This ‘anti-woke’ video game is actually good… (KC:D2)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s devs may not have good politics, but the game offers important advice to all of us: that we ARE actors in history and CAN affect the world around us.
Why I’ve been able to pour 200 hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
I will say, before we go any further, that I do have a non-vested interest in talking about this game. I love it. It’s so fucking good. I really hate to say it in such an artless manner, but this game is fucking fun. Whether you’re doing alchemy or smashing in the helms of your rivals, the game feels realistic and rewarding. The immersion is so strong that, after an update created a bug that flickered the trees as they reached the game’s render distance, I had to stop playing for almost a week until they fixed it. I didn’t want anything ruining my immersion into the world of Medieval Bohemia.
But wait, how is a game set in 15th century Bohemia significantly anti-woke? Isn’t that obvious? It’s the damn 1400s…
If you have been online for a long enough amount of time, you have heard of GamerGate and its stupidity. Unfortunately, that’s where this game’s ‘anti-woke’ legacy stems from. The backstory to the anti-woke crusade (pun-intended) originally occurred at the release of the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance, when the developers responded to criticism of the game’s lack of diversity. Historically, the region depicted in the game would be overwhelmingly white and Christian. But, when challenged by a European historian, the game dev, Daniel Vávra, doubled down on his choice. This backlash lead the director to sympathize with pro-Gamergate voices and himself say “The future of our biz is at stake, and ‘progressive’ media are destroying it with their hateful narrative.”
Obviously, this was silly -- but wasn’t everything in 2015 silly compared to today? The stakes of “video game journalism ethics” are miniscule compared to the idea of free speech being completely destroyed or birthright citizenship being revoked. Why am I playing a video game at all right now?
Now, more than ever
Reflecting on the history of the past could not be more important right now, at a time when literally everyone is trying to obfuscate, generalize, or straight-up lie about the ancient and even not-so-distant past. Getting insight into the types of exploitation, subterfuge, and social dynamics that existed outside of our time period is immensely beneficial, especially given the insistence that capitalism is a permanent, age-old concept. This game takes place a little more than 600 years ago and, behold! — capitalism is only the concept of a concept. Something that is so rigid and deeply-woven into our lives just barely older than half a century. Unfathomable to us individually, but infinitesimally small in our collective memory. Worth pondering.
Henry, the class understander
In KCD2, your protagonist, Henry, begins on a courier mission from your liegelords, but quickly you are assaulted by bandits and lose all of your belongings (and skill experience) ‘from the first game.’ While this may seem like a classic ‘sequel reset,’ where a game’s sequel forces players to start from the bottom and work their way back up to their original prominence, it serves as a strong introduction to the world of Bohemia. Unlike the majority of RPGs, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 disabuses the player of the notion they are special almost immediately, reducing your lordly companion to a peasant because of the quality of his dress. In the world of Medieval Bohemia, the clothes make the man. This type of rigid class society is easily exploitable, though, because of their reliance on symbols and customary dress. Adorning a waiter’s uniform, decking yourself out in flamboyant fabrics, or wearing dirty armor all impact the ways you are received by the locals. If you present an untrustworthy facade, you’re likely to be rebuffed and told to go clean yourself up.
Hal’s Pals
Henry is one thing, but the other characters are where the game truly shines. Supporting characters are wily, fully-developed, and the world reacts to you in a much more intimate way than, say, Skyrim, in which random NPCs will address you by one of the many titles you are able to obtain as the ‘Dragonborn.’ Here in KCD2, you’re just a guy. Despite your lack of status, the world remains open to you, and you are able to work your way through different problems. You want to spy on the usurper king visiting the city? Help out the local waiter and he’ll give you his clothes. You’re aligned with the local thieves against the usurper king? Steal some sausages and booze from the army’s camp and they’ll tell you secrets about the army’s movements. Everything is within reach when you’re amenable to helping people.
Apothecary Diaries
Of course, above all, KCD2’s gameplay is the star of the show. Grinding cannot get more literal in this game: the first skill I was able to max out was my alchemy, grinding together thousands of flowers and boiling them to perfection. Most activities in this game, including combat, require attention and precision -- just a slight slip-up and your brew or weapon is ruined. Or, in the worst case, you miss a block and you’re reloading a save from an hour previous. If you didn’t drink Saviour Schnapps, the item that allows manual save, you might be out of luck because the game doesn’t autosave. The game feels like a radical return to video games of a previous era, when thought was required at every juncture. Oftentimes I had to pause whatever I was listening to in one ear and dedicate my attention to the game in a way that a piece of media (save for books) had not forced me to do in a long time. I’m not going to make an argument that video games are good for your attention span, but this game will actually punish you for your inattention, a far more frustrating type of punishment for an ADHD brain like me.
