Think of all the ways you've screwed up stealth in games. Lingered too long, forgot to hide the bodies, shot the Skyrim guard before he forgot about the last time you shot him, missed the dude standing mere feet away from the dude whose neck just received a new piercing shaped mysteriously like your knife.
Now cast your eyes to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which delivers exciting advancements in stealth fumbling technology by letting you get so filthy and smell so bad that stealth becomes incredibly difficult because an alarming cloud of your irrepressible stank will reach any unwitting guards several seconds before your knife ever could.
Our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review notes the game's unflinching commitment to recreating 15th century Bohemia with brutal accuracy, and one recurring detail – just how gross the old times were – came up in our conversation with senior game designer Ondřej Bittner. One of our writers had reason to suspect that a guard had quite literally sniffed him out because he hadn't taken a bath in a while, and it turns out they were bang-on.
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- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs – "If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored"
"Basically, if you get the debuff that, you know, your body odor, you smell, there's like a circle around you," Bittner explains. "Basically, you're broadcasting, like, I'm here. So yeah, we added that. It's actually smelling. If he would just wash or go to the bathhouse, this wouldn't happen."
The solution to this stank-sabotaged stealth situation couldn't be more obvious: take a bath, you filthy animals. Bittner's advice was simpler still: "Wash your hands, kids." This isn't the first game with stealth to use smell as a variable, though it is uncommon, but the medieval presentation is certainly funny. I'm actually reminded of one of my favorite community watershed moments from a previous RPG with the Baldur's Gate 3 launch: that time too many players realized too late in the game that you don't have to walk around looking like the canvas from an FBI blood splatter test.
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