Warhorse Studios has just taken a giant leap for the gamers who still haven’t played Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. The developers announced a free weekend to play the game for all and sundry on Xbox and Steam, and a discount of 40% if you choose to buy the game. This almost over trial period allows the players to experience the medieval RPG without spending their money and then after that, they can play it to their hearts’ content.
The feedback from the gaming community has been to put it mildly a combination of technical difficulties and excitement. There are users who are having a great time playing the game but then there are others who are having such serious problems that one might think twice about going into the game.
Positives should be the first to be mentioned and the reason is that there is almost a whole lot of excitement to be had. A good number of users have stated that KCD2 is performing very well, and one of the players even remarked “the optimization is so good it’s crazy.” This is indeed something very rare when one takes into account the game being laden with beautiful medieval backgrounds and complex gameplay. Another user called the improvement “diabolical” in a good sense, and honestly, that just makes me more inquisitive about the whole affair.
The free-trial scheme appears to be giving the expected return to Warhorse. One player commented, “Warhorse knows what they are doing by granting KCD2 access for free for only a limited time,” thus, explaining that the strong initial hours are what immerses players in the narrative and world building. They even pinpointed the moment when a player can no longer be saved as the time inside Trosky Castle. This is really bold game designing indeed.
The question now is where the trouble starts and if I may say so, this is the point where it gets really interesting. Some Xbox Series X users reported that the game was constantly crashing, and one person even said that for him the game “crashes every 20 minutes on Series X.” I wouldn’t call that a great experience at all. The situation was even worse for the user on Steam who stated, “I installed the game and it crashed four times in four attempts to play. I couldn’t even get through the intro xD.” That really is a tough situation.
The combat system, which was always there to split opinions, continues in this game as well. A player from the Turkish-speaking community expressed his complaints saying that “the direction sensitivity in fighting is too weak, realism is missing (like limb dismemberment), and counter-attacks being triggered in the wrong directions is mentally taxing and unnecessary.” They would only want counter-attacks with timely attacks in the same direction to be triggered, which to me sounds like a dueling system.
Nonetheless, there are still gamers who are on the side of the improvements in the fighting system. One of the players has already finished the second playthrough with the DLC and is “training with TomCat to learn the Master Strike!” They also called KCD2 as their “GOTY and the best game I played since Baldurs Gate 3.” What an incredible compliment, considering BG3 won almost every award last year.
The game’s release on various platforms also caused some commotion, especially among the PlayStation fans who felt unappreciated. A user bluntly stated “Fuck PS i guess,” which certainly represents the opinion of most Sony console players. Another user asked for “an Xbox pc version please,” suggesting that there are still some confusions concerning the different platform versions.
Furthermore, the performance problems were not limited to game crashes only. Some people with older PCs said that they were planning to play kcd2 but their machines were too weak to run it. This is the classical problem every PC gamer has to deal with—trying to keep up with modern games which is indeed becoming a very demanding task.
The plot and the character’s conversations were controversially received as well. A user noted that although the improvements in frames per second and support of the quality of life were nice, he criticized the “modern style of communication in Medieval setting,” calling Hans “forced cringe.” He even asked for a 60fps upgrade for the first game on Xbox, claiming that it had “better story beats and writing.”
Despite the technical glitches, the enthusiasm for the game among players is still unbroken. One player even went as far as to say that it was “one of the few games I was happy to pay the full price for,” while another even went on to tell the developers “you all are great.” It is plain to see that there is a lot of affection for Warhorse Studios out there.
The free weekend’s timing did, however, result in some player inconveniences, as one user asked if they could “extend it since ‘I won’t be home on the 8th and 9th; can you extend it until the 11th?'” I’m afraid extending free
