KCD 2 is the new action and adventure role-playing from Warhorse Studio. As a sequel to Kingdom Come: Deliverance first of his name, it’s a great experience with incredible exploration and role play, but it can be a bit spare on tips and tutorials. Where do I need to go, what do I need to do, and does this do are questions you will find asking yourself quite often in the first few hours. Our Method guides are here to help you get the best start, learn about combat, mounts, quests and the overall starting experience to ease your journey in this amazing game.
This guide will contain some minor spoilers about the game.
How to Start & Key Choices to Make Early
As you start the game, you will be diving into a few hours long prologue, taking its time to introduce you to the story of the sequel but also allowing you to catch up with what happened in the first one. One of the few things you can do to be ready for this game is finding content about the story or the first one to know what happened. It will be beneficial to your overall experience. Either way, after this introduction, you will find yourself [spoilers] stranded alone in the middle of the map. From this point, you pretty much decide what you want to do : side quest, main story, perking up, finding gear… it’s pretty much your choice.
From this spot, what should you do?
- Getting familiar with the combat system. The combat system is a little be.. Strange for beginners, so you might want to find people to find (bandits or instructors) to simply learn it.
- Find a new gear. You can roam in the land around the town you are to steal or find a dead guy to loot, then fight with a bandit to get his gear.
- Try to get back your horse and your dog. Peebles and Mutt are still in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. You can get them back if you advance a little in the game, and should be one of your first goals.
We wrote a full guide on the early actions you should take and the choices you should make in the story to avoid locking you out of options.
Top Side Quests of Early Game: Must-do Missions and Rewards
As you get further into the game, you will discover a lot of side quests. In a similar fashion as the first game or other open worlds games like The Elder Scrolls series, you can spend hours not paying attention to the main plot and just do the side quest. Or, you might do the opposite and want to rush the main storyline to know what will happen to Henry. Even if you want to rush, there are a few quests on the side of the road you will want to look into, because the rewards are just too good to pass or they will greatly help you get a better grasp on the game as a whole.
- Getting your dog back.
- Getting your horse back.
- Getting some schnapps to help save the game.
- Blacksmithing tutorial.
We wrote a full guide on the top 6 quests you should spend your time on in the first few hours.
Essential Combat Tips: Parrying, Blocking and Timing your Attacks
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II will put you in a lot of combat situations. Even though it’s not a combat driven game and you can find a lot of solutions to avoid combat (stealth, archery, getting people to fight for you or with you), you will find yourself in fights more often than you think. Knowing how to fight is a big step to having a smooth experience in the game, and even though you could grind a lot and just be a mountain of levels to outgun every opponent, if you can’t land any blows because you didn’t engage with the combat at any moment, you will lose.
So, here are a few tips to get started:
- Focus on upgrading your skills with one type of weapon. Early on, if you try to play with too many different weapons, your damage will suffer a lot.
- Master Striking is the key… Master Striking is back in KCD 2 but will not be spammable anymore : you need to attack right when another enemy attacks, in the opposite direction.
- … but only with Swords. Mace, Polearms and Axes will not let you master strike, but you can play a bit more like a savage.
- Don’t let enemies circle you. While fighting a group of enemies, never let one of them get behind you.
- Use your surroundings. In an open field, you can look for walls, small paths or other narrow spaces to funnel your opponents and fight one on one every time.
If you need more tips, we’ve written a dedicated guide to help you master the fighting in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, including tips about dodging, parrying, blocking and the right timings to be efficient.
Armor Explained: Light, Medium or Heavy - Which Suits your Playstyle
Armor types are an important part of gearing. Your armor - and your outfit overall - will have a crucial impact on your gameplay. As you can expect, it will change the way you fight, how well you can take hits, your overall stamina, but gearing in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II will also influence how NPCs are treating you. Talking to some peasant with nice shiny armour will not have the same effect as wearing nothing or a muddy shirt.
Between this and the impact of your armour on stealth, understanding what to wear according to the situation you are in is very important. And, as a bonus, KCD 2 now offers the option to make armour pre-sets, allowing you to change your armour based on your needs on the go, when you need to!
Light armour is better for stealth and heavy armour for combat, even though you will me slower. It’s up to you to find the type of armour that suits your playstyle the best, and to help you find that, we have a dedicated article on Armors in KCD2.
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Best Early-Game weapons & Where to Find them
As discussed earlier, you will start Kingdom Come Deliverance: II pretty much naked with no gear. Now, fighting is a key element in the game and it’s hard to go forth with no weapons. Fortunately, you have a lot of ways early on to find weapons of all types and get the ball rolling.
- Bows and Crossbows can be bought at the carpenter or you can find a free bow in the secret location called “A target on a tree, north of the starting town.
- You can find clubs and axes almost everywhere, and as long as no one sees you steal something, you won’t be punished.
- Your starting weapon is enough to actually be able to fight a dog guarding a bandit camp, and by stealthing around said bandit, you can knock him out and grab his stuff.
These are just a few tips, we’ve gathered way more into a dedicated guide on quests and ways to find gear early on.
