Unlike the majority of its peers, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 launched as a complete, polished game – one that’s old-school in the best possible way. That’s a welcome relief from the usual, and certainly worthy of praise despite a few lingering issues.
Perhaps one reason why KCD2 is in such a great state is down to its choice of engine. CryEngine made its name powering large, open-ended levels like those in the original Far Cry and Crysis, and it was tapped for the original Kingdom Come Deliverance game back in 2018. The new game uses a DirectX 12 version of the engine, but unlike most DX12 titles the game doesn’t suffer from the stutter, hitches or otherwise troublesome frame-times that we’ve come to expect from modern PC releases.
Rather than playing on a high-end PC, I spent most of my time with KCD2 using medium settings on a mainstream build, complete with a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and RTX 4060 or RTX 4070 Super graphics card. Even with the older and/or mid-range components, frame-times remained solid when targeting 60fps. Most notably, the game doesn’t exhibit shader compilation stutter, so seeing new effects never triggered frame-time hitches over hours of play.
Based on what I know from interviews with Crytek, the necessary PSO caching can be accomplished during loading screens between chapters or asychronously in the backgroud, with delayed visibility of a shader if it’s ever needed but not ready. Regardless of the mechanism, the results speak for themselves, and it’s refreshing to see a game make such a solid first impression.
After around eight hours of gameplay on the Ryzen 5 3600 system, I only found two instances of a frame-time spike which broke the 60fps cap, and both came in the prologue – once while moving forward into the pond, and once later on wwhile moving from the stream to Bozhena’s house. I’m not sure what caused them, but they’re fairly forgiveable given their rarity.
As you might have guessed, the game also doesn’t seem to suffer from open world traversal stutter as we’d normally expect even from relatively polished Unreal Engine releases, nor does it have frame-time issues in areas with large numbers of NPCs. Running through the game world through areas of varying density did nothing to dent the frame-time graph (or frame-rate graph for that matter) on the Ryzen 5 3600. Even when hitting the NPC- and object-dense mid-game area of Kuttenberg, the 3600 produced a perfectly flat frame-time graph with zero issues and impeccable smoothness. Of course, the game isn’t at its most demanding on medium settings, but it is still running real-time software ray-traced global illumination, which is no small feat.
Moreover, the base gameplay design – with all the dense open world quests, realistic NPC schedules and AI, and bigger population densities – are not intensely CPU-limited in a way which produces bad frame-times. This is definitely not the norm in modern high production value releases like Dragon’s Dogma 2 or Avowed, where choosing similarly mid-range or even lowest settings still results in poor frame-time health in city environments. DD2, for example, constantly has frame-times above 33ms, while having NPCs appear out of thin air right next to your character. Avowed has much less interactivity and NPC density, but there are still big frame-time spikes when crossing terrain, while performance dips to the 40s in towns. I’m actually in awe over how well KCD2 runs in these areas, and the game is an extreme outlier – even compared to its own predecessor, being more CPU-friendly despite a more ambitious design. Bravo, Warhorse – audentes fortuna iuvat!
While running quite well, KCD2 manages to do a number of things to stand out graphically too. The core look of the game is heavily influenced by the technology powering the indirect lighting, one of the more advanced modes of CryEngine’s sparse voxel octree global illumination (SVOGI). The 3D geometry is simplified into blocky voxels of increasing coarseness at a distance, which are then cone traced against in software to give the game real time diffuse global illumination. Like games with hardware RT, this gives the game a realistic colour palette, albeit on a coarser scale.
This means you can see realistic natural occlusion, so recessed areas in large structures have darkened interiors, while a courtyard lit by the sky but not direct sunlight have dark indirect shadows for their overhangs and inlays. SVOGI also simulates light bounce, with the highest “experimental” setting in-game using two real bounces before falling back to a light cache. For example, an area under a thatched roof picks up yellowish bounce light from the light tan ground nearby, while sunlight falling on a building painted light red transfers that colour to a wall opposite.
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Outside of the cities, SVOGI combines with very naturalistic and minimal post-processing, like that of the original Crysis, producing some exceptional landscapes. The density, variety and lighter hues of the games foliage play extremely well with its indirect lighting solution – and I truly think these are the best looking central-European forested areas and rolling hills that I have seen in gaming. Something about the hues and the natural encroaching darkness caused by denser areas of underbrush is very compelling to me. It helps too that there are a lot of artistic flourishes here, like the way streams and brooks crisscross the entire area, or the way the developers allow dusk and night to become extremely dark. Have you ever walked along the edge of a forest at dusk and shuddered at how impenetrably dark it looks? This game does that very well.
In total, the combination of vegetation and lighting gives the game impeccable ambience in its more rural areas that needs to be experienced first hand. Often I found myself wandering and engaging in incidental virtual tourism – inspecting the landscape and appreciating how light bounces around on a larger scale.
So Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 can look great as well run well, but a number of visual aspects don’t scale as far as they do in other games – and there are a few legacy CryEngine idiosyncrasies that Warhorse has left in that degrade graphical quality. As in Crysis 3, back in 2013, plant physics and animations run at lower frame-rate than the rest of the world – eg at 60fps they run at 30fps – but with improper animation pacing, so they sometimes update at uneven intervals. I’d love an ultra high-end setting for plants to make their movement 1:1 with the game frame-rate. The same is true of water interactions, something that’s been in the engine since 2011’s Crysis 2, which gives the 30fps water a frame-y look at times and would likewise benefit from an ultra high-end setting.
The most glaring 30fps limitation though is the cutscenes. I can only guess why Warhorse chose to do this, but I imagine it’s for consistency with the few pre-rendered cutscenes which are used to mask loading. I don’t think this is always a great choice though, as the pre-rendered cutscenes can have have bursts of uneven frame-times – and the same is true of 30fps in-engine cutscenes on occasion. Mods exist to unlock the in-engine cutscenes and they run without issue even on low-end hardware, so I hope this option is officially added in the future.
The game also has some odd issues if your desktop and in-game resolution aren’t matched, with frame-rate capping becoming ineffective. For example, if the desktop is set to 1080p but the display maxes out at 4K, then a 60fps frame-rate cap operates at 30fps instead.
Moving over to graphical quality itself, KCD2 doesn’t scale as far as it could in some areas, most notably reflections and lighting precision. For reflections, the game seems to use cubemaps and screen-space reflections (SSR), as SVOGI only applies to diffuse lighting. As a result, materials like metal or water often look out of place, either glowing strangely in comparison to the surrounding darkness or just poorly shaded, while the rougher surfaces near by look more natural. Due to a reliance on cubemaps for specularity, the game can at times look overly diffuse, with reflections missing on surfaces where you would expect them. The lack of scaling in the reflections is perhaps most obvious around bodies of water, where SSR disocclusion artefacts are commonplace.
Given this weakness, an optional RT reflections option would do wonders, and CryEngine does support this at some level as we saw from the Crysis remasters – though this is no guarantee that implementing a similar system in KCD2 would be trivial.
Another less than great looking aspect of the visuals comes from SVOGI’s lack of precision – while it works for occlusions on a large scale and rolling hills, it is not fine-grained enough for smaller, thinner things. For example, it’s quite common to see light leaking through the wall of a barn or stall, or observe that smaller dynamic objects don’t seem to fit the lighting of the rest of the environment. There is only so much can do here on a technical level given how big the voxels being traced are, but it’s fun to dream about how KCD2 could look with a more fine-grained per-pixel GI solution or even path tracing.
The game also completely lacks HDR support. This would be a big upgrade given the game’s visuals strengths, so I hope it’s something the team could consider down the line.
This is more of a nitpick, but the game’s graphical quality options are named a bit strangely for my tastes. Ultra feels like the default setting, with options below ultra often coming with obvious visual shortcomings. For example, medium shadow quality produces rough results when speaking to NPCs during the day, with a very last-gen look. The same is true of volumetric quality, where medium produces blotchy aliasing inbetween the leaves of trees and only experimental really solves the issue. Skin shading is another one, with striated lines on any setting below ultra.
Given this, ultra feels more like medium, with the game scaling lower than other titles. This could be useful for extremely low-powered devices, but I found better results from keeping ultra as a baseline and adjusting resolution and upscaling instead. This results in less obvious visual degradation for a given level of performance.
For the CPU side of things there are limits to hitting 60fps, with the 60fps Kuttenberg run requiring medium settings on the Ryzen 5 3600. Bringing the game up to ultra increases the CPU burden, but thankfully given the level of optimisation here, there are only a few drops below 60fps – and none are noticeable stutters, they’re just a gentle waxing and waning of the frame-rate. If you have a Ryzen 5000 series CPU or later, ultra settings should be completely unproblematic for performance.
Regarding the experimental preset, I think most settings – other than volumetric quality – should be reserved for properly ultra high-end PCs. Choosing experimental tends to mostly affect graphical quality at a distance, with longer draw distances that increase CPU costs significantly. Here, the Ryzen 5 3600 is largely in the 40s and 50s on the Kuttenberg run, so you’ll need a much stronger CPU for this setting to run at a locked 60fps.
Overall then, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a very polished release which Warhorse Studios should be very proud of. I imagine the game will continue to be updated and improved in the future given its reported success, and I would be grateful if the developers considered adding on some higher-end graphics options in the areas I highlighted above. Even without that though, I think most people will have a blast playing the game, and it certainly gets the DF recommendation.