Triple Click - Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Roundtable (with Tom Bissell, Liam McIntyre, & Matthew Seiji Burns)

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Kirk has really been enjoying the medieval role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, but Maddy and Jason both weren't playing, so he didn't have anyone to talk to about it. Hoever, some of his non-podcaster friends were playing the game, too. One thing led to another, and they wound up recording this special episode about it.ABOUT THE GUESTS:TOM BISSELL is an author and screenwriter. He has published loads of books including Extra Lives, Magic Hours, and Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. He's also written for video game series like Uncharted and Gears of War and wrote the final three episodes of Star Wars: Andor.MATTHEW SEIJI BURNS  is a writer, musician, and game designer. He worked on AAA series like Halo and Call of Duty before moving to Zachtronics, where he helped make games like Opus Magnum and Eliza, the latter of which he also directed. He is the author of the 2025 novel Process.Together, Tom and Matthew wrote the 2015 interactive fiction game The Writer Will Do Something, which remains (in this episode notes writer's opinion) one of the definitive encapsulations of working as a writer in video games. Seriously, go play it.LIAM MCINTYRE is an actor who has appeared in a variety of programs - among other roles, he was the lead in Starz's Sparticus: Vengeance, and played Weather Wizard in the CW's The Flash. As a voice actor, he's played everyone from Captain Boomerang to Marcus Fenix's son JD, and will play Logan himself in Insomniac's upcoming game Marvel's Wolverine.LINKS ETC.SkillUp’s KCD2 Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wFHtqKYMaM“Saint Barbara Theme,” “Welcome to Troskovice,” by Jan Valta & Adam Sporka from the KCD2 Original SoundtrackSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Some Triple Click Merch!! https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/  Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Hello everyone, Kirk here, as promised, with a special bonus episode for you all, a Thanksgiving treat. A little while back on the show, I mentioned that I had been playing and loving a role-playing game called Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. A bunch of people had written in over the course of the year to tell me that I should play this game, that I would love it, saying that it was just the kind of grounded, narratively complex, and frictional game that I'm always saying I like. I finally listened to them, I installed it, and I quickly fell in love with it. I found myself falling under this game's weird spell. So thanks to everyone who recommended that I play this game. As I was playing, I was talking with my friends Tom Bissell and Matthew Sagey Burns,

two writers I've known for a long time, each of whom had also been playing the game. Tom, many of you will know. He's an author, a literature critic. He's a video game writer. He's written out on everything from Uncharted 4 to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter to Gears of War. Lately, he's been working in TV more, and he wrote the final three episodes of The tremendous second season of Star Wars and Or. We actually had him on Triple Click just recently to talk about that show. Matthew, meanwhile, will also be familiar to longtime listeners. He's

been, I guess, on the show many times going back to the split screen days. He worked in various development roles at big studios in the 2000s and 2010s. He worked on series like Halo and Call of Duty before joining Zachtronics, where he wrote and continues to write music and did narrative design and writing for a number of those terrific games, those machine games. building puzzle games that they make at Zactronics. He also wrote and directed the visual novel Eliza, which is great and kind of predated chat GPT, but it's all about AI-driven therapy. And it's really more relevant than ever today.

It'd be a great one to play, I think, really thought-provoking, and just a really nice game. Matthew's recent novel process is also really cool. It was my one more thing recently, and I really enjoyed that book. So I was playing this game. I was talking with these two guys, and I realized that I really wanted to talk. about this game on triple click in a substantive way. Like, have an actual conversation about it, not just rant about how it's really cool for a while during a one more thing. It's just such an unusual and interesting game. It demands conversation. There's so much to talk about. And sometimes

this just happens on triple click. You know, one of us gets into a game and the other two hosts just don't have time for it or they're not interested or whatever. And that's fine. I mean, that happens. It's not like we're going to start making episodes like this all the time. this is just kind of one of those stars aligning kind of situations where Tom and I were chatting and we kind of just came up with the idea of, hey, why don't we just record something ourselves with Matthew talking about this game? And then Tom said, oh, you know what, you should have my friend Liam on as well. He and I played through the game together. He's really funny. He'll be a great guest. And I'm like, huh, Liam? Okay, who's Liam? And he says,

oh, Liam McIntyre, the actor. And I'm like, oh, okay. So Leon McIntyre is a well-known actor. He played the lead in Spartacus Vengeance. He's been on TV. He's in a lot of video games and animation. He does a lot of voice work. You'll hear why he gets hired for a lot of voice work the minute he starts talking. And he'll actually be playing Logan himself in Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game. So I said, sure, that sounds great. I'd love to know what Wolverine thinks of this game. So the four of us hopped on a Zoom call and had the conversation you're about to hear. Now, what is this game? Kingdom Come Deliverance II came out earlier this year. It was developed by the Czech Studio, Warhorse Games. It's already been a big success per Warhorse. It has sold 4 million copies

as of November. It is dedicated to an unusually grounded story set in 15th century Bohemia, which was the name of the region of Europe that we now know as the Czech Republic. You play as Henry of Scalitz, the same character from the first game, a squire and bodyguard to Hans Capon of Perkstein, an annoying and occasionally annoyingly charming noble. The two of them on a diplomatic mission that quickly goes incredibly wrong. After the prologue, you will find yourself naked and penniless with only your wits to get by. But then over the course of the next many dozens and dozens of hours, you'll build Henry up to be a master swordsman, famous blacksmith,

a spy, a thief, and a diplomat who plays an integral role in a series of increasingly complex conflicts between the regional lords and the forces of two boring kings, the current rightful king, Wencesloss the fourth, to whom Henry and Hans are loyal, and the Hungarian Sigismund of Luxembourg, also known as Sigismund the Usurper. Both of those kings, of course, real people. This whole thing really happened.

The backdrop is real, even if some of the specific characters are amalgams or are fictionalized. As for the gameplay, it is a first-person action RPG. It feels a little bit like Skyrim, just in the basic movement, the way the world is all simulated. It's a little bit like Red Dead Redemption 2

in its groundedness, its slowness, its dedication to historical realism, And it's a bit like The Witcher 3 in its massive script, its sprawling and ambitious story, and the constantly surprising side quests. They never go where you're expecting. There's always some new complication, and each of them is very well-written and entertaining.

All right, that is enough from me. Before we get started, I want to play my three temporary co-hosts introducing themselves, just so you can know who each guy is, though they all sound very different. And I do want to note that Tom recorded on AirPods because that's what he had. So his vocal quality isn't quite on the level. And actually, if you compare the way that his recording sounds to Liam's recording, you can see just what a difference it makes if you have a really great microphone. And also if your voice sounds like Liam McEntire's.

Hey, I'm Liam McIntyre. This is Tom Bessel. And this is Matthew Sagey Burns. All right. With that, let's get into our conversation about Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. All right, guys, welcome to this special episode of Triple Click. I'm so excited that you're all here. and I'm very excited to talk with you about this game.

