It’s fundamentally impossible to create a videogame that truly recreates the full experience of playing DnD. Larian’s extraordinary Baldur’s Gate 3 comes closer than ever before; it can’t replicate DnD’s mutative, imaginative quality, but it mimics it shockingly well by interweaving tons of well written adventures for players to explore however they like. BG3 is so good, in fact, that it left me doubting if a CRPG could possibly capture D&D any better. Then I played Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and I realized – as Boromir once said – that there are “other paths we might take”.
Basically all the best DnD games on PC and console have been Computer Roleplaying Games (CRPGs) – predominantly single player, story driven RPGs with a top-down camera; puzzle-like tactical combat scenarios; and long, overarching storylines that you mostly experience via detailed written conversations in dialog boxes. In the 50 years since Arneson and Gygax brought D&D into the world, its only really great videogame adaptations have come in that form.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the pinnacle of this evolutionary tradition. It exemplifies all its forebears’ virtues, but outstrips even the best CRPGs that came before with the depth of detail in its world, the cinematic excellence of its 3D graphics, and the immersion that comes with hiring 248 different voice actors to let even the lowliest of characters speak convincingly.
Which begs the question: have we peaked? We know Wizards of the Coast is funding more big-money videogames set in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons, but where can they go from here, except ‘BG3 again, but in a different place with a new story’? Don’t get me wrong, I want that game pumped directly into my veins – but it’s hard to imagine it improving on Larian’s pride and joy anywhere near as impressively as BG3 itself advanced over its predecessors.
This got me thinking about what a Dungeons and Dragons videogame actually is, what it needs to be successful, and what essential ingredients set it apart from any old fantasy RPG. I’m not talking about mechanical components like the archetypal DnD stats, or building your character from the familiar DnD races and DnD classes. Getting those things right is important, of course, but it’s essentially spreadsheet stuff. I mean deeper elements about what the game is about, what you can and can’t do in it, what you’re supposed to enjoy about it – ultimately, what it’s for.
Here’s the recipe I came up with for things a videogame needs to ‘be’ DnD:
- Complete creative control over your character, their story, and development.
- A heightened sense of intimate immersion in your character – that you see through their eyes, speak with their voice, and touch with their hands.
- An interactive, believable, medieval world that reacts convincingly to your actions (big and small) and changes over time.
- A feeling of genuine, personal freedom to explore that world, without excessive railroading.
- Socially and mechanically rewarding teamwork between party members that’s integral to the storytelling.
- Extreme flexibility of options for how to approach each quest or encounter, and how to spend your time generally.
- Satisfying ways to apply your character’s specific skills to challenges of your choosing, with meaningful rewards for success and consequences for failure, all of which make intuitive sense within the world, but don’t ‘break’ the game.
I reflected that even BG3 doesn’t ace every one of these – it falls down a bit on points two and four in particular – but it succeeds because it excels in the other areas, especially points one, five, and six.
So, I wondered, what if a DnD game focused its energies on the bits where BG3 is weakest: atmosphere and immersion on a personal level, self-led exploration, and tactile simulations of in-game actions that make you imagine you’re actually doing them, just like your squishy human brain does when you play tabletop D&D? That could be something new and different.
And then I played Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and everything fell into place. To be clear, KCD2 isn’t a DnD game or even a fantasy game – it’s set in 15th century central Europe and you can’t even cast Fireball.
But it is a meticulously immersive, visually stunning first person RPG in which you play a poorly equipped, penniless journeyman warrior trying to survive and thrive amid the hardship and hostility of feudal society, lending folks your muscle, wit, and blade to earn the coin and renown you need to advance. Sound familiar, DnD fans?
Of course, KCD2 itself doesn’t fulfil my whole criteria – and not just because of a lack of wizards, dragons, or goblins. For a start, you can’t create your own character. Henry of Skalitz is a specific, predetermined guy with a set backstory from the first game, and – while your playstyle shapes his strengths and weaknesses over time – his core character, motivations, and aims are as pre-baked as his appearance.
You get to develop and steer him, but he’s not your character. You have no ‘party’ to collaborate with, either, not in the DnD sense of regular companions who travel, fight, grow, and level up with you constantly. It’s Henry’s story, and everyone else is an NPC.
But the game embodies other DnD experiences that BG3 doesn’t. Its world, like Baldur’s Gate’s, is luscious and filled with places, people, and items to interact with – but viewing them up close, in first person, rendered in extreme detail and lighting, is an altogether different, more engrossing perspective.
