Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a 2018 action role-playing video game developed by Warhorse Studios and published by Deep Silver. It is the first entry in the Kingdom Come series. The game is set in the late medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, an Imperial State of the Holy Roman Empire, and takes place during a war in Bohemia in 1403, during the time of King Wenceslaus IV. After mercenaries raid his village, commoner Henry joins the service of Lord Radzig Kobyla, who leads a resistance movement against the invading Hungarian king Sigismund. As Henry pursues justice, he becomes involved in an effort to restore Wenceslaus to the throne. The game features branching quest lines in an open-world environment, and focuses on period-accurate content.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on 13 February 2018, on 15 March 2024 for Nintendo Switch, and on 13 February 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game received generally positive reviews for PC, and mixed reviews for consoles; critics praised the story and characters, but were divided over its attention to detail and focus on realism, and criticised its technical bugs and save system. Some commentators, historians, and scholars criticised the game's portrayal of certain ethnic groups, particularly the Cumans. It sold over 10 million units by May 2025. A sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, was released in February 2025. A third game in the franchise is set to be released during Warhorse's 2027 fiscal year.
Gameplay
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an action role-playing video game set in an open-world environment and played from a first-person perspective. It utilises a classless role-playing system, allowing the player to customise their skills to take on roles such as warrior, bard, thief, or a hybrid of these. Abilities and stats grow depending on what the player does and says through branched dialogue trees. During conversations, the time a player takes to make a decision is limited and has an effect on their relationships with others. Reputation is based on player choices and therefore can bring consequences.
Character bodies and faces are created through the combination of multiple, individual pieces with finishing touches. The clothing system features 16 item slots and items on many areas of the body that can be layered. For example, a heavily armored knight may on his upper body wear a gambeson, followed by mail and plate armour, with a tabard or surcoat over top, for a total of four clothing items in the chest slots. Each clothing type provides different levels of protection against different types of weapons. Clothing also gets progressively more worn, dirty, or bloody through use, affecting the character's appearance. The player is able to use a variety of weapons, including swords, knives, axes, hammers, and bows. Horses are featured heavily in the game, and are designed to act with their own AI while under the player's control, moving or jumping to avoid small obstacles or dangers. The player can also fight from horseback and use their steed to carry items if they need additional inventory space, but warhorses are also competent combatants with their own AI. Steeds come with five slots for armor and attachments.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance also features a needs system which requires the player to sleep and eat in order to stay healthy. Equipment and clothing also degrade and require repair. Foodstuffs and other perishable items will spoil over time. The game uses skill/stat-based mini-games for many of these tasks, including weapon and armor repair, as well as for gathering new items by picking locks or pockets, distilling alcohol, or creating medicines. The game uses long- and short-ranged weapons in combat which is based on a physics system using inverse kinematics to determine the reactions of both combatants based on the speed and weight of a blow. This system aims to add greater variety and realism to the combat, coupled with a variety of basic combat moves and combination moves, some of which can be unlocked by skill points. Different weapons have different characteristics, making them useful for different purposes. For example, a sword is a quick weapon for striking and parrying, but it is not very effective against heavy armor.
Quests are intended to be nonlinear, with multiple ways to complete objectives to allow multiple character types to be viable. The storyline features some large-scale events such as castle sieges and large battles. Every non-player character (NPC) has a daily routine, and every routine can be affected by the player. Characters are able to react to all player actions and adjust their routines to them. NPCs will report crimes to authorities, who will punish the player accordingly, either with a fine or time in jail. Crime will affect economics, and people will get suspicious or aggressive after unresolved crimes.
Synopsis
Setting
Kingdom Come: Deliverance takes place in the early 15th century in the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and of the Holy Roman Empire, in what is now the Czech Republic. The accessible area of the game is located in the region between Sázava (Sasau) and Rattay. Other real-world settlements and towns in the game include Ledečko, Mrchojedy, Přibyslavice, Samopše, Sázava Monastery, Stříbrná Skalice, Talmberk, Úžice, and Vraník.
Before the events of the game, the Kingdom of Bohemia was ruled by Charles IV, who was also Holy Roman Emperor, and it experienced a golden age under his reign. Upon Charles' death in 1378, his eldest son, Wenceslaus IV, would inherit his father's throne. Wenceslaus would prove himself an idle and frivolous ruler, and a nuisance to the Bohemian nobility. After Wenceslaus did not seek a coronation ceremony as emperor, the nobles turned to his half-brother Sigismund, King of Hungary and Croatia, for help. Sigismund thus kidnapped Wenceslaus to force his abdication, and took advantage of the ensuing disorder with a brutal campaign to pillage the Bohemian lands and punish Wenceslaus' allies.
