Though this isn’t the first update the developers of Kingdom Come have made, it is, in my opinion, the most important. Why, you ask?

As a fan of the Gothic series, I’ve always held world interaction above all other things when it comes to judging the quality of an RPG. While many designers claim to feel the same way, what we usually get is the staid and cardboard-like NPCs of Skyrim or Mass Effect, where everything is either heavily scripted or completely emergent, two extremes that never really do a good job of making you feel like you’re in a real virtual world. Maybe I’m just a grognard who is impossible to please or a European CRPG fanboy…whatever the case, it seems Warhorse studios agrees with me.

You really have to admire the depth of the NPC interaction system they’re crafting. With environment objects being treated like NPCs (I still can’t even get over them saying that) and NPC scheduling being paramount among their concerns, I’m really liking where this game is going. Other than Gothic and Ultima, there haven’t been a lot of games that worked on scheduling like that. The cardboard feeling present in the modern open world games has always rubbed me the wrong way and I often find myself replaying Ultima 7 or the first two Gothic games and shaking my head in disgust when I see that old games like these are more advanced then the games of our current generation.

This is all made even more amazing by the fact that this game almost never even existed. Thankfully Kickstarter changed that, and now we’ll get to play what may be the defining CRPG of this generation.