Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2might be the best game of 2025 thanks to the way it bucks open-world trends. There are no towers to climb, the map isn’t filled with markers, fast travel isn’tthatfast, and the game’s world is moderately sized and dense instead of huge and empty. But there is at least one way Warhorse’s acclaimed RPG should be taking notes from its open-world competitors. Namely, it could learn a lot from howFar Cryhandles DLC.
Kidnapping Dracula?
During a panel at Prague Comic Con, KCD2’s producer Martin Klíma said that 35 quests had been cut from the final game so that Warhorse could ship it half a year sooner. Those quests may end up in eventual DLC, or may never see the light of day. According to Klíma, one of the excised missions involves Henry participating in a plot to kidnap Dracula (or his son, Klíma seems unsure).
This wouldn’t have been the legendary Dracula created by Bram Stoker, which should be obvious if you know much about KCD2’s painstaking realism. It would have instead been Vlad Dracula, the historical voivode of Wallachia, who was also known by his colorful epithet Vlad the Impaler. But Klíma casually name-dropping Dracula got me thinking about a world where Warhorse allowed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to have a little more leeway with history.
Far Cry Points The Way
The Far Cry games aren’tquiteas interested in realism as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Warhorse’s open-world game requires that you sleep, eat, monitor the freshness of your food, sharpen your sword, and think carefully about which direction that sword is pointing in a fight. If you don’t, it’s over for you before it even begins. Far Cry, on the other hand, lets you command an alligator in battle. Yet both are attempting to present a version of the real world, not a fantastical or sci-fi setting.
Well, that’s only actually true for the mainline Far Cry games.Far Cry 3: Blood Dragontook the series to an ‘80s-inspired future, Far Cry: Primal went back to caveman times, and Far Cry: New Dawn shot ahead to a post-apocalypse set in the aftermath ofFar Cry 5’s nuclear ending. Speaking of 5, one of that game’s DLC expansions took us to Mars, and another had us fighting zombies.
Ubisoftis able to keep the Far Cry games relatively grounded by siloing more speculative ideas into spin-offs and DLC. Rockstar did something similar withRed Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare, andCall of Dutyhas long kept its Zombies content isolated in its own mode. A series set in the real world can still take detours into fantasy. The developers just need to verify that the detour is properly marked. Selling them separately as DLC or standalone expansions is a perfect exit sign.
Medieval Bohemia is ripe with interesting fantasy ideas to explore. We see some of this in the base game, like when Henry hears the story of a mythical axe getting buried by a nearby lake, or when Miller Kreyzl enlists him to help create a golem. These flirtations with fantasy are presented as flights of fancy for the characters involved. In the same way that Robert Eggers’ Puritans in The Witch see the world entirely through the lens of 15th-century religion and folklore, the cast of KCD2 believes in some things that we now know aren’t real.
Realism is part of the charm, so there is the risk that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 could lose a little of what makes it special by dabbling in the fantastical. But if the success ofThe Witcher 3andA Song of Ice and Fireteaches us anything, it’s that fantasy doesn’t have to be at odds with gritty realism.
I would love to see Warhorse’s idiosyncratic approach applied to, say, killing werewolves. Give me a big event like the base game’s wedding, but hosted at a vampire’s castle. Let Henry brew actual magical potions at the alchemy bench. Give us some Christmas DLC with a boss fight against Krampus. The sky’s the limit when the rules of reality can be bent like a sword in dire need of a sharpening wheel.
