I have a longer post brewing about Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KC:D), but I needed to get this out today because its infuriating, and also because we might all be quarantined from the Coronavirus by Monday (but don’t worry, Pence will just pray the virus away, so we are all good!)

The combat system in KC:D when fighting more than one opponent is so cripplingly bad it might ruin everything else about the game.

Let’s back up. The combat in KC:D is like a worse version of Mount and Blade when its one on one. You swing in certain directions, you block in those same directions, you have stamina and health, armor and weapons, there are combos, blablabla. It works, even if it never feels good.

The problem is that KC:D insists on being realistic even when that gets in the way of an enjoyable game, and while this is annoying in other parts of the game, it straight up doesn’t work in combat when fighting multiple opponents. For one, because the camera locks onto a target, you can’t accurately track multiple enemies, especially if they aren’t standing next to each other. The result is you spend much of combat fighting the camera just to have a chance of seeing when you need to block.

Then there is the issue with animation locking. If you swing a sword, you realistically can’t do anything during the animation period. If you get hit during an animation however, it stops and you take damage, unless it’s a block or dodge animation, in which case you dodge/block all of the attacks coming at you. It’s so ‘realistic’ it makes zero fucking sense. This also means that if you are fighting 3+ enemies, your window to successfully make an attack is tiny, as you are mostly focused on blocking/dodging the entire time. This is extra fun against stronger enemies who block/dodge most of your attacks.

Having stamina is key to combat, not only to have energy to block and attack, but because you take more health damage the lower your stamina gets. In one on one situations this is a fine mechanic, as you can control stamina by managing the pace of the fight. This mostly goes out the window when 2+ enemies are around, because you CAN’T control the pace. I’ve yet to win a combat that is 1v3+, and frankly don’t see how its possible without cheesing the game via geometry manipulation or archery fuckery.

Now maybe this is a case of me being really bad at the game, and good players can easily juggle 1v3 situations and enjoy it. Sure, maybe. But I doubt it, because not to toot my own horn, but I’m kinda good at videogames in general, so if I’m struggling here, good luck to the average chump that is Silver rank in LoL, or near the bottom of the dps chart in WoW.

Rant over.