Excited to be here as well. This is the most absolutely not-so game that I've probably ever played in probably about 50 years. Well, maybe not that many years, but a while. So Tom, you and Liam played this game together. Can you just describe to listeners a little bit how you played it? Because Matthew and I played it like normal people hunched over a computer in the darkness alone. But the two of you actually played together. How did that work?

I had heard a lot about how wonderful the game was. I think I watched Skill Ups Review, and I tried the first Kingdom Come. I'd heard it was weird. I heard it was very obtuse and kind of hard to get used to, and I bounced off the first one real hard. But the Skill Up Review I watched, and I thought, okay, this sounds pretty interesting.

So I proposed it to Liam. Liam and I kind of have a running date where, you know, once or twice a month, he comes over and we play something until 3 in the morning. And we fired up Kingdom Come. And I remember, we were like, this is kind of remarkably interesting and really strange. It doesn't feel like anything. I think the joke we made is that if you thought Red Dead Red Dead Redemption 2 was too fast-paced,

this is the game to really go to. And we, Liam, back me up. We kind of hated it at first. It was aggressively what it was. Like, I don't think I've ever played a game that was so unabashedly like, you're getting this experience no matter what. There is no amount of playtesting that we will do that will change our mind. It was just, look, I haven't played a game like this since control where for the first two weeks of playing control, I actively hated it every moment of it. I just, I'd just stop playing it off and on. I was like, I can't, I'd just stop playing this. I hate this until it magically clicked at some point. And this was the same. Tom and I, we'd set up these times to play the game. And then, so we'd sit down, we'd play it for 30 minutes.

you would walk endlessly through a forest, nothing would happen, you would see an encampment, and you're like, oh, I know how RPGs work, let's run to that. It's an empty encampment. There must be a quest. There's no quest. Why are we doing this to ourselves? And we did that for way too long. And we, interchangeably, we'd be like, we've got to try something else, and we'd go to like power wash simulator or something. And then inevitably, it was so committed to itself, once you started to invest, the sunk cost became, you know, enriching and it became better and better and better the longer you invested in it. A rare case of the sun cost fallacy helping you discover something wonderful. The same thing happened to me. I almost quit as well. And the only reason I stuck to it was

because Tom told me that I should keep playing. Nice. But it was like that opening. It's like, I was like, am I watching a Kajima game? It is just, it's just, it's talking at you for like 20 minute blocks at a time. And then isn't that first mission where you really get to do something, you just pick up a bunch of flour or something similar and walk it into like a storage claw? And you're like, okay, here we go. And there's like, all right, thanks for that. Here's 20 more minutes of like backstory. And you're like, wait, that was it? Unbelievably way. Like, incredibly brave way to start a game. Yeah, that is definitely true. This is a very unusual game. I think anyone listening to this,

I'm guessing that a lot of people listening to this will already know what this game is, what Kingdom Come Deliverance to is. At the same time, I think we could probably explain it a little bit, aside from just it is a historical medieval role-playing game. So I thought one way that we might do that would be to each tell a specific story of something that illustrates how unusual this game is. And I'll start. This was something fairly early on in the game.

You two are describing, or all three of you actually, are describing these like incredibly the period of the game where you have like nothing. You're naked. you're running around in the woods, you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing, which can go on for a very long time, depending on how directed you are, and how fast you are about, like, going and talking to the blacksmith, who gives you a place to sleep and gives you some clothes, or just wandering around in the woods, which I did for a while.

But once you kind of get going, especially with the blacksmith, who is one of the kind of main quest givers you go to talk to, he gives you somewhere to sleep, he kind of gives you a job, you get a little bit started, and then an early quest that he gives you, has you going to another town, you kind of talk to the officials of that town, and I went and did this. This was a kind of standard side quest for this kind of a game. I talked to them, and they say to me, okay, we're going to go out and we're going to figure out where this crashed down wagon is, and we're going to find these guys that went missing. We can't ride out now, so we're

going to ride out in the morning. So come find us, and then we'll go. So then I think, okay, cool, great. And then I go off and do seven other things and play for another few hours. And then I come back and the guys are sitting there. And I'm like, hey, all right, can we go? And they say, we already went. Why didn't you show up? You know, we got up early in the morning. We were going to go check it out.

And you weren't there. So we went and did it. And then they explained to me the entire rest of the quest as it would have happened if I had been there. And I realized like, oh, so with side quests at this game, if they tell me to do something on a time frame, I have to do it. You would think I would have learned. But then actually, multiple times in this game that has still gotten me where I'm supposed to go find something.

too late and someone finds it before me because time matters in this game in a way that I didn't realize. So that is my one unusual thing from this game. I haven't experienced this personally but I was reading some other people's experiences the game and one thing I didn't

even consider it was like there's different points in the game where you have to have like a charisma off with someone where you know someone you've got to you know embarrass people or whatever it might be or like trying to show off in front of people and apparently you can you know, you can, you'd poison their food the night before and then the next day they will be incapacitated and not show up themselves or, you know, get their, they steal their clothes and they'll

have nothing to wear. And I was like, oh my God, you can do that? That's mad. Someone was saying you can poison, I believe you can poison a horse's food, like you could poison an apple and feed it to a horse and it makes the horse die. Am I right? I might be making that up. Sounds right. It's the kind of thing that is at least possible in this game. I think for me it was the mission where you have to give someone diarrhea to beat them in a horse race when I thought, okay, this is pretty special. And I remember early there was a mission where it seemed like pretty straightforward, go get something and bring it back.

But somewhere along the way I was offered a kind of side hustle. And I don't, forgive me for not remembering the particulars who was a while ago that I played this. But I remember there was some side hustle that came up and I wound up completely. the mission in what felt like a pretty unusual way. And when I came back to the Quest Giver, they talked about the unusual way that I completed it. And then I remember just thinking, oh my God, like it knows when you don't fulfill a mission

under the traditional auspices of mission fulfillment. And then it knows to comment on it. And then it's got enough variety in the actual script where it's able to roughly guess, not only did you do it in an unorthodox way, it hints at the way you accomplished it. And I remember thinking, oh boy, this feels like a game

that's really worth digging into and messing with. And I wound up poisoning a lot of people's forces. I would sneak into an enemy camp that I couldn't beat traditionally while they were all asleep and I'd poison their wine jug and then I'd just go crouch in the woods and wait and watch them wake up in the morning, have their morning line,

and then they'd all pass out, and then I would come kill them all. It was like it just doesn't operate like any other game I've ever played. Matthew, how about you? Yeah, it's so reactive in that way that you were just talking about, Tom, and people will comment on you as you walk by what status you are as well. And so the thing that I'll always, that happened to me throughout my playthrough is that when you take a bath or use any kind of bathhouse services, it just automatically takes all your clothes off. And then it doesn't really tell you that it does this. So you're like, oh, thanks.

