From recent experience, it seems to me that there actually kind of was a great Skyrim-like lately - Kingdom Come Deliverence 2. When I was playing it, I kept being reminded of Skyrim, except that it kind of feels like what Skyrim was trying to be decades ago when the technology wasn't really there. It's got all the same systems - alchemy, forging weapons, sneaking, speech, combat - but they're all just vastly better, having been developed with the benefit of many years of experience, better technology, and a lot of money. When I was playing this game, with its incredible combat, its populous and intricate towns and cities, its great potion brewing mechanics, I couldn't help but wonder why on earth others were bothering with the Oblivion remaster?
And indeed it seems that most people briefly messed around in Cyrodiil and promptly moved on, because the game, while nostalgic for many, just isn't very good value compared to the amazing RPGs that can be made now. The only thing KCD2 is lacking is the ability to define your own character, which is undoubtedly still a huge draw for the Elder Scrolls and its imitators. I would die happy if Warhorse made a fantasy RPG where you could design your own character and I could play dress-up with my very own Blorbos in photo-mode.
Also, hardest of hard agrees on the superiority of Morrowind's magic system. Teleportation was so incredibly useful and satisfying, particularly in the main quest, as was levitation, chameleon, all of these fantastic spells and magic items make Morrowind so much more fun to play. Is it balanced? No, but in a way that's preferable - I found exploring in Morrowind so much more compelling and rewarding, because you would often find incredibly useful items that you'd still be using countless hours and levels later, which creates a strong incentive to keep exploring, whereas in Skyrim it's just predictable, incrementally better generic loot (which you couldn't even sell for a fair price without mods, because merchants were so inexplicably poor).
Thanks so much! I've heard that about KCD2 a few times now, and I'm definitely going to have to see it for myself just as soon as I have some more cash to burn. It seems like Warhorse really nailed the world's interactivity in the ways you'd expect from a relatively grounded historical-fiction RPG.
Is it a Skyrim-like? That's a fascinating question to ponder. KCD lacks elements like a magic system and dungeon-delving (mostly) because they'd be fundamentally at odds with its setting, which makes me wonder whether those elements are or are not indispensable. And as you say, KCDs 1 and 2 are stories about a specific character with specific motivations and a particular history — I'd certainly feel weird about starting a KCD campaign and just going off on random mercenary adventures without worrying about recovering that sword or burying my parents.
Come to think of it, Warhorse might be in a better position than any other major studio to develop a high-fantasy Grand RPG that competes directly with Skyrim et al. I'm planning on giving KCD1 a proper go soon, so I'll make a point of considering this all in more detail.
That's very true. There are definitely a few things KCD lacks comparitively - a true Skyrim-like would need to be less narrative-heavy and more open-ended. It's always been surprising and disappointing to me how few post-Skyrim RPGs leaned into this approach - studios like CDPR and Warhorse were sort of tapping into the same market, yet have always emphasised narrative-heavy games where you play as a pre-defined character.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do often find myself trying to play KCD or The Witcher 3 like Skyrim, i.e. focusing on bounty hunting, sidequests and exploration, actively avoiding the main quests, because then it feels like MY adventure, and not Geralt/Henry's.
I wish more studios with real budgets would try to replicate the sense of freedom and imagination that made Skyrim so great, and part of that was always the lack of movie/novel/TVification that has crept into so many big productions. I've got an unfinished thing about Skyrim in drafts which calls it 'the Goldilocks RPG' for this reason - despite being one of the best selling RPGs ever, there have been surprisingly few attempts to replicate it, and zero have really succeeded (though a lot have been great by other measures).
In honor of the late Julian LeFay (RIP), features I really enjoy from Daggerfall that I think ought to make it into whatever game happens to be the next Scrolls-like.
1) Class-based familiarity and disposition. This is very fun for inhabiting a character, which is the part of systems-driven games that I don't think you cover very much here. The environment is important, but another very crucial component of these games is getting to feel not just like you are an actual adventurer dealing with various adventurer problems, but that you are a *specific* adventurer dealing with various adventurer problems. To recap for those unaware, in TES 2 Daggerfall, you can make a character who is more popular with the lower or upper classes of a city. Your cutthroat bandit type could have an easier time getting along with regular folk, and your majestic knight is highly appreciated by the nobility. This is much more interesting than just "i'm generically charismatic and everyone likes me OR i am generically dull and no one likes me"
2) Timers on quests. This is incredibly controversial and it probably won't be added, but I think it should at least be added to the survival/hard mode/whatever. The fact that almost all quests in daggerfall have a timer on how many (in-game) days you have to complete them requires you to prioritize your time. Part of what enables this system is the fact that a lot of the quests are repeatable and procedurally generated (which personally I really enjoyed, but I know that's not everyone's cup of tea), but the game is not afraid to make you fail even very important quests because you took too long.
