Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an action role-playing game set in an open-world environment and played from a first-person perspective. It utilizes a classless role-playing system, allowing the player to customize 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.[2]
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.[1] 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.[3] 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.[3] For example, a sword is a quick weapon for striking and parrying, but 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.[4] 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.[1] Characters are able to react to all player actions and adjust their routines to them.[5] 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.