Wandering down a forest path under tree-dappled light, sploshing through a stream, watching a startled hog dashing away into the brush, I can’t help but think: “what if I could explore the Sword Coast like this, that would be freaking sick“.
Traveling between Bohemia’s muddy villages and medieval holdfasts, you meet serfs, smiths, farmers, priests, and other folks going about their daily business, grumbling about their neighbors, making a living, doing things they’d be doing even if you weren’t there.
This stuff strongly reminds me of the best DnD campaigns I’ve played in, but doesn’t call to mind BG3. Larian’s game is full to bursting with wonderful, diverse stories but, in the main, they feel like they exist purely for you: a band of heroes who are absolutely going to be at the centre of the world’s biggest events for the next 200 hours.
From the very beginning of KCD2, there’s a big fancy plot going on that you’re definitely a part of, and which you know you’ve got to get back to at some point. But, before that’s even possible, a string of bad luck leaves you stuck in the sticks with almost nothing to your name, and the game’s food and sleep based survival mechanics force you to work regular jobs and even live off the land – in other words, meaningfully exist in the world. You’ll have to make your own way by the same rules the peasants do, before you can start thinking about getting back into the wars, treaties, and affairs of kings that drive the ‘main story’.
It’s an elegant way of showing off the game’s core realism schtick, but it also feels like a compelling opening to a (fairly old-school) DnD campaign. Yes, you’re going to be a big man someday – but right now you’ve got mud on your face; you are, narratively and mechanically, a big disgrace; and, unless you start rolling a few more 20s, somebody’s definitely going to put a boot into your face.
In BG3, the sprawling open world that’s offered up to you in act one is a delicious smorgasbord of fantastical treats laid on for your enjoyment, and you spend happy hours pottering around discovering them one by one, safe in the knowledge each one will, in some way, take you closer to your epic destiny. In KCD2’s opening act, the surrounding woods and villages similarly contain lots of pre-programmed stuff for you to encounter and XP to gain (it’s still a videogame) but everyone and everything in them is either indifferent to you or actively thinks you’re an unwanted vagrant that stinks of shit, and acts accordingly.
Both are extremely fun, and in some ways the difference is subtle – but it massively affects the gamefeel in a way that makes me desperate to experience BG3’s world and story through KCD2’s gameplay. That desire only grew when, in the first couple of hours of Kingdom Come, I was introduced to its crafting minigames – fully gamified, optional, but unskippable mechanics for brewing potions, forging weapons, drying herbs, and so on.
Could it get boring after a while, manually following potion recipes, plucking ingredients from shelves, adding them in order, and monitoring cauldron temperatures to get the best possible healing draught? Certainly. But did I, on playing these things, immediately dwell on how cool it would be to apply the same formula to crafting DnD weapons, learning new spells, or socketing enchanted gems into my +1 Longsword? Oooooh yes.
These kinds of minigames take a ton of work on the pacing, animations, visual and audio details, to make sure they’re an immersive boon rather than tedious busy-work, and even so they’re not everyone’s mug o’ mead. But, done right, they can simultaneously pull you into your character’s perspective and make a functionally mediocre reward, like a crappy work axe worth four measly coins, feel meaningful, valuable, and your own.
And, once again, it reminds me of the difference between a cheap, Skyrim-esque model that has you click a button to instantly exchange five inventory items for one new one, and working over several DnD sessions to create an item that’ll change your game.
What all this is getting at is: KCD2’s overall experience strongly feels like a blueprint for a type of modern day DnD videogame that we’ve never seen before. It’d get us no closer to digitizing the platonic ideal of Dungeons and Dragons, but would push different boundaries from the ones Baldur’s Gate 3 so gloriously smashed to bits in 2023.
A first person adventure with the heavyweight storytelling investment that made BG3 so brilliant, and the survival-adjacent, immersive sim elements that power KCD2, could be an amazing vehicle to evoke the grittier, you-versus-the-world adventures that old school DnD pioneered. And it could still hold space for a grand fantasy narrative, lots of thrilling dungeon dives, and big monster fights that’d make Kingdom Come’s grimy, inglorious sword brawls look dull by comparison.
Warhorse, Deepsilver, and Wizards of the Coast, you can have the idea for free if you promise to make it for me. Meanwhile, I’m going to go and pick another 3,500 flowers to get enough Groschen to pay for dinner.
Source: Wargamer