3) Money and finding work matters a lot. Because you have a timer on your quests, you may often find yourself wanting to get places quicker. While DF (unlike Morrowind) has unlimited fast travel, the travel takes in-game time, and fast*er* travel requires stuff like riding a boat, or buying a horse, which costs money. Merchants also actually sell a lot of good stuff that is not easily outmatched by things you find in dungeons, unlike the later games. In turn, this means getting money by doing basic work for various factions matters a lot more, which synergizes well with the procedural contracts and faction reputation systems.
Thanks! I played Daggerfall for the first time several months ago and wholeheartedly agree with all three of these. Some specific thoughts:
1) To be a *specific* adventurer is a great way to put it, and Daggerfall might be the best at facilitating a wide variety of class fantasies out of all the TES games for this reason. It's remarkable how much more immersive social interactions are made by the simple addition of speech skills and conversational tone, and it underscores the relative weakness of the latter games' hypersimplified dialogue mechanics.
2) Frankly, I never understood why quest timers got dumped. It's an intuitive and effective means of pacing questlines, and one of the precious few tools we have for influencing narrative pace in an open-world RPG. It certainly would suck to accidentally soft-lock a main quest or something because you accidentally let a timer expire, but that just makes me think there must be some kind of reasonable compromise solution. I'll have to think more about this.
3) I think Daggerfall is the only TES game where I regularly find myself going out of my way specifically for extra cash, and that's a good thing. The adventuring lifestyle should feel expensive, and I especially like how working to sustain yourself passively builds your relationships with local factions and powerbrokers. When it all comes together, you feel like an actual participant in the world and its events rather than a prophesied hero, and I reckon that's where any adventure-focused fantasy RPG is at its strongest.
Thanks again for reading, so glad you enjoyed! RIP Julian LeFay.
I've been hearing a lot in pen and paper communities lately about how important the aspect of time-keeping is to maintaining a coherent illusion of agency and player presence in the world, and I've long thought it's one of the biggest things that's been jettisoned from modern videogame RPGs in the pursuit of wider general audiences. Even more generally, it feels like developers of RPGs in particular have become queasy about having features that players get locked out of without at least a binary compensatory reward, and almost no quests anymore have meaningful fail states of any kind, with time limits being the least frequent.
It turns EVERY RPG playthrough into the same kind of thoughtless, rote collectathon at some level, hoovering up every quest prompt you come across, from the mundane to the grandiose, and filing them into the same ever-expanding list of tasks for you to one day, maybe, cross off, if you even remember it [or more likely, a big arrow pops up when you get close enough to the thing you're supposed to do]. The end result is that the game world, which for an RPG, is usually supposed to emulate a living, dynamic place, instead feels bizarrely suspended in time, with nobody really caring if it took you two hours or two years to do a favor for them, or heal their sick child, or save the world. And it is an incredibly important part of Daggerfall that going around saying 'yes yes, I'll get right on that' to a dozen people usually results in a dozen people and their social circles getting pissed at you.
"stop designing RPGs around repetitive gear-grinds and numbing quest loops and start designing them around the inherently compelling aspects of adventure" - So, uh, make them fun? Nah, that'll never sell.
That's a top notch analysis! I'm not a Bethesda devotee and Elder Scrolls isn't my cup of tea, so I followed most of what you described from a higher level. However, there's nothing on what you described that I didn't see in the AAA game tier in the last 5 years. Unfortunately, the industry is stuck in lack of innovation and risk taking avoidance, things that weren't so grave in 2011 as they are now.
In short, I think that Bethesda struck gold with Skyrim and something tells me that they weren't expecting that level of success. That's why they are taking so long to release ES VI. It's hard to follow that level of expectations, especially after more than a decade.
