Kingdom Come - Any Farmer can kill you

@Gamecritics they look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance and talk about what the game is adding that is mechanically different to most RPGs while admiring the games attention to detail.

As an open-world, first-person RPG, the player will travel over parts of what was then called Bohemia. It looks like the sort of medieval land that a player would want to wander through and explore, but what blew me away was that all the locations were real - the towns, the castles... All of it. Apparently the dev team has hired a full-time historian to research facts, and they've gone to painstaking detail in order to recreate what the area looked like, and what sort of technology would have been around, and even what sort of foliage would have been present.

For example, there's a monastery that plays a prominent role in one of the main missions. On one side of it is a long chute which the monks used as a toilet. Apparently they would to go the top floor, hang their bums off the side, and relieve themselves down the chute with the results landing in a heap at the bottom. On another side of the building was a crane used in medieval construction, powered by a man in a hamster wheel. I raised an eyebrow at this, but yes, again, it was all historically correct. When shown a picture of the same monastery in real life, the faithfulness of the in-game model was amazing.

This same attention to detail extends into the quest design and combat.

At one point, the main character needs to get into this monastery and the team had to consult with the historian to see what would've been possible at that time - Tobias was very specific in saying that the team did not want the player to ‘Press A To Become A Monk', so they had to come up with quest logic that would've made sense in that context.

The combat shows equal care. It was mentioned that in battle, any farmer can kill you. It sounds a little goofy, but since this is a realistic title, the main character will never level up their health or gain toughness or abilities that would be beyond what a normal human being would have. Therefore, staying alive depends on skill with a blade and wearing appropriate armor. No matter how many quests the player might've completed, one well-placed axe strike to their head will still take them down.