funny.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was very sad to see that Mr. McKay was not, even though I think awards are all bullshit and based on nothing, that he did not get a nomination at the Game Awards for Best Vocal Performer.

• 50:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh yeah, that's true, huh? He didn't get nominated. Yes, he definitely deserved a Game Award.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Wait, he didn't get nominated? I thought he did, he didn't?

• 50:43Kirk Hamilton?

  No, and Aaron Paul didn't either for Dispatch. There are definitely some, some notable, some notable oversights at the Game Awards.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 50:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's a, that's probably, that's a whole, that's a whole separate podcast.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  But was he, he was nominated, nominated for a Golden Joystick Award? I'm sure I saw him nominated for something of merit. It doesn't matter. It makes me sad.

• 51:01Kirk Hamilton?

  So, so Tom, you mentioned the, the religious aspect of this game. And I think that's another thing that's very interesting. And I know that's something that you have found particularly striking about this game.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Well, Matthew should speak to this first because he sent me a beautiful text just a couple of days ago about.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, I told Tom, this is like, in a weird way, this is like the most Christian video game I've ever played. And it's not because it's proselytizing. It's because it's just depicts a world that's just suffused with Christianity. And it doesn't, you know, it, it doesn't.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  seem to take necessarily a particular side of, you know, you can, you can be doubtful, you can, you can, it, it shows like sort of negative aspects of the church, but it also shows just that it's just part of the texture of everybody's daily life. And you can be, you know, a more religious Henry if you want to. You can get this ability, pray, and you can cross yourself and pray at a shrine, and you have to actually say the entire prayer. If you get up and leave, you don't get the the buff that the prayer gives you. So you have to sit there and listen to him. Yeah, exactly. You have to listen to him say the whole thing. And then, yeah, and then there's

• 52:18Speaker 03

  this entire sequence, like I was saying earlier, there's this entire sequence that's where they're all speaking Latin to each other for, for lines and lines and lines. And so it's just part of the world, and they do a very good job of depicting that, and they don't shy away from it at all. You know, like, I think a lot of other big AAA games set in, in times where religion were, was a huge part of society and life. I always think about the Assassin's Creed games, like in contrast to this, right? They, they treat the, the topic with, with kid gloves, right? They're, they're kind of like, there's a

• 52:58Speaker 03

  big disclaimer at the beginning saying like, well, you know, we, lots of different viewpoints and blah, blah, blah. And they're clearly worried about, about being criticized for this. But this kind of goes all in on depicting this world as they interpreted it was. And it's the richer for it, I think.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  And the frankness with which they treat antisemitism too, is really interesting. Like, it's a big, it becomes a very big part of the game near the end, and it provides one of its most powerful emotional catharsis. So it's not like the game is antisemitic, but it, it, it acknowledges that most people alive at this time were hideously antisemitic, its view of women. Yes, there are some women who like do a bunch of active shit in this game. But like generally speaking, the women are have the roles that they would have been forced upon them. You know, at the time, it like it makes a real commitment to the historical reality of it.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  And I'm not saying that's great, uh, but I am saying that I do admire that it wasn't afraid to do that. Uh, again, like I cannot imagine a group of modern day game writers. Even being interested in writing such a straight faced portrayal of normative Christian belief without wanting to pick at it and dissect it. And like the, the problem with historical fiction is that it's written by people who know how it all ended up. And I think historical fiction becomes truly transcendent when the people writing it manage to forget. They know where everything lines up. And when they forget everything winds up, the characters are allowed to not know what's going to happen.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  And, uh, I think you can only truly write effective historical fiction when you will yourself into a state of almost

• 54:53Speaker 02

  intellectual oblivion about what lays beyond the parameters of the period you're, you're, you're, you're writing about.

• 54:59Kirk Hamilton?

  That's interesting. That's well put. I appreciate on a much more surface level, just how you'll be walking around the world and someone will go, Jesus Christ, be praised. Every time I hear it, I think that something horrible has happened or they're angry. And then I realize, no, this is just something that someone is saying. It feels a little bit like maybe the writers are, are having a little bit of fun, but, um, but it is like, is true to the world. And something that I like about this game's approach to spirituality, uh, that's sort of dovetails with what you have both said is that I like that there are a variety of different beliefs and superstitions, you know, there are non-Christian beliefs as well. And that you always have to engage with them in this way that treats them as though, not as though they are true,

• 55:41Kirk Hamilton?

  but as though the people believe them and that matters, you know? So someone says, well, I can't give you this ring because it has a curse on it. Then Henry just has to accept that they believe that.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  And then he's just deal with that.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Well, because you probably would though. That's what I love about it. I feel like it's not.