Thanks for the bath. And you run outside and you start running through town or running through the woods. And then you'll be walking through a village and somebody will be like, hey, you should put some clothes on. Like, what are you doing? And you'll go to your inventory and you'll be like, oh, that's right. I forgot that when I take a bath, it just takes your clothes off. And it doesn't really remind you. It just is kind of a joke, I think, maybe, on the part of the developers

that you have to, like, remember to do these kinds of things. I was telling Kirk that that happened to me. And Kirk said, well, I always remember to put my clothes back on after that. I shouldn't overstate that. I do forget sometimes, actually. I fall for it sometimes and realize that I'm walking around in a towel. We just had that thing as we played last night where we were walking around and we accidentally drew a sword

and went up to like a tray or just a person wandering around the roads between cities as they tend to do and they just aggressively like put that down put that sword down right now and you're like well all right buddy and then when he's like all right

that's a much better way to behave and you're like dude you know I saved a kingdom do you know who I am? And it was just they have so much variety and that same interactivity that's that real it feel the world feels

it's banality I guess makes the world feel more alive. I think a lot of games tend to tiptoe towards the line of just regular stuff happens, but it's not exciting, so they have to fill it with other things, whereas this game has so much, it's just, it's not quite a life simulator, but it is as close as it can to just be, you know, walk around and stuff that would happen will probably happen, and stuff that wouldn't happen probably won't happen. I think there's really something to that.

in that, you know, I mean, Matthew, you said maybe they're playing a joke on the player, but really I think that each of those little things you have to do, that you have to remember, even just having to eat or, you know, I don't know, take a bath or clean off your clothes, those kinds of things. You put them all together and it kind of lowers the peak excitement level that this game can really have. Or like the possibility space kind of lowers until you're just in what feels much closer to the regular world. Like, if you think about a game like Skyrim, the most exciting thing that can happen to you in Skyrim right at that moment could be like a dragon flying out of the sky and then suddenly you're like fighting a god and like shooting it out of the air, right? Like the possibility for excitement is really, really high.

So as a result, when you're doing little boring stuff, there's like a huge level of contrast. Where in this game, most of the time, the most exciting thing that can happen is like maybe you get in a fight with a bandit or like two bandits and the violence isn't like that exciting. It's sort of weird. So most of the time, it's like attenuated the level of excitement that you can have. And so all of those little fiddly things don't feel like distractions. They feel like pretty vital parts of the game. And then when you're doing something like you're at a wedding and you're sneaking alcohol up to some guys that you think probably shouldn't have that alcohol, like it feels kind of exciting because it's the most exciting thing you've maybe done in that hour. Does that make any sense?

I have a theory on this, all this stuff. It's a game about decisions in a lot of ways. and it's a game about the choices that you make on a moment-to-moment basis matter and the choices you make within the story matter. So they've designed the game. Technically, you can kind of scum-save your way through it, like you would with a traditional sort of RPG.

But because saving is kind of a pain in the ass and because you need to actually make or buy the potions to do the saving and their expenses. Can we talk about Savior Snops after this? I have a whole lot to talk about with that. Go on. So it discourages the kind of, Oh, I fucked that up. Let me try it again. Gameplay that most games like this sort of rely on.

And because of that, every decision you make, even drawing your sword, feels really weirdly consequential. And I really admire how the consequentiality goes from your choices as Henry, the character whom you inhabit to whether or not you remember to put your clothes on, to whether or not you remember to eat. Have you slept enough? do you sell how quickly you sell stolen goods like it takes a long time for the heat to fall off stolen goods before you can sell them again

it really discourages the kind of mischief making that you do in other RPGs and it makes you really think God boy I could go steal that thing but this whole town could be in an uproar if I do that and it's mechanics

more than any other game I can think of really enforces is the idea that what you do matters. I think nothing sums up my experience of the game with Tom than save your schnapps as an idea and how it affects the game. Like from the get-go, you're like playing this game. It's egregiously, but like, it's just, it's unsympathetically plain in its delivery. It's everything is very...

You're walking through the woods and nothing is happening. Nothing. It's just, it's a so real world. You're not getting gored by an animal, random. or having some boss fight or a dragon flies. You're just walking around and that's it. Maybe you play dice. A wolf might attack you.

A wolf might attack you and that's a nightmare because they're impossible to beat it. Anyway, so then you have a limited resource of saving, which is I guess the only real part of the game that you're like, okay, it's probably outside of the regular world. But it's, so the concept of Savi Snaps is like you have a limited resource of saves, fine, which also enforces part of that philosophy that, Tom's talking about, about living in the world and not finding ways to break it like you do most

RPGs. And when, you know, you save a game, and that's the only way and the only way you can save a game except for this is very rarely when you complete a quest or something like that. So you could be, as we did during our hate playing version of that period of the game, like we finally got to some small, important mission in a different town. And after multiple tries, maybe 10 tries, because the combat is also so opaque and hard to understand to begin with and eventually when you master it, you feel like a god. But you finally, we finally beat whatever ruffian or rarely regular dude we've had to fight and felt like Kings for the first time in the game probably. And then Tom just absolutely beelined it across the countryside and ran

straight off a cliff and died. And we had to go back about two hours of gameplay. And I was, and we were both like, we're never playing this again. It's impossible to do that again. And then, so at the very start, you meet that woman, you end up staying with that, I can't remember her name, that you stay with, you sort of first. The healer. And, yeah, the healer.

And she shows you the, how to make potions and all that stuff. And that is, again, an impossibly complex. It involves like a sand timer and all these kinds of things. And you're like, why is this so hard? And you have to collect resources. But then if you walk around with them for too long, they degrade and you can no longer use them. So just the process of saving the game is a nightmare and impossible and inscrutable. And getting a save potion is so hard to master,

but that we just never did until an event like that happens where you just lose two hours of progress because, you know, a rush of blood. And now Tom, as we play, has to have, is it 25 save your schnappsas in any given time? Like I had to talk him down from making more as we were playing last night where I'm like, we've only got a couple of hours. We cannot spend all of those hours crafting Save Your Shams. And he was not very happy with that decision, I don't think. That's funny.

Save your Shops is kind of a mechanic that can stand in for a lot of things about the game, where at first it feels really thrilling and it's this really frictional thing. You only have a few of them. You have to really plan your saves out. And then over time, I found at least because you can quit and it will save as well. And there were times where I would just quit and save and then reload the game to get a free save. Wait, what? If you quit it saves?

Am I blowing you guys is fine? What? Well, you can save and quit, and it does the same thing as a savior snaps and saves at any point. No, it doesn't. Tom, does this reduce the amount of save your snaps that you think you need to carry your own? I thought it says you'll just lose your progress. Matthew, did you know you could, when you quit it saved? When you quit to the main menu, it does save in one.

