I'm so torn on my excitement for Kingdom Come II. I'm just so ambivalent about the first game. On the one hand, for me and the things I value in a game, the first KCD is one of the best games I've ever played. I really think it's fantastic. It's like a better version of Oblivion. On the other hand, it's a frat bro power fantasy glorifying brutal violence made by an outright racist studio. Or at least the lead writer made some posts on Twitter, years ago now, which in my memory were explicitly racist, misogynistic, and pro-gamergate.

It wouldn't even be that hard to fix the main issues I have with the game. Feature more women with agency, some of whom find success within their ascribed gender roles and some who buck those roles. To its credit the game does a bit of the former, but not enough, and I'm not sure it's balanced out by all the lascivious prostitutes and the three women who throw themselves at the main character for no reason. Next, the game takes place near Prague, a major city in medieval Europe. You could have all sorts of people traveling through who are something other than Bohemians. Jews, Arabs, Berbers, Ethiopians (this actually would be pretty unlikely, I think, but perhaps not impossible. An Ethiopian Pilgrim meets a Bohemian Pilgrim in the Holy Land and for some reason accompanies them back to Prague, something like that), Moors*, Mongols, assorted people from the Caucasus region, etc. It'd be so easy to take some stance other than the frankly insane "only white people ever set foot in these lands for all history." And then the last real issue is how Henry is the son of a middle class tradesman, then is elevated to knighthood and riches among the gentry. The story does sort of justify this, and it isn't impossible anyway given the time period, but still I'd rather the story featured a character already trained to fight, a professional soldier or something, and there should be more explicit commentary on the class system.

Of course since there seems to be a racist/misogynist attitude at Warhorse Studios they can't do these things, or if they were to do them they'd likely be cynical about it.

*Is Moor explicitly a racist term? I always have assumed it meant the people resulting from the centuries of mixture between Arabs, Berbers, Iberians, and Visigoths in Al-Andalus, but now I'm not so sure.