• 55:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Exactly. Yes.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  I, I think as similar to what the others were saying, it's like, I, I think it's super important that when engaging in history, you don't. Doctorate to fit a more convenient truth that you know now that you did. Obviously, we've come a long way since that time. But to then revise the characters' understanding of the world to fit a modern sensibility of the world, I feel is dishonest and prevents us today having a better discourse about it. Because I do really respect how nonjudgmental and how honest for the period so much of Kingdom Comes at least attempting to be. So that you can now, you know, we're talking about antisemitism and stuff like that.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  As a result of it sort of attempting to tell it how it was, as close as they were able to, you can have a conversation now about how things have changed or not changed, as opposed to having that already pre made. Your characters, like Tom said, knowing, you know, having a knowing wink towards, well, he's our hero character, so he'd know better than that. He wouldn't. He wouldn't know better than that. He, you know, and if that, in that, that mission where that guy won't give up that rock because the girl wants to get pregnant and, and she, and she's like, I need the rock for to be pregnant. He's like, well, I'm only strong because I have the rock. So, and, and Henry isn't like, rocks. He's like, absolutely, 100%. I've heard those rocks are awesome. And you're like, of course, because of course he would.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  And I think it's richer for it because you can then either go, maybe he was onto something, or have a discussion about how crazy it was that people believed rocks gave you superpowers, or anything like that, because the characters live in the real world that they would have existed in at that time, as close as you could imagine, I suppose, or as far as you'll be able to imagine perhaps from this distance.

• 57:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it fits in well also with how the game has no actual magic in it. And yet there is magic of a sort at every time. Like you're constantly engaging with the supernatural. There's a whole quest line where people saw this revenant, like this ghost, and no one really knows what it was, but everyone tells you this different version of a story where there was a ghost and there was a horrifying vision. It was a demon. And you have to really engage with people on their terms and what they believe a demon is, you know, you can't just start talking about it in the open and saying, oh, you saw a demon and they're like, dude.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's because magic does exist. In this world, though, like it does exist because in this world, for most of the characters, Christianity isn't just like a great idea. It's real. It's absolutely true. And the characters honor that for the most part, if they believe it. They do worry about if they say the wrong thing, God will smite them or send them to hell and things like that. And therefore, the magic that is inherent in that belief system. You know, so you can exist in that way, but there is another quest where you have to go into the sewers. Because there's some horridious demon down there and it turns out, you know, spoiler alert. I think it's a knight or something who swore an oath to protect them from some other horrible. But it creates, it allows magic to exist because in the, in their world,

• 58:56Speaker 01

  magic through the form of faith and belief is absolutely real. So unlike now where there might be a lot of cynicism about stuff like that. You're like, oh, okay, you curse me to hell. Sure, buddy. That would have been the worst thing that's ever happened and their whole family would have heard about it. And they'd have to like disown them or something, you know. And so it creates a world where the magic is alive in a magicless game, you know, like in a, where there's no spell, you know, sort of like spells to cast. It feels like you could just say to a character, I curse you. And that's in itself a magic you've performed. It's cool. I love it.

• 59:29Kirk Hamilton?

  That's totally true. And then, of course, and then this is the time where these legends were born, right? It totally makes sense like that. These people are weaving legends out of their everyday life. They're constantly elevating things in that way. And then that just informed everything about the way that they experienced the world.

• 59:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, we could talk about this game forever. This has been fantastic. I'm so glad to have had three, three fellow veterans with me here. Let's see, if you guys have any final stories, anything that you want to share, Tom, it looks like maybe you have something.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  I do. My daughter watched me play this game a lot. He called it Medieval Peasant Simulator.

• 1:00:09Kirk Hamilton?