Reading is good actually
The final piece of the puzzle that seals the deal for me is the game’s comprehensive Codex which features dozens of entries about the world of 1400s Bohemia, with topics spanning politics, trades, inventions, technologies, and social customs. I have read more in the Codex of KCD2 than in the trilogy of Assassin’s Creed games featuring Ezio (the only ones that matter). In the wake of the anti-intellectual shift in our culture, any game promising literacy as a benefit is fine by me. The game emphasizes the importance of scholarship by making it one of your in-game stats, and it goes up by just reading random books you find. KCD2 encourages information gathering as part of the canon and the mechanics of the game, which obviously has my full-throated endorsement.
Interrogating the past
Before I get into my endorsement, I will dispense with my criticism. There are some tacit endorsements of the underlying systemic problems of the 15th century world the game inhabits and those are important to identify, especially when the creator of the game is European.
Violence
In KCD2, while violence is not always the best option, it almost always is an option. As a good Marxist, I can’t and won’t completely disavow the use of violence for political ends as much as any supporter of America could do the same. However, there are situations when violence is definitively not one of the options. The game seems to neglect that, and offers violence as a last resort to many of the game’s fundamental quests. Players have complained of difficulty of achieving a complete ‘pacifist run,’ wherein Henry does not kill; as a gamer who has personally spent way too much time playing this game, it seems nearly impossible to me that someone could complete that run. Despite its theoretical possibility, the likelihood that a random player would be willing and able to complete such an arduous task with seemingly no tangible reward makes the appeal of violence as a solution that more tantalizing. Why actually try to negotiate when you can just get the sword out?
Gender Roles and Exploitation
Given the general experience of women of the times, standouts like Katherine and Rosa Ruthyard are incredibly welcome additions to the mostly male-focused plotlines. However, unfortunately, these two, alongside Anna of Waldstein do not represent the vast majority of women in the storyline. The overwhelming majority of the women characters are, at best quest-givers with little more than functional dialogue, at worst willing and satisfied participants in the time period’s Catholic doctrinal loophole to prostitution: the bathhouse.
To be fair to the game, it is really funny that when your character’s stamina skill level is lower, you’re more likely to get a negative performance review.
But, past level 20 in stamina, I never had any negative comments after the ‘full-service’ bathhouse experience. Moreover, Henry gets the ‘Time Well-Spent’ perk after this experience, granting bonuses to key stats — for one of the lowest prices in the game for a service. For other goods, the time taken and skill required seem to factor in more heavily. For women’s labor, that does not seem to be the case, as usual.
The ‘Sons of Israel’
Depictions of Jewish Czechs are both Orientalist and patronizing, painting the Jews as controlling large sums of money in local politics and only showing their support for the ‘business as usual’ King Wenceslas when their fortunes in the city seemed to shift. A minor character, Administrator Jerome, describes just one of the mundane manual labor tasks that you should complete with a quote that seems to almost speak through the television into the modern world. I’ll let you be the judge of whether there is any ideology contained in the below image.
Studying the past
Besides the key takeaway from the game that violence is a tool that can be used by righteous or malevolent forces, there are some more lessons that Marxists and socialists should take into consideration.
Actors in History versus Observers of Events
Despite the lack of status and the accompanying lack of political power, Henry as an actor in the course of the game’s events is able to affect the world — investigating and exposing a massive national conspiracy stealing from the silver mining industry, negotiating alliances between large houses, ending the terror of a murderer in the streets of Kuttenberg, and more. By the endgame, you are a menace, able to defeat a band of brigands or the most venerable tournament champion — you have become something from basically nothing. You have taken your place in history, despite the story not writing you in. Through sheer will, you affect events and your future.
Taking your time, analyzing a situation, putting together a rational understanding and, then, crucially, acting in order to affect events. These are the lessons that I drew from the immensely fun Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 — now it’s time to actually use those lessons.
In solidarity,
-H