I think you're absolutely right. There's been a huge amount of innovation in RPG design in the years since Skyrim, including at the highest levels. The aggravating part is that it so rarely comes together in a culture-positive package that gets gamers earnestly excited — Skyrim's earth-shattering success increasingly seems like a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for the industry.
Expectation management is going to remain a very difficult problem for AAA, but I'll add that I'm encouraged by the positive reception behind games like Tainted Grail because it demonstrates that the audience for these games is totally willing to compromise on certain aspects of polish and mechanical complexity as long as they get an engrossing adventure in return. There's no panacea, but that at least seems like a good avenue to investigate.
All very good points, but for me, the question is moot. Not just because I'm perfectly happy with the current status quo of indie and AA developers blowing the big fish out of the water with gaming dynamite, and not just because for me Skyrim was pretty much dead on impact anyway. I think we have had a Skyrim-Killer, at least in one sense.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is far and away my favorite 'Bethesda-style RPG' since Morrowind, and it manages that by ironically being very different from the originator studio's take. KCD is a game rooted in real history, with [mostly] real characters, a real place, and real stakes, and it being so grounded allows it to recapture some of what made older, more clunky but commensurately more able to capture the imagination Elder Scrolls games feel special. Though there is fast travel, [unless you're playing Hardcore] that fast travel still only takes you to major settlements, which still forces you to navigate the world between, and even within them, which is not necessarily a trivial task given how much more danger there is from highwaymen and peasants upset with you trespassing on their private property than in a world where you have magicka coursing through your veins.
Something that ties KCD close to Morrowind in my mind is that both of them really encourage the player to almost 'live' in the world they're an external agent in. Morrowind does this by forcing you to walk from place to place, look around and orient yourself to the world, pay attention to the things people say to you rather than just glancing at your phone GPS app - I mean the arrow on your compass as you drive your character to the next quest marker with one hand. KCD does that [again, in Hardcore especially, which even removes your own positional marker from the in-game map] and more, forcing you to find food, find food that hasn't rotted away when you look and realize it's been two weeks since you stole that roast chicken from an inn, find a place to lay down and rest, haggle with whoever technically owns that bed, run a whetstone on your sword to smooth out the chips from your last battle, and so on.
Again, compare that to, for example, Skyrim, where there IS a lot of effort put into ALLOWING you to do those sorts of things, but no real reason to. You CAN sit at a bar and pull out an apple and munch it, but even the most dedicated role-playing RPGer would have to really push themselves to bother more than a couple times. The real difference is that a lot of modern RPGs [and modern big budget games in general, see: Red Dead 2] pour a lot of effort into making these superficial 'realism' widgets for credulous gamers to gawk at once or twice, but the actual game you wind up playing is totally divorced from those passing gestures to realism. It's all just stage dressing, which the player gets yanked through on the way to their next scripted scene. Obviously, making players eat and drink and find a place to pee isn't necessarily the recipe for Role Playing Magic [that's more the recipe for Strand-type Magic] but I do think KCD crushed Skyrim for real RPG connoisseurs, and I'm perfectly happy admitting I don't have the tiniest shred of hope that Bethesda, a publisher that got so big it swallowed up DOOM, will somehow revitalize the genre with a sequel they've been cagey about the way that one guy you work with is about his novel he's been working on for 15 years. Shit or get off the pot, Todd! Look at Gabe! He doesn't even pretend like Valve will make a real game in our lifetimes!
Thanks for reminding me about Nehrim and Enderal, by the way, and let me throw one more curveball - if you haven't yet, check out Chronicles of Archelos, a Polish overhaul of Gothic 2 in much the same vein as those two, freely available on Steam if you own Gothic 2 Gold, and which blows Gothic 2 out of the water in terms of updated mechanics, world design, quest design, character and writing, and so on. You don't have to, but play it in Polish - I'll hear the protagonist's delivery of 'dzieki' in the back of my mind for the rest of my life.
Damn, guess it's time I finally gave KC:D another shot. My dirty secret is that it pissed me off so much back in 2018 that I kicked it in the head before Act 2 and never went back. I recall thinking at the time that it had the worst combat system I'd ever experienced, which is what ultimately put me off the thing, but I remember the interstitial travel and some of the writing pretty fondly. Once I've processed the lingering trauma from being railroaded into an unwinnable fight with Runt, I'll reinstall and try a melee-focused build. You make a compelling case about the groundedness of its world.
