Despite numerous top ratings for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, there’s a bad mood surrounding lead developer Daniel Vávra. A test has tarnished the team’s average on Metacritic.
How is the role-playing game received? While players have been able to play since 5 PM (just on Steam the game has over 120,000 concurrently active players in the top 10), dozens of editorial offices and content creators have already published their final verdict on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. On metacritic.com, the average currently stands at 87 or 88 (depending on the platform). On opencritic.com, it is currently 89.
Compared to the first part, which currently has a rating of 68 to 76 (via metacritic.com) or 72 (opencritic.com), this is an enormous leap forward. There is even great praise from industry veterans like Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout: New Vegas), which even momentarily left the otherwise outspoken Daniel Vávra speechless (via Reddit).
The humorous CGI trailer for the release of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2:
Anger over Spoilers
Why is Vávra complaining? According to the majority of previous reviews, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 deserves a score of 90 or even higher. However, a few outliers bring the average below 90, and one particular critique is a thorn in the side of the lead developer: the devastating 50 from GamesHub.
The editor responsible explains in his quote for metacritic.com:
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is a game that shamelessly demands to be approached on its terms, which I find somewhat admirable. I just constantly found it a miserable slog, where everything was inflated ten times more than it should have been. Deep down, there’s a fascinating sandbox, but sifting through the mountain of dirt to appreciate it was simply more than I could tolerate most of the time.
Daniel Vávra’s angry reaction followed on X: “A trusted news source. Mission accomplished. We no longer have a 90% Metacritic rating. Be proud of your excellent journalistic standards!”
In a second post on X, the developer then criticizes the reliance on Metacritic: “Opencritic is so much better than Metacritic. More reviews, more options, more information. It’s a shame that Gamerankings was swallowed by Metacritic. And it’s a shame that many modern websites remove so many user options to be more accessible.”
What’s behind the anger? While average ratings should always be questioned (for example, because they can be manipulated through targeted review bombing), they serve as an important parameter within the industry that can directly affect areas such as marketing, reporting, or even bonus payments. That’s the more sober perspective.
Developers who have invested several years and a lot of heart into a game naturally view ratings with much more emotion. You can certainly understand the anger from this perspective when almost everyone celebrates your “baby,” but a few exceptions completely trash it.
However, the truth also includes that ratings are always subjective, and there are indeed other editorial teams that only arrive at a score of 60 or 70. Additionally, GamesHub is a relatively small online magazine, with around 250,000 visits per month. The 60 rating from Eurogamer hurts even more (9.7 million sessions per month).
And: These few, rather negative reviews will hardly affect sales at all. By now, it should already be clear from the first player numbers and the enormous hype surrounding the release that KCD2 will be a million-seller.
Wasn’t there something with Daniel Vávra? In all this, one should not forget that the lead developer has already made headlines with his statements in the past and has had to endure accusations of racism and a certain proximity to Gamergate (more about this can be read by our colleagues at GameStar).
Before the launch of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, exactly this has come back to haunt him, but this time because the second part is suddenly deemed “too woke” by the right-wing crowd, and Vávra is said to have caved in. You can read more about that here: The developer comments on the accusation that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is woke, pre-sales on Steam are therefore collapsing
