Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Has One Of The Strongest Open Worlds In Games

And it's simply because it never forgets.

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The concept of open worlds and choices in video games is nothing new. Many games often employ one or the other to give players freedom in games, though many are much less open than they seem at first. The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance aimed to buck that trend – merging the concept of freedom of choice with a realistic but harsh open world. While other games do both to varying levels of success, its sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, does things even better. I’d even go as far as to say it’s one of my favourite open worlds in a game for a while.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II does a lot right when presenting its open world, but at its most basic, it gets something especially right – it’s incredibly inviting to explore. While there will never be a wealth of activities and side quest markers peppered throughout the world of Bohemia, there is always something happening whenever you travel from one point to another. I’ve said it before on our podcast, but just like Dragon’s Dogma II and Tears of the Kingdom, it’s an open-world game where the journey matters as much as the destination.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Open World

Even during points where I’d die and inevitably retrace my steps, the world would often throw something at me that I’d not seen before, even if it was a path I’d travelled before my aforementioned death. One time, somebody had mistaken me for somebody else and wanted to worship me. Another was a bandit posing as a monk in trouble, trying to rob me in the cold dark of night. Others it was a simple group of travelling musicians I could play dice with or, given my predilections, rob blind. They’re small touches that make the world of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II feel alive.

But it’s not just the physical characteristics of the world that pull you in; it’s how the world reacts to you. While this is nothing new for players of the original game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes the concepts that made the previous game unique and expands on them significantly. Putting it simply – every NPC you encounter has a routine, inventory and reputation level of some sort and you can easily manipulate this fact to approach most quests in a way that best suits your playstyle.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Open World

This manifests in a few ways when playing the game. It can be as simple as trying to beat someone at a game of dice, noticing they have a lucky dice winning them their matches and then stealing it from them so they can’t use it in a match shortly after. Of course, if you’re trying to win an item from them, you could even kill them too, though if you get seen, the whole town will know you’re a criminal from then on. Or perhaps you want to do things more quietly – following them to their home, looking to see where they eat from and poisoning their food supply instead.

It’s a system that feels like an immersive sim in every sense of the word. If you can think to do things in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and you have the items or means to do it, it’ll probably work. There are admittedly some points in the main story – particularly battles – where you can’t quite alter the course of the story too dramatically. I won’t spoil those moments, but they are slight blemishes on an otherwise very robust system.

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Open World

It’s not just about the choices you make either; it’s also about the consequences of those choices. Often, if you’re seen skulking around at night by somebody, and you subsequently rob them, that NPC will remember they saw you and report your appearance to guards. Revisiting that town in the future will mean the guards will arrest you, and if you don’t have enough money to bribe them or the charisma to talk them out of arresting you, you’ll have to suffer from a punishment of some kind. Do it a few times, and you’ll be branded, physically changing how other people, including merchants, interact with you. Do it even more, and you’ll be executed, and the game will end.

Other smaller choices you make will contribute to your eventual successes or failures. I thought I was clever initially, stealing money from merchants to fund my adventures. But then I spent considerable time stealing all kinds of things from others, hoping to sell them to those same merchants. Imagine my shock when they had no money to pay me for my goods because I’d stolen it all from them already. It didn’t feel very pleasant, but it was also entirely my own doing.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Open World

This commitment to realism makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance II stand apart from other open-worlds in games. Often, other games will have you choose during a key story moment that will alter how it plays out afterwards. Deliverance II still has that, but how the world is constructed means that every choice you make has to be carefully considered, even the smaller ones, as you go about your days. Whereas in a game like Skyrim, I can steal from people and know it’s alright if I just get out of the zone and come back, in Deliverance II, I often find myself thinking about what I’ll do and how that’ll mess me around in the future.

So, while there’s a lot to love about Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, it’s world is easily one of the best open worlds in gaming. It feels alive in the greatest sense – from both the player’s perspective and from Henry’s, both in-game and out. But it means that the choices you make matter – from something as simple as taking an item from an NPC to something more complex like framing them for a crime through an intricate web of lies. No matter your choice, the world reacts, sometimes expectedly and other times unexpectedly. And that is why Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s open world is so strong. It truly never forgets.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Dog

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on February 5th 2025.