One slot, a single slot. Yeah, there's a save slot that's just for when you quit. And it's save and quit. You don't have to. You can just quit to the menu without saving if you don't want to save whatever just happened. So I would abuse that. But that's like, it's kind of a crappy thing to do. I mean, you guys are playing at a way better way by really embracing savior schnapps,

only because, you know, you have to quit the game and get back in. It totally kills the rhythm. And I actually appreciate the restriction that Save your Snaps puts on you. But then again, like, now that I've played more, I have so much save your schnapps. It's so easy to save. I've bought beds in every single inn and have infinite money because I'm so powerful. So there's this really significant curve with this game where once you get through the part we've been talking about, like the intro and really just the first act, it stops being like

broke medieval peasant simulator and it starts being rich, powerful, medieval knight-errant simulator. And like it kind of, the narrative also kind of opens up at that point like the main storyline. And it gets much more, there's a lot more intrigue. you're playing much more of the kind of, you know, manipulating different lords and trying to actually shape the outcome of this region. So that's actually an interesting part of this game and something that I think we should talk about and kind of emphasize is that for all that we're talking about, these parts of the game

where you're walking around in a field where, like, one pack of wolves is the difference between life and death. You finally get a halfway decent sword, and it's the most exciting thing that ever happened. You're constantly at the alchemy, you know, station trying to just brew up more stuff. Or like me, I mean, I did a lot of farming. there's a lot of kind of podcast, like listen to a podcast and just do archery for like an hour. All my strengths slowly goes up. Like there's a lot of that at the beginning.

And then the game actually becomes a very different game halfway through. And I'm kind of curious how that was for the three of you. Matthew, how was that arc for you as you were kind of playing from the first act into the second act? Yeah. So I definitely spent like the first couple hours just dying at every opportunity because you're so disempowered when you start the game. and anything will kill you immediately. And so I was like, I don't know how I'm supposed to, like, afford anything or, like, get anywhere. So what I did was I just spent maybe, like, two or three nights, like, real nights, just playing the game and brewing potions.

Just, like, I spent, like, the first, like, 10 hours of gameplay, just, like, in that hut, brewing potion after potion. And then I would bring them into... Walter Whiting it. Yeah, it was. Yeah. I would bring them into town. sell them. And then one time I spent like an hour or two brewing potions and I was going into town to sell them and there was a bandit there and I just died, no save and just gone. And I was like,

this is it. I'm done. Like I'm not playing this anymore. And then I was like, well, I'll play. Okay, fine. And then the next day. And so once you kind of like bootstrap yourself into getting some money and then like knowing that you can get money for stuff, it doesn't. does kind of start getting a little bit easier and it starts kind of turning into a little bit, I want to say, like, more of like a normal RPG. I think that's safe to say. By the end, you know, because there's like a little bit more emphasis on just like quest stuff and, and things like that.

There's like, there's conveniences you can learn to do, to take care of your equipment. Like normally you have to like bring your equipment to someone to repair it. You have to like get your clothes washed and stuff. but then later you can find like items that will do it and you can like skill up and doing all those things yourself. So there's a huge delta between when you start the game and then when you finish the game between like how disempowered you feel versus how powerful you feel. Yeah. And it really takes its time getting you to that too. Yeah. I want to say that I never felt particularly powerful because I never really learned how to fight very well.

I constantly spent spending thousands of coins. on repairing my armor because I didn't bother to get the perks to learn how to do any of that stuff myself. Well, I was a ring in for a couple of weeks, right? Yeah, whenever I got to the fight, I couldn't pass. I just call Liam at like 9.30 at night and go, can you just please come over and beat this guy for me?

And I couldn't, I just, it took me 30 to 40 hours to get the hang of sword fighting. And then I finally got it. But every consequential fight in the game, Liam basically did for me. In fairness, the sword fighting system is, maybe one of the weakest points of the game, in my opinion anyways. I think it's really cool what they're doing.

I think it's really well designed, and I love that directionality plays a role. To explain this to listeners who have not played the game. When you're in a sword fight with a guy, you get a kind of new reticle that floats over him, and it shows the four cardinal directions left, right, up and down. And then depending on which weapon you're using, you kind of pick your swings. So if you, I'm playing with a controller, it's fine with a mouse and keyboard, but I'm playing with a controller. You kind of flick the stick to the right. the right arrow lights up on screen, and then when you hit the trigger, Henry will swing from the right.

And then depending on where your opponent is holding his weapon, he'll maybe be able to counter you or master's stroke you and hit you immediately. And there's a lot of kind of strategy to the position of your weapon and to reading the position of your opponent's weapon. And that's really cool, especially because the master's stroke, which is a kind of an immediate parry that always works. basically if you time it right, you hit their sword and then stab them really quickly. Like that is a very effective way to get through sword fights, at least if you're a sword fighter, which my Henry is. I like that all in theory. There's just kind of like a flotiness to it.

I think like the sticky friction to use Tim Rogers's term or like whatever you want to call it, the physical feel of the combat, for me at least, doesn't quite gel. And then as a result, I always feel like one step more removed from the combat than I want to. But I'm curious, Liam, it sounds like you're a defender of the combat. So maybe you feel different. Is it Mordhow? Is that the game that has a similar kind of combat system? I don't know.

I haven't played that. Yeah, there's a couple of like sword fight simulators where it is more based on, you know, stances and positioning and more of the puzzle of a sword fight. Liam is an actual master swordsman just to throw that out there. That's probably a stretch, but I know how to swing a sword around a little bit from Spartagos. Oh, okay.

So you can sword fight in real life. Don't spread that around. My biggest fear after that show was that people would just walk up to me in the street and be like, want a sword fight, mate? Think you're tough? You slap your face with their godson. Yeah, I know, on Godza.

And I was like, good Lord. No, but I, you know, I know a little bit about it anyway. But it just, it wasn't even so much the realism. Because I agree, like as a, it didn't feel weighty and heavy. But it was much like everything. We'll get into the concept of Gustav, which we imagined as a character, as a, as a production team member whose job it was to say, that seems too fun. We should take it out as a part across all. of the game.

Gustav. Yeah, Gustav. He's just looking over everyone's shoulder. Absolutely. He turned up. He's like, I don't know. I think someone might like doing that. Take it out.

And so I felt like he was like, oh, look, this combat will have, we can't. We don't have time to develop a more opaque, harder to understand combat system. So we'll have to go with this one. But again, like the game itself, first time you play it, you're like, I have no idea what this is. This is madness. It's impossible. and then the puzzle of it, for me at least, as I started to understand it, became fascinating.

