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You know, I thought I liked Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. I was so suckered in that I even gave it a 90% in our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review before theorising a new iron law of game design based off of it. But I was wrong. The game was actually unplayable, and it’s entirely down to the fact that I couldn’t give Henry a mullet.
Fortunately, Warhorse has realised its world-historic blunder and promised to introduce a hairstyle system to the game in an upcoming March patch. In a recent Twitch stream, KCD2 lead designer Prokop Jirsa and Warhorse PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling showed off some of the features that would be hitting Bohemia in a patch planned for the middle of this month. Most important: the ability to give Henry a zoomer haircut.
Although KCD1 got the ability in its 1.4 patch for Henry to change his default momma’s boy haircut and scraggly beard at any of Bohemia’s many bathhouses, that feature was absent at KCD2’s launch.
But Warhorse was just holding it back as a treat, turns out. In the Twitch stream, Stolz-Zwilling and Jirsa show off a frankly luxurious array of different hair and beard styles for ol’ Henry to equip on his mug, from razor-sharp undercuts to sumptuous bouffants.
My favourite is the ‘brawler’—the aforementioned Zoomer ‘do—not because I actually like how it looks, but because it really does look like Henry’s getting ready to go shoot TikToks asking passersby about their bodycount.
The Bohemian quiffs aren’t all we’re getting this month. March will also mark the triumphant arrival of a KCD1-style hardcore mode to the game. If you’re not familiar, this is the mode that makes Henry’s adventures even more “immersive” than they already were.
First up, wave goodbye to fast travel. Also wave goodbye to cardinal directions on your compass and having your location indicated on the game map. Getting anywhere means puzzling out where the hell you are from surrounding landmarks and then figuring out how to get what you’re going. It’s pretty, uh, hardcore.
But beyond that, you even get the chance to make things even more difficult for yourself by selecting from an array of negative traits at the game’s start. You can give Henry a bad back, or make him sonambulant (a sleepwalker), or give him a malus to speech checks by picking the ‘bashful’ trait. In KCD1, if you turned on every single bad trait and still managed to beat the game, you got a special achievement for your trouble. Do I find this tempting? Yes, because I am very foolish.
My favourite thing about KCD1’s hardcore mode, though, was that it upped the realism by straight up killing you in character creation. If you try to start a hardcore game, you stood a great chance of hitting a ‘You died’ screen, outlining the circumstances of your early death in a harsh medieval society (a cut could get infected, or you fell into a pond, or maybe you never made it through birth at all). You’d often have to start a new game multiple times just to make it to the actual character-creation screen. That’s how hardcore we’re talking.
I’m not sure if that particular aspect of the game’s hardcore mode will make a return when KCD2 gets its own version later this month, but I hope it does. It’s a weird, rare, and special thing Warhorse has made. Aspects like that just make it even better.
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Kurt Indovina
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