Kingdom Come Deliverance Beta

[Amelie Robertos]

On4 of march 2016 Warhorse Studios announced the release of Kingdom Come: Deliverance Beta access on Windows PC, available for backers with the Knight Tier or higher. This release includes a part of the game's main storyline, multiple quests, new combat systems, weaponry and the first large-scale battle.

The backers registered on our website in the past months already have Steam keys in their profile. The code is still there for your reference. For the Early Alpha players, who already activated the Steam code, the Alpha will automatically update to Beta on Steam.

We also would like to announce the launch of the new editions. The previous ones are not available anymore, but don't worry, Kickstarter tiers will be assigned to your profile, after you register on the website!

All editions provide access to the Beta and the final game. There is still and option to upgrade your pledge, if you like to grab some unique collectibles! For more info please visit our website www.kingdomcomerpg.com and try the Beta Access today!

The new video, shared on YouTube by Digital Dreams, showcases the beta version of the role-playing game developed by Warhorse Studios complete with ReShade-powered ray tracing. Despite being the beta of a game released a few years back, the Kingdom Come Deliverance beta complete with ray tracing looks considerably better than most games released in recent times.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is a story-driven role-playing game developed by Warhorse Studios. Playing as the son of a Blacksmith in 15th century Bohemia, players will find themselves involved in a conflict that will determine the future of the kingdom.

You're Henry, the son of a blacksmith. Thrust into a raging civil war, you watch helplessly as invaders storm your village and slaughter your friends and family. Narrowly escaping the brutal attack, you grab your sword to fight back. Avenge the death of your parents and help repel the invading forces!

I've been playing the closed beta of Conqueror's Blade, a lavish medieval warfare MMO from a team led by assorted Halo alumni. It arrives with eerily similar timing to that other big-scale medieval game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but entirely multiplayer rather than singleplayer, and is all about bundling together hacky-slashy third-person tropes with a massed-army siege mentality.

Total War has made its own attempt to provide a boots-on-the-ground view of its enormous historical skirmishes, but 2005's Spartan: Total Warrior wasn't exactly a crowd-pleaser. Here's a fresh take on playing as a general who gets their hands oh-so-dirty.

This stage of the beta, which only runs until Feb 4, has one foot in the world of startling technological accomplishment and the other in the world of glitchy strife. My character has an invisible or psychedelic face depending on where the camera is, for instance, while weird, spiky artifacts fluttered unpleasantly across the screen at all times.

The big, crunchy, NPC-heavy online thunder has been somewhat stolen by Ubisoft's For Honor, whose halting success surely gives the makers of any other historical warfare action game pause for thought, but this is a very different proposition.

There are similarities, at least in the broadest strokes of your selecting a class then haring about manually stabbing (or, in this case, sometimes shooting) hordes of people while accompanied by a horde of AI-controlled followers, and running on the ol' gear upgrade treadmill to boot. However, Blade takes an altogether more strategic approach, with a big emphasis on doling out formation orders to your lads and directing them to use various siege equipment once you fancy a punt at snatching a castle.

It's not total Total War by any means, but a working knowledge of shield walls and column vs row formations will take you far. Quite a lot of it, in my limited experience to date, involves repeatedly ordering your crew to follow, charge or grab some equipment, with actual battles descending into a frantic melee, you yourself charging around the outer perimeter, hacking at people's backs. But this is based on my early, unskilled forays, and, going on the General chat channel, it gets a lot more involved and a lot more rock, paper, scissors (it feels weirder every time I write that) in terms of the NPCs you bring with you.

It doesn't describe itself as an RPG, and it's fair to say that it's light on stuff like skills and quests, though you will be levelling up and earning or buying gear upgrades, like swords which deal more piercing or blunt damage and all that jazz. From what I've seen, it has plenty of numbers but, out on the battlefield, the results seem to come down to overall stabbiness more than anything. But that's low level; I can't speak to whether I'll be uselessly poking at armoured spearmen further down the line if I don't happen to have the right armour-piercing stick.