Instead of usual games like, you know, Spider-Man or something, or even, you know, even like a Bethesda game where you just attack a guy mercilessly and hope to, you know, maybe block occasionally or, you know, counter, there was a real, like, it felt more authentic to combat of the time, which was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait some more, see him reposition, reposition. yourself wait wait okay there's my shot you know or he i'll block that one dive away ducking and attack him block me counter that he's he's foolishly tried to attack me on this side i'm prepared for that i'll master strike you and and then there was combos you could learn and integrate which were very hard to pull off but because the combat was hard and strange and unusual to like you're conventional like you know it was square and triangle kind of you know combat these days it meant that I got good at a single battle like with one person and that was

I felt like I'd really done something like I'd really outthought my opponent out position you know but then you'd face like two or three opponents and it was near impossible because you couldn't do that to so many people so you'd try to funnel them in places and I don't know I felt like

it offered a very different way to appreciate combat than most almost all games that I've played certainly in that space have provided, and much like the rest of the game, was just a little bit weird enough to make you go, okay, let's do this. No, you know, and I can't disagree with any of that.

I mean, that's totally true, and it is so different, and it's so specific, and they are trying to do something, you know, tied to reality in a way that's really cool, and I really like all of that. Speaking of tied to reality, Kirk, it sounds like you did archery quite a bit? I did, yeah.

Yeah, just like the archery competitions. And that was going to kind of be my go-to for combat for a while, too, which was really useful, except that it takes so long to switch weapons that I would see some bandits on the road and get off my horse and, like, get out my bow, and they wouldn't see me. And I'd think, okay, hang on, hang on. And then I'd kind of line up the one guy and I'd shoot. And it would clearly do a lot of damage to him, like he'd be limping.

But then he and his friend would start coming for me with their swords. And then I'd have to kind of try to get my sword out, and I would just get absolutely got while in the middle of those switching weapons. And it just wound up in a kind of yakety sacks running away, you know, getting my sword out so I can turn back around and try to fight situation. And then in those early hours, like you were talking about Liam, I mean, even taking on two guys is pretty much suicide. So, but anyways, yes, to answer your question, Matthew, I did a lot of archery at first and I still do the competitions, but I don't use it that much in combat anymore. And you were okay with it? because I had problems with, like, first of all, there's, like, no targeting reticle or anything like that, right?

It's just, you're just there with your bow or your crossbow for using a crossbow and lining up the target and, like, accounting for the dip of the arrow and everything. You just have to eyeball it. There's just no help at all. I like that a lot. It doesn't give you that drop-off reticle that you get in so many other games where there's, you know, arrow drop-off. I really got to feel for it. It's the kind of thing. I mean, I've shot.

I don't know how many are some embarrassing number of arrows now because like I said, I just would spend an hour listening to some podcasts and just shooting. And I got so good at it. I mean, you just get a feel for it. But it's cool because it kind of feels a little bit like real archery where you, you know, you're not, there isn't a reticle in my eyeballs like when I'm doing actual archery. You do just kind of line it up a little bit up into the left from where you're holding the arrow and then you let it fly and see where it goes and then kind of adjust from there. I can hear Gustav saying that there's no reticle. real life. Why would you get riddle in the game? I know in my heart that a designer put the reticle in and he was like, whoa, whoa, hang on. What is that?

Take that right out. Take that right out now. Tom and I, we desperately tried to make gunpowder work. I don't know if we were talking about that. For the same reason, you were like, let's waste a guy. Let's just go like Tony Montana. You know, let's just kill a bunch of dudes with guns.

And it just never quite worked out the way we wanted it to. Yeah, no, man. I mean, so to explain to listeners, there are guns in this game, technically. They're like kind of portable little cannons. These are very prototypical firearms. That's like a stick with a little barrel on the end that has, it's like a little cannon that you're carrying around. I watched a combat tutorial video. There's a lot of great tutorials on this game on YouTube, by the way. If anyone is playing this and wants to get some great tips, like people will tell you things that you can do that the game does not explain very well. related to blacksmithing related to combat a lot of things that you

aren't really taught in the tutorials and then one it was this guy being like oh yeah you can totally use a gun in combat and it showed him using it and just the amount of setup time like lighting the fuse and the fuse is burning down and he kills one guy

and then he has to put it away and get out of his sword it was an incredibly cumbersome process I think it's like 17 17 seconds to reload that thing it's just some crazy no you get one shot

it's an opening gambit What was that mission that we had, Tom, where we were in the underbelly of the city in like the sewers or whatever. And we had that fight. We were trying to, what was it? We were trying to get something from this group. It was the tax guy's ledger or something. Oh, I have that quest right now. I haven't done it.

And we were trying. There were eight guys in the tunnel. And we, that was like a three-night engagement where we were just trying to get past a single fight. It was really bad. Because we had all these schemes. which was like we had it we'd set it up we'd drink all the potions we'd set up the can and ahead of time invariably i'd be like it's not that button it's the other button not liam you'd screw it up again have to start up again drink the thing this is this pre-savish naps as well

where we had like a terrible save point and we couldn't improve on it so we had to drink the so every time you'd be like is this the one should we be bothered spending the next five minutes drinking potions in the hope that we actually get somewhere but then again because the game is so horrifically hard that when we did get there. You know, I don't know if I have had a rush like that for, you know, in games for so long, because it is so mundane, but

when you do succeed, because, like you said, like the, they've lowered your kind of range of emotions in a way. When it does spike, you've gone from like hunting foxes and being, you know, a regular person to these moments of true

sort of regular human triumph as opposed to superhero triumph that you sort of get so used to in these games. Yeah, no, it's very true. I just did a side quest. I'm helping the lady at the bathhouse in Kootenberg, and you have to fight a duel on behalf of this noble. And in the duel, you're fighting against a guy who's in full plate armor,

and you have no armor, like you're not allowed to wear any. And it's really freaking hard because he takes almost no damage from almost every hit that you give him, because he's wearing full plate armor. And it really does kind of, like it felt like a great, I am when I finally beat him, even though I'm really late in the game, and generally my Henry is pretty mighty, and I can mess up most guys. So it's very good at putting you in those situations. So let's talk about the story some, because the writing and the story in this game, I mean, that's maybe my favorite thing about it. While we've talked about the simulation so much,

and, you know, the combat, like, those are really interesting parts of this game, but the story, the grounded historical nature of it, the world building, Henry is a character, there's so much interesting going on with this story. And I think that in particular, because we have Tom and Matthew here, we have like the two writers of the writer will do something, playing a game with this much writing in it. I got that this game has like one of the longest scripts of all time and also writing of this quality and with this much variance. I'm curious as writers what the two of you think of it. Matthew, maybe you go first. This is something that we talked about a little bit, but like this game really takes its time with dialogue. Yeah.

