Latest news with #KCD2
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Don't get rid of your starting horse in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2—there's a secret perk that makes her the best in the game
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. My many years of experience have taught me: you should only stay with someone because of who they are, not who you think they could be. The last two weeks have taught me: unless they are a horse. Because it turns out that, if you stick with the worst nags in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 long enough, they'll eventually blossom into strong, valiant steeds. If you've gotten to Semine in KCD2—a process which could take 30 minutes or 100 hours, depending on how sidequest-happy you are—you'll know the game does you the favour of giving you a free horse: Pebbles, Henry's dowdy old mare from the first game. She's terrible. She's slow, scared, and weak, and you'll probably make it your first order of business to buy or steal something better as soon as you can. But you shouldn't. Because it turns out that, if you ride old Pebbles for 35 kilometres or so, you'll eventually unlock a secret perk that makes her one of the best horses in the game. It's called Good Old Pebbles, and it sends her stats skyrocketing. Here's a quick comparison. Which is, frankly, nuts. This makes her one of the speediest and strongest horses in the game, meaning you might finally be able to beat the Voivode's son at that bloody race. The only downside is her static courage (I'm half-convinced it's a bug, but perhaps not), but I reckon it's a very worthwhile trade-off when it comes to getting such an incredible horse for free. Also, townsfolks will stop insulting her, which should make you feel a bit better about yourself. Pebbles actually isn't the only horse you can do this with. There's a similar secret perk for Herring, the free horse that you'll get as part of your adventures around Trosky castle. If you ride ol' Herring around for 50 (count 'em, 50) kilometres, you'll unlock the Red Herring perk. Here's his before-and-after (though a quick note: I never got this perk myself, so I'm using stats from the community, and it looks like these ones factor in your horse's basic gear, which Pebbles' upgraded stats above do not). Which one you prefer is, of course, up to you, but I'm such a hoarder that Pebbles' extra carrying capacity makes her an obvious choice for me. Also, she's been with you since the first game, are you gonna just abandon her in some podunk village outside Kuttenberg? Not very chivalrous of you, Henry. KCD2 console commands: How to use cheatsKCD2 treasure maps: Every loot locationKCD2 horse: How to get a free mountKCD2 Saviour Schnapps: Save your game lotsKCD2 romance options: Bohemian romantasy
BBC News
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: A mammoth acting challenge
You'll often hear about actors and the role of a lifetime, but for Tom McKay and Luke Dale it's especially the past nine years they've dedicated most of their working lives to two video games - Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) and its together, the scripts for the role-playing epics set in 15th Century Bohemia run to more than three million pages and thousands of thought that KCD 2, which came out last week, could be the longest video game script ever actors spoke to BBC Newsbeat about what it was like to be part of such a huge project and working with the game's controversial director. The original KCD was something of a slow-burn sleeper hit. Its review scores were respectable when it released in 2018 but it wasn't universally it found a passionate fanbase in the months and years afterwards and the appetite for a sequel 2 arrived to positive reviews and sold one million copies within 48 hours of sequel follows the story of Tom's character Henry of Skalitz, a blacksmith's son turned knight, and Luke's character, the impulsive Sir Hans a sprawling, open-ended game that allows players to carve their own path through means it's possible to find important characters or items outside of the storylines that revolve around them, and the game will respond to these variable something the game's developers have to account for, and something that Tom in particular, as the main playable character, needs to act out over and over again with subtle differences each meant hundreds of hours of studio time and repeat trips to Prague, where developer Warhorse Studios is says it was "one of the most amazing and unusual acting challenges" he's faced."You would kind of go down one channel of a decision and then come halfway back up and go down another one and then maybe all the way back up to the beginning and back down," he says."And that's not an acting challenge that you ever would have in TV or film." The video games industry is secretive, and both Tom and Luke spent three years under a non-disclosure agreement as they made the second game."It was almost like working for GCHQ or something," says Tom, referring to the British intelligence agency."You couldn't talk to anyone about it and people in the studio couldn't even talk to their partners in some cases about what they were doing." Tom says he would occasionally bump into fans of the game when he was working on other projects, and would have to dodge the question when they grilled him about a says it was more difficult when he bumped into fans of the game in the Czech Republic, where the game is celebrated as a national success they asked why he was spending so much time in Prague, Tom admits he had to bend the truth a little."I'd be like: 'I just love Prague. And I come here very often for lots of holidays," he says. Luke says many fans "gave up hope" that a sequel was on the way, given the six-year