Love the phrase "superficial 'realism' widgets," by the way. I sense a lot of exhaustion with the practice even within the RDR2-stanning mainstream, and it makes me hopeful that some studio of means will follow the money and greenlight a similarly absorbing RPG untainted by languid pseudo-interactivity and testicle physics. Bethesda certainly won't be the ones to do it for any number of reasons, but whichever studio pulls it off will most likely take a lot of inspiration from BGS' glory days (such as they were).
Oh, and I'll definitely give Archolos a play, too. I played and loved Gothic 1 over a decade ago but never got around to the sequel, and I need an excuse to play that one as well. In Polish, of course.
You don't really need to do a melee focused build, but you should take seriously the offer for martial training once that becomes available - it's not just an extended tutorial, it's also a place where you can freely work to improve Henry's ability to hold a weapon without putting your life at risk, and it's repeatable.
I mentioned it here https://playingthisweek.substack.com/p/kingdom-come-deliverance-ii-playthrough-diary-part-1/comment/138355054 just yesterday, but in general I think the combat in KCD is frustrating and punishing early on for very intentional reasons, to strongly discourage people still early in the character arc from leaping into every ambush they encounter and arrogantly taking on multiple enemies expecting their gaming prowess to override their character's lack of conditioning, training, or experience. Now, it's still kind of annoying even later on, but I think it's definitely supposed to be OPPRESSIVE when you start out, otherwise half the people who played would slaughter every Cuman mercenary menacing Skalitz at the start just to prove they could. Once you can swallow the idea that you're controlling a character who initially can't duel a run of the mill bandit without getting whipped, much like how in Morrowind you can't drain your stamina sprinting everywhere and expect to land a single hit if a rat bounds up to you at level one, I think you can appreciate how KCD really ENFORCES its life-simulation and grounded setting to create a genuinely epic story in a very small and low-stakes setting.
Ya know, I never thought about it that way. Kenshi does pretty much exactly the same thing vis-à-vis deliberately oppressive early-game combat, and God knows I forgave that game a lot of questionable design choices. I'll try to remember to avail myself of the extra training — must've missed that altogether my first time around.
Great article. A few things I'd note:
From recent experience, it seems to me that there actually kind of was a great Skyrim-like lately - Kingdom Come Deliverence 2. When I was playing it, I kept being reminded of Skyrim, except that it kind of feels like what Skyrim was trying to be decades ago when the technology wasn't really there. It's got all the same systems - alchemy, forging weapons, sneaking, speech, combat - but they're all just vastly better, having been developed with the benefit of many years of experience, better technology, and a lot of money. When I was playing this game, with its incredible combat, its populous and intricate towns and cities, its great potion brewing mechanics, I couldn't help but wonder why on earth others were bothering with the Oblivion remaster?
And indeed it seems that most people briefly messed around in Cyrodiil and promptly moved on, because the game, while nostalgic for many, just isn't very good value compared to the amazing RPGs that can be made now. The only thing KCD2 is lacking is the ability to define your own character, which is undoubtedly still a huge draw for the Elder Scrolls and its imitators. I would die happy if Warhorse made a fantasy RPG where you could design your own character and I could play dress-up with my very own Blorbos in photo-mode.
Also, hardest of hard agrees on the superiority of Morrowind's magic system. Teleportation was so incredibly useful and satisfying, particularly in the main quest, as was levitation, chameleon, all of these fantastic spells and magic items make Morrowind so much more fun to play. Is it balanced? No, but in a way that's preferable - I found exploring in Morrowind so much more compelling and rewarding, because you would often find incredibly useful items that you'd still be using countless hours and levels later, which creates a strong incentive to keep exploring, whereas in Skyrim it's just predictable, incrementally better generic loot (which you couldn't even sell for a fair price without mods, because merchants were so inexplicably poor).
Thanks so much! I've heard that about KCD2 a few times now, and I'm definitely going to have to see it for myself just as soon as I have some more cash to burn. It seems like Warhorse really nailed the world's interactivity in the ways you'd expect from a relatively grounded historical-fiction RPG.
Is it a Skyrim-like? That's a fascinating question to ponder. KCD lacks elements like a magic system and dungeon-delving (mostly) because they'd be fundamentally at odds with its setting, which makes me wonder whether those elements are or are not indispensable. And as you say, KCDs 1 and 2 are stories about a specific character with specific motivations and a particular history — I'd certainly feel weird about starting a KCD campaign and just going off on random mercenary adventures without worrying about recovering that sword or burying my parents.