And it does in dialogue, you know, a conversation that almost any other game would whittle down. to a couple sentences because, well, we don't need to take that time. This game just kind of luxuriates and just lots and lots of dialogue. They're perfectly fine having scenes go on twice or even three times longer than you would think an equivalent scene would in a comparable like AAA game. And you can just get into these long conversations with people about all kinds of, not random topics, but topics that are maybe a little bit tangential to the actual story. And it just seems to be a priority for them to have this much investment in that,

in the ability to have those conversations. I would say the script is never worse than pretty good. And often it's excellent. What I was most impressed by was how genuinely complicated a lot of the game's morality. he was. I've had this long-standing theory, which I've written about, Lansing Lee,

is that games, you know, a lot of exciting development right now is going on in countries of the former Soviet sphere, Poland, Czech Republic. And I often, like,

the Metro games, those were all made by, you know, people my age who kind of grew up in the shadow of a totalitarian empire. and I feel like I don't think it's a coincidence that Metro and Witcher and this game they approach the question of human morality

from a much more interesting angle than we in the West do. In a mass effect game, it's like, slap the reporter, kiss the reporter. Like it's the moral quandaries they give you are so stupid. Whereas this game

and the other games I mentioned, the moral quandaries are a lot messier and darker. And I think it's because if you grew up, and I say this having lived in the former Soviet Union, people who grew up in that environment, Anna Arnert writes this, that like growing up in a totalitarian system to be a good person means you're constantly lying and cheating

and being dishonest. Like, it's a system that just forces like a layer of dishonesty on you, whether you're a good person or a bad person. It just corrupts you right down to, you know, your very atoms. And I don't think it is a coincidence that the children of that, of the children of the children of the people who have the last sort of vivid memories of that system at its worst approach human morality from a much more kind of rich and chewy and interesting direction and over and over in this game you get a quandary where it's just too bad two bad choices and you know and you feel genuinely

awful about about making a decision very few games give me that feeling and why don't they give you that feeling oh, I've been in these meetings. Well, we can't do this because the player will feel demotivated or the player will feel like his actions don't matter. Dude, the way players are put on these glorious pedestals like little children who've eaten all their vegetables is so infantilizing and dull and boring. And Matthew can back me up in this, I'm sure,

that the Western game makers fear of the, the player ever feeling like anything other than the biggest boy at school really leads you into just a lot of pretty fucking rote and boring kind of narrative schema. And it makes me sad and depressed because we all know games, because of the very interactive nature, they're capable of providing a much brighter, darker catharsis. I think that the two things that you each just said, so Matthew, what you were talking about with like the sheer quantity of the writing. And Tom, what you were saying, with like the complexity of it,

I think those things are related. There's definitely a feeling playing this game, like, there's just so much writing that as a result it's allowed to have a lot more texture. Because in something like a Mass Effect, like a Western-style game, which I love those games, they're great. But the dialogue comes at you. It feels like rat-a-tat compared to playing Kingdom Come Deliverance, too. And it's a pacing that I've just gotten used to with video games.

Liam, I'm sure this is something that you, you've encountered as a voice actor where a lot of the line reads that you're giving are fairly short if you're in that kind of a game like anything, you know, with like a dialogue system because, you know, each line is just going to be fairly short. It's not going to be a paragraph the way that it is in this game. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to me playing this game for the same reasons that, you know, often in RPGs and many games, I suppose, you have a, you know, there's so many dialogue tree options and generally you're like, that's the quest one, I'll do that one. And if I have time, I guess I'll hear about what is life is and what they do for,

you know, fun. And it's irrelevant. Whereas this, I felt it was far more complex. And again, speaking to Tom's talk, a conversation about the morality of it, I didn't feel that the choices were always obvious or, but then also not like hidden for the sake of it. But also you didn't feel like each dialogue tree was just like, this is what this one does. this is the functional one in the game and the release are just fluff essentially

or, you know, colour. It was just like, so I felt more inclined to look through the stories and enrich myself with those stories because it is. It's rare in these games. You know, in my experience, making them, certainly in the Western AAA world,

there is, I guess, a prevailing sense that players want to get back on the sticks and get back into the game as fast as they can. And I mean, I'm interested. That may be true to a degree. There may be actual, I guess part of that whole struggle is, you know, art versus business, is that there probably is real metrics saying that a game that's being brave like Kingdom Come will turn off a lot of players for the exact reason where they're like,

oh, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, let's get back to stabbing somebody. Which is a shame to me, because I, I love telling stories. And a lot of the games that I've done in the past, there is that sense of like, let's keep this moving and let's just be succinct and get the player back into the action so they can start feeling like the hero and the protagonist and not part of this world in a more, you know,

discrete sort of sense, where I feel very much that Henry very much feels like one person in a very big world, not the person in a, It's a world made for him. Yeah. You know, and so there's a joy in that. There's a certain joy, and you need this.

That's right. That's definitely a similarity this game has with The Witcher 3, which is always something I appreciated about that game, that Geralta Vervia is like, he's a very powerful guy. He's an important figure, but he's also kind of a guy next to the person. Like, he's helping the emperor, you know. He's helping the woman who's going to help save the world. Like, he's always kind of in the background. And that winds up actually being a more interesting story than he is the job.

chosen one who's going to save everything. And yeah, Henry, I mean, certainly, like, Henry is not even, you know, noble. Like, he is, he's kind of the, as elevated in every man as there can be. And then that really puts him in an interesting place in the story. And, you know, related to the pacing and the dialogue, I should mention something. I played this game in a kind of distinct way, at least for me, I turned off subtitles, but played in English. So I had to listen to everything. Like, I couldn't skip through dialogue. So because, as we've mentioned, there are these conversations where when another game would have one or two sentences, this game will just go. And then Henry will ask a follow-up. And then the character will keep talking. And then

someone else will interject. And then Henry will talk. And like, that's one dialogue interaction. So I just sit there for a long time just watching them talk about this guy and how, well, we thought he was actually working for, you know, Wenceslaus. But he wasn't really. He's actually this other guy. And like, he knew my father. But then it just goes and goes, it goes. And I have to pay attention and listen. And I'm finding that by not having the stuff, subtitles, I just can't do the thing I sometimes do where I'll skip through dialogue. And as a result, it's really grounded me in the writing in a way that I've at least found very cool.

Matthew, I think so you've been playing with the Czech audio track. And I'm curious what that has been like. I played the entire game in check with the subtitle. So how was that? It was great. I mean, I kind of missed out on some like, you know, when like someone just kind of passes you buy and they have some ambient dialogue, I just, I don't know what they said. Right.

But, man, it was great, actually. And I recommend it because it was just so, I don't know, it just felt right, especially those, like in the main quest, you know, those worthy guys you collect together to do this really dirty job. They're all drunk and swearing at each other in an Eastern European language. It's perfect, right? It just feels right. And kind of all of the other language stuff, too, is still in the other languages.