  That's what I call it. I think I call it that because of you.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  And I knew there was some adult content in it, but my Henry was mostly pretty chaste.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  I just didn't go down that path with him because I didn't think that was his vibe. And there's a part near the end of the game where. He can kiss a woman in a certain circumstance. And my daughter was like, ew, you're gonna kiss the kiss the lady. And I'm like, just, we're just gonna do this and we're gonna get through it. And then they kiss and then cut to Henry thrusting away on top of this woman. And and one of the hardest core video game sex scenes I've ever seen.

• 1:00:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, really?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  She's 11 years old. She's screaming. My partner looks up from the couch. She's screaming. I'm like, oh, my God, turn this off. And it was, uh, one of the more amusing mishaps I've had in my video game playing career.

• 1:01:07Kirk Hamilton?

  So game of the year is what you're saying. Game of the year 2020.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Game of the year.

• 1:01:10Kirk Hamilton?

  10 out of 10.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Every time this happened, every experience he had was not one of the experiences I was there for. I don't think I ever saw Henry do anything of any note in that regard. And Tom would always be like, guess what just happened? I was like, oh, okay. Zero stars.

• 1:01:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Liam and Matthew, any final thoughts on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2?

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  I really respect this game enormously just for for its, you know, its ambition and its willingness to do things that that that other games wouldn't, you know, with the kind of scale that it that it has. I'm blanking on anything other than the thing that I've already talked about twice now, which is that there's a huge scene where everyone just speaks Latin.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Were you moved by the ending, Matthew? Did you find it moving?

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I was actually. The game actually has a moral opinion. And that's also something that you don't see in a lot of big budget entertainment, especially Western entertainment. It turns out, you know, the the game kind of withholds it for for much of the game. But it's there. And in the end, it kind of tells you a little bit about what it thought, the game thought. And and that's, you know, in a world of like, kind of Bioshock style, like everything, you know, both anything is bad, trying anything, you know, doing anything is bad. Like, this game actually really stands up for doing the right thing and and or trying to do the right thing in a completely fucked up situation, which the game acknowledges it has,

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  you know, it has created for you. And so it's kind of, I think it's brave in that way for saying. Ultimately, at the very end of everything, all those millions of words and hundreds of hours later, it kind of says, hey, you should do the right thing. And that's a very surprising thing to me in this day and age.

• 1:03:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Liam, any final thoughts?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I think they've said it better than I could, but it's a triumph of a game because it is so unusual and so unique and seems like I keep thinking of like the meetings you would have in perhaps a Western game studio and how impossible any of it would have been. There would be no way this game would have been created in so many other environments, anything like the game.

• 1:03:28Kirk Hamilton?

  They would have fired Gustav on the first day.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Gustav was unemployed day one. He's not celebrated like he is in this company. No, but I probably have to look back to like Ultima 7, when I was so willing to just engage with a game and its strangeness and walk around for two hours to get to the other side of the map to do something, you know, and just be cool with it and to just engage with characters and see what they have to say. You know, maybe that speaks to my, you know, my becoming immune to the storytelling of games over time, but I just, I tried to hate it so much, like

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  so hard. And it's incredible how it stuck to its guns so strongly that it won me and it sounds like every other long-term player of this game has some experience of like, whoa, what is it? What are they doing to going, oh, they're doing something truly special? It's a great game.

• 1:04:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want to say one more thing, Kirk. I've spent the last 15 years of my life on and off writing big budget, mostly big budget video games. And it's very hard for me to want to play a story-based game anymore. Most of what I play these days is Shared world kind of emergent narrative generating game.

• 1:04:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Helldivers.

• 1:04:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Your favorite game of all time.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  I, I start playing a narrative game these like this has been going on for years. I start playing a narrative game and I, and I'm like, yeah, this is cool. And then I just kind of just piece out of it at a certain point. I just, it's hard to get me over the hump on them anymore. And, and this game pulled me back into just a love of falling into a game narrative. And man, am I grateful for that because I thought that the spell had been permanently broken. And it turns out it wasn't. I was just sick of the same old thing. And I say that having written a bunch of the same old thing myself. And I'm really grateful to it for that reason.

• 1:05:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, I think that's a great note to end on. Tom Bissell, Liam McIntyre, Matthew Seiji Burns, thank you all so much for coming on the show. This was so much fun.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  Thank you, Kirk.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Real pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having us.

• 1:05:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:06:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.