Back when Kingdom Come: Deliverance launched in 2018, we reviewed it on PS4 with a 6/10 and said, “If you want to experience the rich and immersive action RPG to its fullest capacity, I’d wait a few months until all the kinks are ironed out.”
Oh, brothers and sisters, I am here today with good news. Only eight years to the day, the kinks have been ironed and the visuals delicately laundered. The free current generation update unshackles Warhorse’s revolutionary medieval RPG from the relatively weaker platforms it arrived on, and breathes new life into the vast meadows and forests of 15th-century Bohemia.
Today’s surprise update adds very little to the options menu, but one key toggle made all the difference for how I enjoyed my brief four-hour return to Henry’s tragic origin story. Of the few settings available to players, they will now find a HD textures toggle. If you, like me, enjoy your smooth frames and stutter-free experience on your base PS5, I recommend leaving this off.
I spent my first hour of the game with it on, and encountered minor but distracting frame stutter when darting about areas with only a handful of busy NPCs about. On a base PS5 on a 4K OLED, I couldn’t see a noticeable texture, lighting, or reflections difference between having HD textures on or off. When I had HD textures on, I could not see an improvement. What I did notice were the downsides. Characters and sound would occasionally unsync in cutscenes. Moving around the world, unable to turn off motion blur, I found the frames bobbing around a bit uncomfortable.
Although non player characters may still behave oddly at times, at least they look nice doing it
Nothing is lost, and everything is gained by leaving HD textures off. A buttery smooth experience that runs as close as possible to 60 frames per second. Lighting that pierces through the thatch and rafters, promising vitamin D you can positively bask in beyond the threshold. And the great outdoors has never looked greater (unless you have already played this on a high-end PC). You will simply load up KC:D on your contemporary platform of choice, and the game will just suddenly look like you always wanted it to. Back in 2018, we said, “[the] Setting can border on being bland.” Bland has never looked like sublime, and if you’re partial to the occasional walking sim, getting your peasant steps in with Henry will lower your blood pressure. Until he starts complaining of hunger again…
KC:D, for better or worse, has a glacially paced opening that runs near to three hours. It pays off with a few moments of excellent drama and tension. However, what shines most on this contemporary console revisit are the visual set pieces that occur during those hours. Modern Bethesda games are praised for their openings that usually feature an emergence into a world, beholding a sublime and explorable vista ahead. KC:D also does this, albeit a little more slowly and across a couple of key moments rather than one. I want to refer to two such scenes that may be potential spoilers.
The first is Henry on horseback making for Talmberg. This is a chase sequence, with Henry on the run. This is your first proper glimpse of the world beyond the walls of Skatliz that have held you during the first hour. The seamless, immaculately detailed open world races past you. A little boxout keeps popping up, advising you that your map has been updated with locations of interest. You’re too busy trying to keep arrows and steel off your arse to take any of it in. But it all races by with such impressively little detail and texture pop-in, making it so easy to get swept along with the immediate drama of the place and situation you are suddenly caught up in. This game’s introduction to its greater world is to kick you off the cliff and assume you’ll admire the view on the way down.
Now picture ‘errie, forked lightning’ in the background
The second scene involves Henry making the trek back to his hometown of Skalitz, some time after the hectic horse chase he somehow survived. I rolled a Hardcore save to test out this update, and circumstances found me having to trek back home on foot and hungry. A hopeless walk to a grim objective, this sequence escalates with some surprise violence that the game had been holding out on until that moment, more specifically, actual combat with all the stakes that come with this game’s challenging take on medieval realism. The return to Skatliz and its subsequent violence are so notable, not just because the game’s first real combat takes place under such devastating circumstances, but because of the weather. Throughout this entire scene, right up until the subsequent cutscene and its grand title-card reveal, Henry is being exposed to a storm of truly cinematic proportions. You go from having felt like a tourist in a new, green world, to being chased about in it and then having to trudge muddily through it. The picturesque vibrance becomes so compellingly submerged under a weather system that looks as alive as the flora it feeds. And then after this depressing scene, it’s back to always being sunny in Bohemia, which is so very Tasmanian/South Coast Australian; we can always support that at WellPlayed.
While there is very little additionally added to the game for players to tinker with aside from the HD textures toggle, there are improvements to load times with KC:D offering a big, seamless open world that features almost no load screens. There is a lengthy load screen before hitting the main menu, probably compiling shaders. Load times from the main menu to the game proper average about five seconds. For a game of this size and scale, those are very reasonable current-gen speeds. I would have liked to have seen virtually any options added for controllers, though. Having some DualSense optimisation might have been nice, but almost no controller options at all is a shame.
Can you feel that sunrise? I can
With Warhorse marking this anniversary of their first game with such a visually impactful free update, now is the perfect time for players coming off of last year’s superb sequel to see Henry’s formative chapter better than ever on console.
The free PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S update for owners of last-gen versions of Kingdom Come: Deliverance is available now.