So, you know, not only is there a check right, but there's German. There's a little bit of Italian later on. And then there's an entire, no, spoiler alert, I guess, but there's an entire huge conversation in Latin, in ecclesiastical Latin, because you're doing a thing with priests. So just, I don't know, like that whole, it was part of the immersion for me to be in that world to just have this language around me, even though I didn't understand a single thing about, you know, what they were saying. It's funny. It's kind of the opposite to the approach I check only because you can only read the subtitles to get the information. And yet it's also immersive, right, in its way. And yeah, it's funny. I mean, in the English track, a lot of people have English accents, which kind of grounds it in the familiar. fantasy of England because so much fantasy, especially like Arthurian, you know, legends and just a lot of games that I've played are set in England during, you know, medieval times.

So to be hearing those accents kind of keeps me in that familiar place. And I do have to say, Tom McKay, the actor who plays Henry, is so great. Wow. It's such a good performance. And like the facial animations along with his voice acting are just endlessly great. And I really love him. It's actually really similar to what Doug Cockle does as Geryl to Vrivia. in The Witcher 3.

The performances are different qualitatively, but they fulfill a similar function in how they elevate the game. Yeah, what I love about Gerald and about my Henry, at least, because Henry can be somewhat different depending on how you play. Gareth is a tough guy.

He's like a badass. But whenever he deals with women or children or animals in the Witcher game, he's so gentle. And he's just so lovely as a character in that way. And I love how Henry as this it seems like fairness

means something to Henry and just decency means something to Henry and like... You had a scholar. We had a scholar, didn't we? Yeah, my Henry, I built, it was an intellectual

and he was an agnostic. And he was the lone agnostic in this world of Christianity. And I always had my Henry voice skepticism for the church's positions and whatever it came up. There's one, you know, he has the little animations,

like there's the one he does like this. There's one where he's like this. and anytime he's doing it he's backed up with his I should describe the listeners he's backed up like holding one hand in his elbow and he has like a finger under his chin kind of and it's when he's about

to say well actually and there's the best lines of dialogue always come when he's like in this in this pose some people in our discord were talking about this and they were totally right it's very funny yeah I was very sad to see that Mr. McKay was not even though I think awards are all bullshit and based on

nothing that he did not do a nomination to the game awards for Best Vocal Perform Oh, yeah, that's true, huh? He didn't get nominated. Yes, he definitely deserved a Game Award. Wait, he didn't get nominated? I thought he didn't. He didn't.

No, and Aaron Paul didn't either for dispatch. There are definitely some notable... Some notable... He's a terrible... ...theirderable things to know. Oh, no. Yeah. That's a whole separate podcast.

But was he nominated for a Golden Joystick Award? I'm sure I saw him nominated for something of merit. It doesn't matter. It makes me sad. So, Tom, you mentioned the religious aspect of this game, and I think that's another thing that's... very interesting, and I know that's something that you have found, particularly striking about this game. Well, Matthew should speak to this first, because he sent me a beautiful text

just a couple days ago about... That's right, yeah, I told Tom, this is like, in a weird way, this is like the most Christian video game I've ever played. And it's not because it's proselytizing. It's because it's just depicts a world that's just suffused with Christianity. And it doesn't, you know, it doesn't seem to take necessarily a particular side of, you know, you can be doubtful. You can, you can, it shows like sort of negative aspects of the church, but it also shows just that it's just part of the texture of everybody's daily life. And you can be, you know, a more religious, Henry, if you want to. You can get this ability pray, and you can cross yourself and pray at a shrine. and you have to actually say the entire prayer.

If you get up and leave, you don't get the buff that the prayer gives you. So you have to sit there and listen to him. Yeah, exactly. You have to listen to him and say the whole thing. And then, yeah, and then there's this entire sequence. Like I was saying earlier, there's this entire sequence that's where they're all speaking Latin to each other for lines and lines and lines. And so it's just part of the world.

And they do a very good job of depicting that. And they don't shy away from it at all. You know, like I think a lot of other big AAA games set in times where religion was a huge part of society and life, I always think about the Assassin's Creed games, like in contrast to this, right? They treat the topic with kid gloves, right? They're kind of like, there's a big disclaimer at the beginning saying like, well, you know, lots of different viewpoints. and blah, blah, blah. And they're clearly worried about being criticized for this. But this kind of goes all in on depicting this world as they interpreted it was.

And it's the richer for it, I think. And the frankness with which they treat anti-Semitism, too, is really interesting. Like, it becomes a very big part of the game near the end, and it provides one of its most powerful emotional catharsies. So it's not like the game is at that. Semetic, but it acknowledges that most people alive at this time were hideously anti-Semitic. It's a view of women. Yes, there are some women who, like, do a bunch of active shit in this game.

But, like, generally speaking, the women are, have the roles that they would have been forced upon them, you know, at the time. And, like, it makes a real commitment to the historical reality of it. And I'm not saying that's great, but I am saying that I do admire that it wasn't afraid to do that. Again, like, I cannot imagine a group of modern day game writers

even being interested in writing such a straight-faced portrayal of normative Christian belief without wanting to pick at it and dissect it. And, the problem with historical fiction is that it's written by people who know how it all ended up. And I think historical fiction becomes truly transcendent, when the people writing it manage to forget they know where everything lines up. And when they forget everything winds up, the characters are allowed to not know what's going to happen.

And I think you can only truly write effective historical fiction when you will yourself into a state of almost intellectual oblivion about what lays beyond the parameters of the period you're writing about. That's interesting. That's well put. I appreciate on a much more surface level, just how you'll be walking around the world, and someone will go, Jesus Christ, be praised. Every time I hear it, I think that something horrible has happened or they're angry, and then I realize, no, this is just something that someone is saying. It feels a little bit like maybe the writers are having a little bit of fun, but it is true to the world. And something that I like about this game's approach to spirituality that sort of dovetails with what you have both said is that I like that there are a variety. of different beliefs and superstitions, you know, there are non-Christian beliefs as well, and that you always have to engage with them in this way that treats them as though, not as though

they're true, but as though the people believe them and that matters. So someone says, well, I can't give you this ring because it has a curse on it, then Henry just has to accept that they believe that. And then... Just just deal with that. Well, because you probably would, though. That's why I love about it. I feel like it's not... Exactly, yes. I think as similar to what the others were saying, it's like I think it's super important

that when engaging in history, you don't doctor it to fit a more convenient truth that you know now that you do. Obviously, we've come a long way since that time, but to then revise the character's understanding of the world to fit a modern sensibility of the world, I feel is dishonest and prevents us today having a better discourse about it,

because I do really respect how non-judgmental and how honest for the period so much of Kingdom Comes at least attempting to be so that you can now, you know, we're talking about anti-Semitism and stuff like that, as a result of it, sort of attempting to tell it how it was as close as they were able to, you can have a conversation now about how things have changed or not changed as opposed to having that already pre-made, your characters, like Tom said, knowing, you know, having a knowing wink towards, well, he's our hero character.