Characters Many of the game's characters are based on historical people, though the protagonist Henry of Skalitz (Tom McKay) is fictional. Henry's companion is the heir to Rattay, Hans Capon of Pirkstein (Luke Dale). Other notable characters are the Hungarian nobleman and main antagonist Istvan Toth (Logan Hillier), liege lord of Skalitz: Radzig Kobyla (Michael Pitthan), Henry's primary love interest mill maid Theresa (Victoria Lynn Carroll), Henry's foster-father Martin (Matthew Wolf), acting lord of Rattay: Hanush of Leipa (Peter Hosking, Daniel Vávra), bandit gang leader Runt (Luke Allen-Gale), the noble Jobst of Moravia (Marc Cram), the German knight Markvart von Aulitz (Richard Zeman), and chief engineer of Skalitz: Tobias Feyfar (Ben Bradshaw).
Plot In the silver mining town of Skalitz, Henry is a young apprentice living with his mother and his blacksmith father, Martin. Henry and Martin finish a commissioned sword for King Wenceslaus' hetman, Sir Radzig Kobyla, who visits to admire the weapon with Hungarian nobleman Sir Ištván Tóth. Skalitz is then attacked by an army of Cuman soldiers under Sigismund's command, and Henry's parents are killed by Sigismund's adjutant, German nobleman Sir Markvart von Aulitz. Henry flees with the sword to Talmberg to warn its lord, Sir Divish, of the attack. Taking advantage of a storm during the night, Radzig sneaks the survivors out of Skalitz castle and towards Rattay.
The next morning, Sigismund's army appears outside of Talmberg, but Divish parlays with Markvart and convinces Sigismund to leave. Meanwhile, Henry is devastated that his parents have not been properly buried, and sneaks back to Skalitz against Divish's orders. Henry is then confronted by bandits led by a man named Runt, who defeats Henry in a duel and steals the commissioned sword. Henry is saved by another Skalitz survivor, Theresa, and Talmberg's Captain Robard and his guard, who take him to Rattay to be harboured by Peshek, the local miller and Theresa's uncle.
Seeking to recover his father's sword and avenge his parents, Henry enters the service of Sir Hanush of Leipa, acting Lord of Rattay and guardian to his young nephew, Lord Hans Capon. After saving Capon from Cumans during a hunting trip, Henry becomes Radzig's envoy. Henry then helps investigate a bandit raid on a local stud farm in Neuhof, which leads him to a concealed camp in Pribyslavitz sheltering bandits and Cumans, Runt being among them. Henry helps Radzig's and Divish's soldiers overwhelm the camp and kills Runt after a duel, but fails to locate his father's sword.
The camp leads the Lords to believe that someone is secretly raising an insurgency. Henry follows various leads to discover a group of bandits operating near Sasau, who are recruiting mercenaries with counterfeit coins. Henry unravels the conspiracy and infiltrates the bandit ranks, leading him to their stronghold in Vraník. He encounters Tóth again, who recognises Henry and has him captured and tortured. Tóth reveals that he wields Henry's father's sword and plans to use his mercenaries to conquer Bohemia, expecting Sigismund to reward him once he reigns as king. He also reveals that Henry is actually Radzig's illegitimate son. With the help of a former Skalitz villager, Zbyshek, Henry escapes and warns the Lords of Tóth's treachery. Radzig acknowledges Henry as his son, and then the Lords and their combined army assault Vranik and defeat its garrison. However, Tóth and a number of his mercenaries infiltrate Talmberg and capture its castle, taking Divish's wife Stephanie and Sir Radzig as hostages.
The Lords lay siege to Talmberg, and Konrad Kyeser is recruited to help build a trebuchet, which the Lords use to breach the castle's walls. The Lords and their soldiers overwhelm Tóth's men, and Hanush negotiates the release of the hostages in exchange for Tóth's safe departure. Henry is angered at Tóth's escape with the sword, while Radzig believes that they will encounter him again. Radzig also reveals that he and Henry's mother were lovers when they were young, but Radzig could not marry a commoner, which was why he allowed Martin to be Henry's father.
In the epilogue, Martin visits Henry in a dream, who commends Henry for his courage and perseverance before walking away with Henry's mother into the afterlife. Henry and the Lords are then visited by Jobst of Moravia, King Wenceslaus' cousin, who has negotiated an alliance with various nobles throughout the empire against Sigismund. Seeing the futility of the war, Jobst wishes to have the Bohemian Lords join so that they can sway Sigismund's supporters to sue for peace. The Lords are uncertain, but agree that Wenceslaus must be restored to the throne. To assess the situation, Henry and Capon must visit one of Sigismund's allies, Otto von Bergow, at his estate in Trosky Castle, with a letter enquiring whether or not his allegiance to Sigismund has been shaken. The pair depart the region with a small armed entourage.
Development and release The project that was to become Kingdom Come: Deliverance began with a pitch by Daniel Vávra, who had left 2K Czech in 2009. With a small team he began seeking investors for the project. Vávra's pitch brought on board Martin Klíma, founder of Altar Games, but pitches to major investors in the Czech Republic were not successful. The team was preparing to abandon the project when a successful pitch to a private investor, the Czech billionaire Zdeněk Bakala, secured funding to develop a prototype of the game. Warhorse Studios was founded on 21 July 2011.