Come to think of it, Warhorse might be in a better position than any other major studio to develop a high-fantasy Grand RPG that competes directly with Skyrim et al. I'm planning on giving KCD1 a proper go soon, so I'll make a point of considering this all in more detail.
That's very true. There are definitely a few things KCD lacks comparitively - a true Skyrim-like would need to be less narrative-heavy and more open-ended. It's always been surprising and disappointing to me how few post-Skyrim RPGs leaned into this approach - studios like CDPR and Warhorse were sort of tapping into the same market, yet have always emphasised narrative-heavy games where you play as a pre-defined character.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do often find myself trying to play KCD or The Witcher 3 like Skyrim, i.e. focusing on bounty hunting, sidequests and exploration, actively avoiding the main quests, because then it feels like MY adventure, and not Geralt/Henry's.
I wish more studios with real budgets would try to replicate the sense of freedom and imagination that made Skyrim so great, and part of that was always the lack of movie/novel/TVification that has crept into so many big productions. I've got an unfinished thing about Skyrim in drafts which calls it 'the Goldilocks RPG' for this reason - despite being one of the best selling RPGs ever, there have been surprisingly few attempts to replicate it, and zero have really succeeded (though a lot have been great by other measures).
Great article.
In honor of the late Julian LeFay (RIP), features I really enjoy from Daggerfall that I think ought to make it into whatever game happens to be the next Scrolls-like.
1) Class-based familiarity and disposition. This is very fun for inhabiting a character, which is the part of systems-driven games that I don't think you cover very much here. The environment is important, but another very crucial component of these games is getting to feel not just like you are an actual adventurer dealing with various adventurer problems, but that you are a *specific* adventurer dealing with various adventurer problems. To recap for those unaware, in TES 2 Daggerfall, you can make a character who is more popular with the lower or upper classes of a city. Your cutthroat bandit type could have an easier time getting along with regular folk, and your majestic knight is highly appreciated by the nobility. This is much more interesting than just "i'm generically charismatic and everyone likes me OR i am generically dull and no one likes me"
2) Timers on quests. This is incredibly controversial and it probably won't be added, but I think it should at least be added to the survival/hard mode/whatever. The fact that almost all quests in daggerfall have a timer on how many (in-game) days you have to complete them requires you to prioritize your time. Part of what enables this system is the fact that a lot of the quests are repeatable and procedurally generated (which personally I really enjoyed, but I know that's not everyone's cup of tea), but the game is not afraid to make you fail even very important quests because you took too long.
3) Money and finding work matters a lot. Because you have a timer on your quests, you may often find yourself wanting to get places quicker. While DF (unlike Morrowind) has unlimited fast travel, the travel takes in-game time, and fast*er* travel requires stuff like riding a boat, or buying a horse, which costs money. Merchants also actually sell a lot of good stuff that is not easily outmatched by things you find in dungeons, unlike the later games. In turn, this means getting money by doing basic work for various factions matters a lot more, which synergizes well with the procedural contracts and faction reputation systems.
Thanks! I played Daggerfall for the first time several months ago and wholeheartedly agree with all three of these. Some specific thoughts:
1) To be a *specific* adventurer is a great way to put it, and Daggerfall might be the best at facilitating a wide variety of class fantasies out of all the TES games for this reason. It's remarkable how much more immersive social interactions are made by the simple addition of speech skills and conversational tone, and it underscores the relative weakness of the latter games' hypersimplified dialogue mechanics.
2) Frankly, I never understood why quest timers got dumped. It's an intuitive and effective means of pacing questlines, and one of the precious few tools we have for influencing narrative pace in an open-world RPG. It certainly would suck to accidentally soft-lock a main quest or something because you accidentally let a timer expire, but that just makes me think there must be some kind of reasonable compromise solution. I'll have to think more about this.
3) I think Daggerfall is the only TES game where I regularly find myself going out of my way specifically for extra cash, and that's a good thing. The adventuring lifestyle should feel expensive, and I especially like how working to sustain yourself passively builds your relationships with local factions and powerbrokers. When it all comes together, you feel like an actual participant in the world and its events rather than a prophesied hero, and I reckon that's where any adventure-focused fantasy RPG is at its strongest.