So he'd know better than that. He wouldn't. He wouldn't. He wouldn't. And if that, in that mission where that guy won't give up that rock because the girl wants to get pregnant and she's like, I need the rock to be pregnant. He's like, I'm only strong because I have the rock. So, and Henry isn't like, rocks. He's like, absolutely.

100%. I've heard those rocks are awesome. And you're like, of course, because of course he would. And I think it's richer for it because you can then either go, maybe he's on to something, or have a discussion about how crazy it was, the people believed rocks gave you superpowers or anything like that because the characters live in the real world that they would have existed in at that time as close as you could imagine, I suppose, or as far as you're able to imagine, perhaps, from this distance. Yeah, it fits in well also with how the game has no actual magic in it.

And yet there is magic of a sort at every time. Like, you're constantly engaging with the supernatural. There's a whole quest line where people saw this revenant like this ghost and no one really knows what it was, but everyone tells you this different version of a story where there was a ghost and there was a horrifying vision. It was a demon. And you have to really engage with people on their terms and what they believe a demon is. You know, you can't just start talking about it in the open and saying, oh, you saw a demon and they're like, dude. Yeah, well, that's because magic does exist in this world, though. Like, it does exist because in this world, for most of the characters, Christianity isn't just like a great idea. It's real. It's absolutely. true. And the characters honour that for the most part if they believe it. They do worry about if they say the wrong thing, God

will smite them or send them to hell and things like that. And therefore, the magic that is inherent in that belief system, you know, so you can exist in that way. There is another quest where you have to go into the sewers because there's some horridious demon down there and it turns out, you know, spoiler alert, I think it's a knight or something who's sworn oath

to protect them from some other horrible. But it creates, it allows magic to exist because in their world, magic through the form of faith and belief is absolutely real. So unlike now where there might be a lot of cynicism about stuff like that, you're like, oh, okay, you curse me to hell, sure, buddy. That would have been the worst thing that's ever happened and their whole family would have heard about it and they'd have to disown them or so. And so it creates a world where magic is alive in a magicless game, you know,

like in a where there's no spell, you know, sort of like spells to cast, it feels like you could just say to a character, I curse you, and that's in itself a magic you've performed. It's cool. I love it. That's totally true. And then, of course, and then this is the time where these legends were born, right? It totally makes sense, like that these people are weaving legends out of their everyday life. They're constantly elevating things in that way.

And then that just informed everything about the way that they experienced the world. Well, we could talk about this game forever. This has been fantastic. I'm so glad to have had three fellow veterans with me here. Let's see. If you guys have any final stories, anything that you want to share, Tom, it looks like maybe you have something. I do. My daughter watched me play this game a lot.

He called it medieval peasant simulator. That's what I call it. I think I call it that because of you. And I knew there was some adult content in it, but my Henry was mostly pretty chaste. I just didn't go down that path with him because I didn't think that was his vibe. And there's a part near the end of the game where he can kiss a woman. in a certain circumstance. And my daughter was like,

ew, you're going to kiss the lady. And I'm like, we're just going to do this and we're going to get through it. And then they kiss and then cut to Henry thrusting away on top of this woman. And one of the hardest core video game sex scenes I've ever seen. Oh, really?

She's 11 years old. She's screaming. Krisha, my partner looks up from the couch. She's screaming. I'm like, oh, my God, turn this off. And it was one of the more amusing mishaps I've had in my video game playing career. So Game of the Year is what you're saying. Game of the year at 2020.

10 out of 10. Every time this happened, every experience he had was not one of the experiences I was there for. I don't think I ever saw Henry do anything of any note in that regard. Tom would always be like, guess what just happened? I was like, oh, okay. Zero stars. Liam and Matthew, any final thoughts? on Kingdom Come Deliverance, too.

I really respect this game enormously, just for its ambition and its willingness to do things that other games wouldn't, you know, with the kind of scale that it has. I'm blanking on anything other than the thing that I've already talked about twice now, which is that there's a huge scene where everyone just speaks Latin. Were you moved by the ending, Matthew?

Did you find it moving? Yes, I was actually. The game actually has a... a moral opinion. And that's also something that you don't see in a lot of big budget entertainment, especially Western entertainment. It turns out, you know, the game kind of withholds it for much of the game, but it's there. And in the end, it kind of tells you a little bit about what it thought, the game thought.

And that's, you know, in a world of like kind of Bioshock style, like everything, you know, both anything is bad, trying anything. you know, doing anything is bad. Like, this game actually really stands up for doing the right thing or trying to do the right thing in a completely fucked up situation, which the game acknowledges it has, you know, it has created for you. And so it's kind of, I think it's brave in that way for saying, ultimately, at the very end of everything, all those millions of words

and hundreds of hours later, it kind of says, hey, you should do the right thing. and that's a very surprising thing to me in this standage. Nice. Liam, any final thoughts? No, I think they've said it better than I could, but it's a triumph of a game because it is so unusual and so unique and seems like I keep thinking of like the meetings

you would have in perhaps a Western game studio and how impossible any of it would have been. There would be no way this game would have been created in so many other environments, anything like the game. They would have fired Gustav on the first day. Gustav was, he was unemployed day one. He's not celebrated like he is in this company. No, he's, no, but I probably have to look back to like Ultima 7

when I was so willing to just engage with a game and it's strangeness and walk around for two hours to get to the other side of the map to do something, and just be cool with it, and to just engage with characters and see what they have to say, you know, maybe that speaks to my, you know, my becoming, you know, immune to the storytelling of games over time. But I just, I tried to hate it so much, like, so hard. And it's incredible how it stuck to its guns so strongly that it won me and it sounds like every other long-term player of this game has some experience of like,

whoa, what is it? What are they doing to going, oh, they're doing something. truly special. It's a great game. Yeah. Yeah, I want to say one more thing, Kirk. I've spent the last 15 years of my life on and off writing big budget, mostly big budget video games. And it's very hard for me to want to play a story-based game anymore. Most of what I play these days is shared world kind of emergent narrative generating games. Or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or Texas Chansaw Massacre, Helldivers, see if you're your favorite game of all time. I start playing a narrative game. These, like, this has been going on for years. I

start playing a narrative game and I'm like, yeah, this is cool. And then I just kind of just piece out of it at a certain point. I just, it's hard to get me over the hump on them anymore. And, and this game pulled me back into just a love of falling into a game narrative. And man, am I grateful for that because I thought that the spell had been permanently broken. And it turns out it wasn't. I was just sick of the same old thing. And I say that having written a bunch of the same old thing myself. And I'm really grateful to for that release. Well, I think that's a great note to end on Tom Bessel, Leah McIntyre. Matthew Sagey Burns. Thank you all so much for coming on the show. This was so much fun. Thank you, Kirk.

Real pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having us. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Email us at triple click at maximumfund.org

and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.