It's strictly structured as a PVP game, with various factions vying for control of a large open world in a way that evokes Planetside's legendary push-and-pull. Though you can somewhat opt out of that broader war and just working on levelling up your character and their army, there is no PVE element to speak of at present.

If you're looking for a fight, you've two options. Quickest and with the most spectacular results is Join a Battle, which entails clicking a big red button then waiting on a queue screen, with no option to do anything else while you twiddle your thumbs. Those waiting rooms are just one way in which this evokes decades-old MMORPGs.

The battles, when they come, play out like some enormous historical take on Battlefield. You've all these players with their several dozen followers, effectively playing the world's biggest game of capture the flag. You have to storm the keep, which involves slaying enemy soldiers and players and/or smashing down gates with battering rams and mounting ramparts with siege towers, and once inside you need to hold control of a capture point for sufficient time.

Alternatively, you can roam a large but flat, almost Google Mapsy exterior world, in which you and whatever soldiers you brought with you will almost almost certainly end up in a fight with someone else and their gaggle, either by chance or by moving into rival territory. This screen also enables you to 'forage' for resources which you can spend on buying and upgrading soldiers, as well as funding more ambitious outings.

Technically this part of the game counts as a sandbox, but in practice it feels vaguely like a real-time version of a Total War or Civ campaign map. It's not exactly getting out and exploring, really, though I'll be interested to see what it's like once the playerbase is fully stocked. That said, it's not exactly a wasteland right now - there's a worrying number of high-level players already, and it's one of those games where someone ten levels above you is effectively invincible, so do be careful in that overworld.

However you get into a fight, you'll then need to manually control your character while simultaneously doling out orders to your units. It's a great concept, realised at scale, but right now it's definitely feeling a little on the sterile side. The menus, of which there are many, are deeply inelegant and cursed with all sorts of overlapping terminology, too.

There's a certain undercurrent of the grindy Eastern MMO, of the sort that briefly scooped up a lot of folk jonesing for a post-WoW fix back in the mid-noughties, from how blandly it presents hubs and shops and faction quests, to the overwrought array of stuff you need to find or buy in order to recruit or upgrade your army. And there's the very harsh level gating. As I say, facing off against a player ten levels higher is suicide, but what I don't know is how it'll all flatten out once everyone's high level and the difference is in the specific units and equipment they wield.

Despite its promise of this big sandbox world caught up in an endless territorial war, it all comes across as quite contextless, just a whole mess of anonymous folk trying to kill each other rather than anyone actually striving for anything. (Although the chat channels featured a lot of sometimes ugly boasting about how the English-speaking playerbase had currently given the sizeable Chinese contingent what-for)

It's a hell of a spectacle, and it's wonderful to see actual armies duking it out from such a close perspective, but I came away feeling it's currently too much of a rat race of grinding out numbers for my tastes. Yeah, it does realise a boots on the ground perspective of Total War's massive battles, but in my experience so far, it's more a test of how much time you can put in than of military canniness.

While the setting, environment and story are all being praised, the technical execution is poor. The game launched riddled with issues, including problems with quests bugs that took two weeks or more to be fixed..

However, if you're playing on PC you have access to the console commands. It's here you can manipulate some variables although it's worth noting that a lot of the most common commands have been removed for the final release.

During Kingdom Come: Deliverance's alpha and beta it was possible to give your character infinite money, items and weapons. These commands are currently disabled so we haven't listed them. If they do return we'll update as soon as we're aware.

These cheats were available during the beta tests but have since been disabled for the proper release. Considering how buggy this game is, it wouldn't surprise us if the money cheat and the item cheat were re-enabled at some point soon. So we've decided to list them here for when that day comes.

The world knows that watered down games on the PC piss me off, so it should come as no surprise that I'm triggered by the news that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has been watered down since its first tease in BETA form in 2016.

When Kingdom Come: Deliverance was first shown off in beta form it looked amazing, and now Shazoo member 'design3d' has pointed to some specific images of the game in its beta state, and the launch version of the game. He said that the screenshots have been taken in the same places, with the same weather, with both versions of the game cranked to Ultra High visual settings.

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