Thanks again for reading, so glad you enjoyed! RIP Julian LeFay.
I've been hearing a lot in pen and paper communities lately about how important the aspect of time-keeping is to maintaining a coherent illusion of agency and player presence in the world, and I've long thought it's one of the biggest things that's been jettisoned from modern videogame RPGs in the pursuit of wider general audiences. Even more generally, it feels like developers of RPGs in particular have become queasy about having features that players get locked out of without at least a binary compensatory reward, and almost no quests anymore have meaningful fail states of any kind, with time limits being the least frequent.
It turns EVERY RPG playthrough into the same kind of thoughtless, rote collectathon at some level, hoovering up every quest prompt you come across, from the mundane to the grandiose, and filing them into the same ever-expanding list of tasks for you to one day, maybe, cross off, if you even remember it [or more likely, a big arrow pops up when you get close enough to the thing you're supposed to do]. The end result is that the game world, which for an RPG, is usually supposed to emulate a living, dynamic place, instead feels bizarrely suspended in time, with nobody really caring if it took you two hours or two years to do a favor for them, or heal their sick child, or save the world. And it is an incredibly important part of Daggerfall that going around saying 'yes yes, I'll get right on that' to a dozen people usually results in a dozen people and their social circles getting pissed at you.
"stop designing RPGs around repetitive gear-grinds and numbing quest loops and start designing them around the inherently compelling aspects of adventure" - So, uh, make them fun? Nah, that'll never sell.
That's a top notch analysis! I'm not a Bethesda devotee and Elder Scrolls isn't my cup of tea, so I followed most of what you described from a higher level. However, there's nothing on what you described that I didn't see in the AAA game tier in the last 5 years. Unfortunately, the industry is stuck in lack of innovation and risk taking avoidance, things that weren't so grave in 2011 as they are now.
In short, I think that Bethesda struck gold with Skyrim and something tells me that they weren't expecting that level of success. That's why they are taking so long to release ES VI. It's hard to follow that level of expectations, especially after more than a decade.
I think you're absolutely right. There's been a huge amount of innovation in RPG design in the years since Skyrim, including at the highest levels. The aggravating part is that it so rarely comes together in a culture-positive package that gets gamers earnestly excited — Skyrim's earth-shattering success increasingly seems like a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for the industry.
Expectation management is going to remain a very difficult problem for AAA, but I'll add that I'm encouraged by the positive reception behind games like Tainted Grail because it demonstrates that the audience for these games is totally willing to compromise on certain aspects of polish and mechanical complexity as long as they get an engrossing adventure in return. There's no panacea, but that at least seems like a good avenue to investigate.
All very good points, but for me, the question is moot. Not just because I'm perfectly happy with the current status quo of indie and AA developers blowing the big fish out of the water with gaming dynamite, and not just because for me Skyrim was pretty much dead on impact anyway. I think we have had a Skyrim-Killer, at least in one sense.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is far and away my favorite 'Bethesda-style RPG' since Morrowind, and it manages that by ironically being very different from the originator studio's take. KCD is a game rooted in real history, with [mostly] real characters, a real place, and real stakes, and it being so grounded allows it to recapture some of what made older, more clunky but commensurately more able to capture the imagination Elder Scrolls games feel special. Though there is fast travel, [unless you're playing Hardcore] that fast travel still only takes you to major settlements, which still forces you to navigate the world between, and even within them, which is not necessarily a trivial task given how much more danger there is from highwaymen and peasants upset with you trespassing on their private property than in a world where you have magicka coursing through your veins.
Something that ties KCD close to Morrowind in my mind is that both of them really encourage the player to almost 'live' in the world they're an external agent in. Morrowind does this by forcing you to walk from place to place, look around and orient yourself to the world, pay attention to the things people say to you rather than just glancing at your phone GPS app - I mean the arrow on your compass as you drive your character to the next quest marker with one hand. KCD does that [again, in Hardcore especially, which even removes your own positional marker from the in-game map] and more, forcing you to find food, find food that hasn't rotted away when you look and realize it's been two weeks since you stole that roast chicken from an inn, find a place to lay down and rest, haggle with whoever technically owns that bed, run a whetstone on your sword to smooth out the chips from your last battle, and so on.