Lockpicking & Stealth 101: How to Avoid guards an Crack any chest
Being sneaky will help you a lot in Kingdom Come Deliverance: II. You can roleplay as a very honorable Henry, never being tempted by honorless manners even in the darkest of hours, but it’s way easier to steal sometimes than to just take everyone head on. And attacking a bandit camp, shouting, charging and making the noise of a full kitchen with your full armor might be a viable battleplan later in the game, but at the start, with pretty much nothing it’s going to be harder.
- Don’t wear noisy armor. Enemies will hear you coming. But you can make noise to lure enemies away, like throwing rocks or trying to whistle.
- Don’t stay on the scene of your crime. Whatever crime you did, get out before anyone can see you. You won’t be chased if no one sees you, unlike KCD 1 where guards had superpowers.
- Don’t wear something you stole in front of the guy you stole it from. NPCs will recognize their stolen stuff and will alert the guards.
- Don’t fancy yourself as a master lock picker until you are. Failing lockpicking is very risky if someone is close to you, sleeping, and will wake people up. If you want to try and lockpick a very hard lock, make sure no one is around.
We’ve written a dedicated guide on Stealth and Lockpicking with specialised tips & tricks.
Horse Basics: How to Choose the Right Mount & Gear for Combat
Kingdom Come Deliverance: II has a huge open world, 125% bigger than the one in the first game. Getting around can be pretty long if you just go on foot everywhere. It’s possible, but not very comfortable and it leaves you open to every little nuisance you can find while you travel.
Getting a horse will help you a lot for your travels but will also improve your carry capacity and you combat potency while fighting in an open field. But, how does riding work, where can we find horses and how do we fight with them?
- You can find your old horse, from the first game, in the little town of Sermine south-west of the starting town. here, find the castle’s stables. You can find Pebbles here, your old horse, and interact with the nearby stable master to get her back for nothing - if you are witty enough - or a small fee.
- You can also steal horses. As long as nobody sees you, you are fine. Those horses can be sold to the black market or used to go around, although if you leave them alone a bit too long they will wander off.
If you need any more information about horses in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, we have a guide made for you.
Early Game Money-Making Tips: Easy Ways to Earn Groshen Fast
We just talked about selling horses to the black market, but do we have any other way to get rich fast ? Yes, you can, but will it be legal… mostly not. Groshen is the main currency in Kingdom Come Deliverance: II, and getting a lot early on will help you learn more things, buy better weapons, better tool kits to repair your gear, etc.
Around the starting town, you will find a lot of different things: bandit camps, dens, treasure, secret locations… Exploring and looting everything is one the best ways to get a few Groshen. Pickpocketing, lock picking, are also great options. And when you find weapons, one of the best things to do is sharpening them! You will find sharpening wheels in every town, and a sharpened blade will sell better than a dull one.
When you sell or buy things in KCD 2, you will be able to haggle. There is a few things to know here:
- Don’t irritate the merchant by haggling too much and asking for too low of a price, it will lock you out of the option to haggle with them for a long time.
- Don’t hesitate to sell some random stuff you don’t need for a lower price, even giving them with another item you were selling, as a bonus. This will increase your reputation with the merchant, lowering his prices on expensive items.
If you need to know exactly where to find easy money, check out our Money-Making guide.
Level up Fast: Skill Progression & Training Spots Guide
Leveling in Kingdom Come Deliverance is pretty straightforward: when you do something, you become slowly but surely better at it. But, there are other ways to improve your skills like talking and training with a master or even reading books! Yes, if you find a bench or a chair, sit and then take a few hours to read, you will eventually learn more about some skills and even upgrade a new skill called Scholarship.
You can find right in the starting area a few quests and a few books that will help you start your adventure with a little pool of skills, and we will help you find these locations and more in this guide to the skill progression system and training spots.
First-Time Player Builds: Balancing Combat, Speech & Stealth
In what skills do we want to invest our time? What perks are the best? Kingdom Come: Deliverance II can be pretty overwhelming at the start. There are a ton of perks attached to a lot of different skills, and you can quickly get lost in the sauce and find yourself upgrading random things that will not help you at all.
Early on, you will want to take perks that will reduce the number of inconveniences the game throws at you: increasing your carrying capacity, stamina, your reputation gains, your speech or the hunger / exhaustion your character will feel during your playtime.
Regarding more specific builds, you might want to take a look at our dedicated build guides for first time players.
FAQ
Do I need to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2?
The short answer is no, it’s not required. Tutorials are still implemented in KCD 2 and the game will make your start pretty much naked, so it’s not needed gameplay wise. But you will want to at least be aware of the important story beats from KCD 1 so you aren’t lost.
How hard is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for new players?
This game isn’t for the faint of heart and you will die, get lost, starve, and other things a lot in your first playthrough. It can really feel like you’re being sent back in time to the 15th century with no prior knowledge on how to survive. The game has a steep learning curve, but once you get the ball rolling and have a bit of gear, the hardest part will be making decisions and not the combat. So yeah, it’s hard, but not on a Fromsoft level.
Is there any magic build in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2?
Despite being a classic RPG by the looks of it, like the very recent and beautiful Elder Scrolls, it’s a medieval RPG focused on realism. So no, no magic here!