gap between the two when the new game was revealed, he says, there was "this incredible reception and everyone went absolutely crazy".It also reignited an online discourse that had erupted around the release of the original Vávra, the co-founder and creative director of Warhorse, is a regular poster on social media and is quick to answer defended the first KCD, when it was criticised for its lack of diversity, as being historically accurate to the time and location of its setting, although there is not universal agreement about the time he also made public statements against perceived attempts to force diversity into games, saying his upbringing in communist Czechoslovakia had made him an opponent of "censorship in the name of good intentions".This won him supporters among the so-called Gamergate movement, which emerged online in 2014 and is widely seen as a backlash against attempts to make gaming more celebrated Vávra for his outspoken, uncompromising approach. But as the release of KCD 2 approached some of those voices turned against him as it emerged that the sequel features a black character and a gay love scene that can play out if players make certain decisions. "I think it's quite a quite an interesting thing that's happened," says Luke."With the first game there was a backlash from a more left-wing mentality and then there's been something of a backlash this time around from the right-wing mentality."Both Luke and Tom, having spent the days after KCD 2's release meeting fans, say they believe the complaints are from an unrepresentative minority. "It's a really good barometer of the distortion between online interaction and real world interaction," says Tom."We did nine hours and it didn't come up once."Luke adds: "I think to be honest with you, the people that are true big fans of gaming and this game aren't bothered about that sort of stuff. "It seems to be people that are really politically involved and they care very much about politics and not gaming and they've just used this as a weapon, but they're not necessarily into gaming." Both actors praise Vávra for his "forensic understanding" of his vision for the points out that, although the director had the final say, many people were involved with making the game."So you do the scene and you've got three four different people coming over to you," says Luke. "Can you do that? Can you just be aware of this? "Me and Tom are like: 'OK can we distill this down?'"And Daniel is really good at helping us to do that because it's his brainchild and he knows exactly what he wants every time."Aside from their relationship with their boss, the other question is whether the co-stars also get on after all that time together."Definitely," says Tom."There's something really organic about spending that amount of time together. "So you kind of get that friendship for free."Luke adds: "It is like putting on a really comfortable pair of clothes."Which is ironic because in the motion capture studio you're literally wearing head-to-toe lycra." Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
After 75 hours, I finally cracked what I was doing wrong in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's terribly explained alchemy system
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is rife with sim-y, medieval stuff. You can whet your blades, forge horseshoes, throw some dice, do your laundry, wash yourself in every trough in Czechia, and, of course, do alchemy. If you're anything like me, that last one is a problem. In my 75 hours in KCD2, I never once managed to produce anything other than a 'weak' potion from my time at the alchemy bench. Even when I felt like I was following recipes to the letter and the nanosecond, Henry would grumble about screwing it all up when I finished. Even the perks which explicitly said they'd make the alchemy process more tolerant of errors didn't help. It got to the point that I thought that was the joke—alchemy isn't real, so of course it never works. But no, I'm just dumb. Or, actually, the game is just really bad at explaining how alchemy works. I've now cracked how alchemy actually works. I'm even getting Strong Saviour Schnapps out of dried ingredients. It's all to do with the game's bellows. Basically, never use the bellows unless you are strictly instructed to. Despite the alchemy tutorial presenting the bellows as, in essence, a faster way to get something boiling, they're actually used to generate a different kind of boiling entirely: vigorous boiling. Like me, I bet a lot of you have been chucking your ingredients in the pot and then bellowing the hell out of them to get them boiling faster regardless of whether the recipe calls for vigorous boiling or not, only turning your hourglass over once it was good and bubbly. What you should be doing, it turns out, is lowering the pot over the fire and then simply waiting for vapour to appear. Once it does (you don't have to wait for the bubbles) turn your hourglass over. Once it's empty, that's one turn. Keep the boiling going for as many turns as the recipe requires, and you're golden. Or, you know, to reduce these several paragraphs to one easy-to-digest sentence: don't use the bellows unless the recipe calls for vigorous boiling, and turn the hourglass once you see vapour. And that, honestly, is all there is to it. After 75 hours of churning out terrible Saviour Schnapps, I just made four strong ones with dried nettle and belladonna. The problem is the game never really explains that the bellows are their own thing. So long as you don't use them when they aren't necessary, it all gets way easier. KCD2 console commands: How to use cheatsKCD2 treasure maps: Every loot locationKCD2 money: Grab every GroschenKCD2 Saviour Schnapps: Save your game lotsKCD2 horse: How to get a free mount
