Deliverance 2 — 5 tips for this medieval Xbox RPG
Five early-game Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 tips
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is out now for Xbox Series X|S
- Warhorse Studios’ ambitious RPG sequel focuses on realistic medieval details
- These five tips should help you early on in the game
The Kingdom Come: Deliverance games are known for their determination for in-depth RPG mechanics and realistic and historical details, which makes for great games, but means there’s a lot of info to take on board. If you’re looking for a few easy hints to get you started on the right foot, read on for some Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 tips!
Save & quit is an option
It can be easy, early on in the game, to get a bit stressed about where and how to save your progress. The in-game methods for saving are downing some Saviour Schnapps (or Weak Saviour Schnapps, if you keep forgetting to use your herbs before they go off, as I do) or sleeping in your bed.
Note: it does have to be marked as your bed, as trying to get a kip in someone else’s will result in you being woken up and threatened with the bailiff. I accidentally picked the wrong bed in Herbwoman Bozhena’s house — I thought we were best buds, but that didn’t stop her marching me off to the bailiff. Awkward, but understandable.
However, unless you have the money for a kip at an inn, access to an alchemy bench, or don’t mind trekking off across the map to one of your owned beds in an out-of-the-way spot like the herbwoman’s house, you might feel a bit stuck.
Don’t let your medieval finances distress you: you can just save and quit. It might break the immersion a bit to take you out of the game, but loading back in from the main menu is a darn sight better than dying to some random wolf and losing all your progress. Remember: if all else fails, save and quit!
Don’t forget your torch
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 goes big on the realistic side of things. Its NPCs all react to the things you do and exact their own justice or punishment, whether you’re lockpicking, wandering somewhere you shouldn’t, or sleeping in the wrong bed (see above).
With all the uncertainty, outlaws, and invasion going on around the time of KCD2, the guards at settlements are particularly strict about keeping an eye out for trouble. If you wander around at night without a torch, they’ll assume you’re up to something and be a bit peeved about it.
Like everything in the game, however, you have to properly equip your torch. KCD2 has a strict armor system for what Henry can wear and how, and the torch is no exception. Having one in your inventory isn’t enough; you need to equip it to its own little slot (on the right side of Henry in the inventory screen) and then hold the down arrow to get it out. Just remember to put it away again if you actually are in town for nefarious business.
Remember your loadouts
Loadouts are one of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s handiest features. You can have three different outfits saved and swap between them in your inventory using the Y button. You can use the same gear and equipment in more than one loadout, too, which makes things even easier.
The good news with this mechanic is that you can adapt Henry to each situation he comes across, on the fly. Instead of fiddling about in your inventory, making sure Henry puts on all his different bits of armor in the right order while your opponent waits for you to finish, you can nip into the inventory screen, press Y, and be battle-ready in an instant.
What I like about this is it lets Henry keep his “fancy stuff” separate. In KCD2, your appearance and condition all play a part in whether you’ll succeed in various speech checks. If you try to be all noble and look like you’ve been beaten up and then spent the night in a pile of dung, you won’t fool anybody.
This way, you can have all your ugly-but-effective armor on one loadout, and then your fancy stuff on another, and swap when you want to impress. This is a good way to save time, but if you’re worried about your carrying capacity and the weight of equipment for three outfits, read on for our next tip…
Get a horse early (and make it pull its weight)
We’ve got an easy horse guide for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 with all the info you need to get Pebbles for free in the early game, but aside from the huge difference it makes to your travel time, a horse is especially useful for the extra carrying capacity it offers.
Henry collects a lot of stuff on his adventures, and armor and weapons especially have a lot of weight. He can get overburdened fairly quickly, depending on how much you hoard, what perks you have, and so on, so the best way to still hang onto your things (and not have to trek back to a storage chest) is to offload items into your horse’s inventory.
Pebbles will likely be the first horse most of us get, and even with her comparatively terrible stats, she has a carrying capacity of 138. You can swap items in and out of your horse’s inventory even from some distance away, and while you can’t mount up while you’re overburdened, it’s easy to quickly drop some items from your inventory into your horse’s.
You can sell anything you’re not going to use or store it in a chest, but if you’re still struggling to shed a last bit of weight from Henry’s inventory, it’s a good idea to check how much of each thing you’re carrying. For instance, you might find you’ve looted a ridiculous amount of crossbow bolts, in which case it’s worth stashing half on Pebbles, since you might run out in a fight and need an easily accessible refill.
When in a pinch, throw a rock
You don’t just need to rely on the weapons you find for stealth mode. Even when Henry’s kitted out with the best gear, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by multiple enemies, so if you’re trying to stealthily take out a group (but are having trouble because they’re all hanging out together in one spot), you can try creeping about and throwing a rock to distract an enemy and try to isolate them.
Henry always has the option to throw a rock and can hurl as many as needed. You need to be crouching to throw one, and it doesn’t hurt to be careful about your aim either, but they can be a great help for stealth, especially when you’re early on in the game and don’t have much in the way of fighting equipment.
