Let's be real for a sec. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a masterpiece of immersive, down-and-dirty detail. It makes you grind herbs with a pestle, get arrested for sleeping in the wrong bed, and master sword fighting as a legit taxing directional dance. It's a borderline fetishistic love letter to medieval Bohemia. But here's the tea: as much as I respect the grind (literally), medieval Bohemia just isn't my vibe for a permanent hangout. Don't get me wrong, the way KCD2 brings it to life is next-level, but my brain keeps screaming: What if we applied this insane level of tactile detail... to the future?
Imagine a game that takes KCD2's philosophy of "object-driven immersion" and throws it into a grimy, neon-drenched 2085. Not a sprawling Cyberpunk 2077-scale epic, but something more intimate—a couple of dense, hyper-detailed mega-city blocks where every interaction feels physical and earned. The joy of KCD2 is how small details lead to big emotional payoffs. Crafting a simple potion feels like a genuine achievement. So, why can't we have that same feeling when, I dunno, preparing a nutrient paste from futuristic cricket rations or manually recalibrating your flying car's gravitic impeller? The potential is literally out of this world.
The Future Needs More Fiddling
One of the coolest things about KCD2 is how its systems are grounded in the physical world. You interact with objects, not just menus. Hacking in most games? It's usually a lame abstract minigame, a digital lockpick with no connection to the world. Remember those Wordle-inspired hacks in Star Wars Outlaws? Fun, but they could be hacking a speeder or a death star and feel the same.
What I'm dreaming of is hacking that feels real. Think games like Observation or Stories Untold, where the tech itself tells the story. You're not just pressing 'X to Hack.' You're physically patching into a server node, routing data through corroded conduits, and dealing with legacy operating systems that haven't been updated since the corporate wars. No hand-holding tutorials. Just you, a flickering terminal, and the terrifying realization that you might just brick the city's mainframe. Talk about high-stakes!
Imagine a terminal with this much gritty personality, but covered in neon and grime.
A Day in the Life of 2085
Let's break down what a day in this hypothetical KCD2-style future sim might look like. It's all about the mundane made magical through detail:
| Medieval KCD2 Activity | Futuristic 2085 Equivalent | The Vibe |
|---|---|---|
| Grinding herbs with a pestle | Rehydrating & flavoring synth-protein bricks | The satisfying schlorp of the paste mixer. |
| Taking a bath to avoid being gross | Running a decontamination cycle in your pod | Watching nanites scrub the smog off your skin. |
| Getting arrested for sleeping in the wrong bed | Having your neural credit score dinged for unauthorized hab-squatting | Waking up to a drone politely tasing you. |
| Directional sword fighting | Manually angling energy shields to deflect projectiles | A tense dance of positioning and power management. |
You'd fiddle with everything! Your apartment's life support system has a quirky, physical interface with sliders and dials that need occasional percussive maintenance. Upgrading your cyberware isn't just a stats menu—you visit a back-alley ripperdoc and watch them solder new components into your nervous system. Even social interactions could be deeper. Maybe you need to adjust your vocal modulator to mimic a specific corporate dialect to gain trust, or carefully choose your words in a negotiation to avoid triggering someone's aggression-dampening implant.
Verisimilitude Isn't Just for History Buffs
KCD2's dedication is to historical realism. But verisimilitude—the feeling of being real—isn't exclusive to the past. A future world needs its own consistent, tangible logic. Why are we so devoted to meticulously recreating the feel of a 15th-century gambeson, but handwave the functionality of a 21st-century smart fabric? A future-setting game with the KCD2 treatment would make you feel the weight of your choices and the texture of the world.
Imagine combat where you manage your exo-suit's power distribution in real-time, diverting energy from your jump jets to your vibroblade. Or a repair system where you don't just click "fix," but you have to manually weld a broken actuator, with your controller rumbling as the virtual arc welder sparks. That's the good stuff.
So, here's my plea to the game devs out there: We've seen the past brought to life with breathtaking, sometimes exhausting, detail. Now let's see that same obsessive love poured into a future that feels just as lived-in, dirty, and real. Give us a world where the future isn't just shiny and sleek, but worn, repaired, and understood one tactile, fiddly interaction at a time. The future is waiting to be grinded, hacked, and deeply, deeply understood. Let's get our hands dirty with it.