Again, compare that to, for example, Skyrim, where there IS a lot of effort put into ALLOWING you to do those sorts of things, but no real reason to. You CAN sit at a bar and pull out an apple and munch it, but even the most dedicated role-playing RPGer would have to really push themselves to bother more than a couple times. The real difference is that a lot of modern RPGs [and modern big budget games in general, see: Red Dead 2] pour a lot of effort into making these superficial 'realism' widgets for credulous gamers to gawk at once or twice, but the actual game you wind up playing is totally divorced from those passing gestures to realism. It's all just stage dressing, which the player gets yanked through on the way to their next scripted scene. Obviously, making players eat and drink and find a place to pee isn't necessarily the recipe for Role Playing Magic [that's more the recipe for Strand-type Magic] but I do think KCD crushed Skyrim for real RPG connoisseurs, and I'm perfectly happy admitting I don't have the tiniest shred of hope that Bethesda, a publisher that got so big it swallowed up DOOM, will somehow revitalize the genre with a sequel they've been cagey about the way that one guy you work with is about his novel he's been working on for 15 years. Shit or get off the pot, Todd! Look at Gabe! He doesn't even pretend like Valve will make a real game in our lifetimes!
Thanks for reminding me about Nehrim and Enderal, by the way, and let me throw one more curveball - if you haven't yet, check out Chronicles of Archelos, a Polish overhaul of Gothic 2 in much the same vein as those two, freely available on Steam if you own Gothic 2 Gold, and which blows Gothic 2 out of the water in terms of updated mechanics, world design, quest design, character and writing, and so on. You don't have to, but play it in Polish - I'll hear the protagonist's delivery of 'dzieki' in the back of my mind for the rest of my life.
Damn, guess it's time I finally gave KC:D another shot. My dirty secret is that it pissed me off so much back in 2018 that I kicked it in the head before Act 2 and never went back. I recall thinking at the time that it had the worst combat system I'd ever experienced, which is what ultimately put me off the thing, but I remember the interstitial travel and some of the writing pretty fondly. Once I've processed the lingering trauma from being railroaded into an unwinnable fight with Runt, I'll reinstall and try a melee-focused build. You make a compelling case about the groundedness of its world.
Love the phrase "superficial 'realism' widgets," by the way. I sense a lot of exhaustion with the practice even within the RDR2-stanning mainstream, and it makes me hopeful that some studio of means will follow the money and greenlight a similarly absorbing RPG untainted by languid pseudo-interactivity and testicle physics. Bethesda certainly won't be the ones to do it for any number of reasons, but whichever studio pulls it off will most likely take a lot of inspiration from BGS' glory days (such as they were).
Oh, and I'll definitely give Archolos a play, too. I played and loved Gothic 1 over a decade ago but never got around to the sequel, and I need an excuse to play that one as well. In Polish, of course.
You don't really need to do a melee focused build, but you should take seriously the offer for martial training once that becomes available - it's not just an extended tutorial, it's also a place where you can freely work to improve Henry's ability to hold a weapon without putting your life at risk, and it's repeatable.
I mentioned it here https://playingthisweek.substack.com/p/kingdom-come-deliverance-ii-playthrough-diary-part-1/comment/138355054 just yesterday, but in general I think the combat in KCD is frustrating and punishing early on for very intentional reasons, to strongly discourage people still early in the character arc from leaping into every ambush they encounter and arrogantly taking on multiple enemies expecting their gaming prowess to override their character's lack of conditioning, training, or experience. Now, it's still kind of annoying even later on, but I think it's definitely supposed to be OPPRESSIVE when you start out, otherwise half the people who played would slaughter every Cuman mercenary menacing Skalitz at the start just to prove they could. Once you can swallow the idea that you're controlling a character who initially can't duel a run of the mill bandit without getting whipped, much like how in Morrowind you can't drain your stamina sprinting everywhere and expect to land a single hit if a rat bounds up to you at level one, I think you can appreciate how KCD really ENFORCES its life-simulation and grounded setting to create a genuinely epic story in a very small and low-stakes setting.
Ya know, I never thought about it that way. Kenshi does pretty much exactly the same thing vis-à-vis deliberately oppressive early-game combat, and God knows I forgave that game a lot of questionable design choices. I'll try to remember to avail myself of the extra training — must've missed that altogether my first time around.