Should you buy Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2?

The sequel to the first KCD game is generating lots of controversy and big sales numbers. Sometimes the choices you make as a player might lead you to a place you don't want to go.

Before I get into this article, I want to note here that I never played the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance game. In fact, I had never heard of it before all the controversy about the second game. I mostly game on Switch, and my time these days is taken up with Skyrim. I’ll have more to say about Skyrim below and in a future article, but I had a few thoughts to share here about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

If you aren’t familiar with the game or some of the controversy surrounding it, here’s a quick summary for you:

1. The game is set in medieval times (1403).

2. The main character Henry in the first game was, by all the information I can find, heterosexual.

3. In the second game, there is an optional gay sex scene between the main character and one of his friends.

4. The friend, according to the game’s codex, is approximately 15 years old.

5. There is another optional scene where Henry is drugged and raped by a woman.

Suffice to say that the inclusion of such a scene has set off an explosion of outrage on the Internet. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the scene:

The game developer has issued a number of statements about all of this:

Now if the inclusion of a gay romance isn’t enough for you, there’s another scene where Henry apparently is drugged by a woman and then raped by her:

What are we to make of all of this? Is this game a complete mess or what? 🤔

It seems to me that on the issue of the gay sex scene, the developer either deliberately included Hans as an underage character or it was a screw-up of epic proportions. It opened the door to charges of child exploitation and the potential violation of various laws in certain states and countries regarding the dissemination of such material. Either way, that issue could have been avoided if the developer had released the game with Hans’ age being firmly set at 18 or higher.

Even if the developer had established an older age for Han, some people would not have liked the gay sex scene or romance. A certain amount of the game’s fan base perceived it to be a Christian kind of game, set in the past, where there were no such relationships publicly allowed. That part of the game’s audience simply wanted what they had apparently gotten in the first game: Henry as a 100% straight male who they could relate to, with no hint whatsoever of anything gay.

The scene with the woman who drugged Henry and apparently raped him is something that has gotten a lot less press coverage, but is also worth considering here. I hadn’t heard of it initially, but I don’t doubt that some of the game’s fans will probably not like it either. It detracts from Henry being a hero for him to be naive enough to fall victim to the machinations of such a woman. In a sense, it emasculates him and removes his power of agency (as the feminists would say if the positions of Henry and the woman were reversed).

Now, has all the controversy surrounding the game helped or hurt its sales? As I write this article, KCD2 is number 4 on Steam’s Top Sellers list:

So it seems like a lot of people out there either haven’t heard about any of the potentially offensive content, or they simply don’t care about it and bought the game anyway. The game apparently broke a million in sales the day after it was released.

Of course, there is one final angle worth considering here. Maybe the developer deliberately included potentially offensive content to gin up sales by generating media coverage through controversy. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time somebody profited by inflaming the culture wars and getting both sides to go after each other. If that’s the case, then it was a smart strategy because the game seems to be raking in the cash.

The larger issue here, though, is the question of content and choices in RPGs in general. In an RPG, you get to make choices, and some of them can be downright nasty or outright evil. I told you at the beginning of this article that I’ve been playing Skyrim. Let me tell you something I did in Skyrim that you might think is evil. 😈

At one point in the game, I went into an inn to get a room to sleep in for the night. The innkeeper took my money, but then I discovered there were only two beds in that inn, and they were taken. WTF!!! Enraged, I made the deliberate choice to use my destruction mage to pay the innkeeper back. I set her cook on fire and killed him. I then attacked her, but she was an NPC, so she couldn’t be killed. I brought her to her knees twice with a fire spell, but then had to run out of the inn, jump on my horse, and flee the town because I was beset by too many guards.

So, in that situation, I made the conscious choice to go on a murder spree at that inn. Do you think what I did was moral or ethical? Yes, she cheated me out of my gold, but that’s no reason to start incinerating people. But I did it anyway, and it was actually fun because it caused a huge amount of drama, and I had to run out of there or get killed by the guards.

The developers of Skyrim gave me that choice by making the people at the inn susceptible to my mage’s fire. If they didn’t want the possibility of a player attacking the people at the inn, they could simply have made it impossible for the player to attack anyone. In other words, they could have sanitized the content and limited my choices, but they opted not to do so, and I took advantage of it. 😂

I also joined the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim. So I’ve made the choice to do some very bad things that range from theft to targeted assassinations. Neither of which could be considered good in real life. One of my friends, on the other hand, killed members of the Dark Brotherhood as she found their murderous ways to be deeply offensive. So, of course, she killed them in the name of good. 🙄

In the case of KCD2, the developer has provided options for choices in the game that some people are going to find deeply offensive or outright evil. Whether it’s the gay sex scene or Henry being raped by the woman, the choices you make as a player are going to lead you somewhere, and you might not like where you end up. I suspect that there are even more examples of controversial content in the game that have not come to light yet.

So should you buy the game? If you are someone who liked the first game and is interested in playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, then you have the following choices:

1. Don’t buy the game if any of the content offends you.

2. Buy the game and make choices in the game that avoid the offensive content.

3. Wait until someone creates a mod for the game that removes the offensive content altogether.

I mention the mod thing here because Skyrim has a TON of mods. I see no reason why some developer can’t create a mod for KCD 2 that simply strips out the offensive content for certain players. The game already has a bunch of mods that have been developed for it, so somebody out there should be able to create one that alters the dialogue options in the second game to make it more like the first one or that simply removes all offensive content completely.

The real lesson here for all players is caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Do your homework before you buy a game, and you might save yourself money, time and aggravation by avoiding content you don’t like.

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