Summary
Kingdom Come: Deliveranceis not your average open-world RPG. Rather than being set in a fantasy world of magic and monsters, this game takes place in a world of lancers and latrines: medieval England, to be precise. Along with this more realistic setting comes more realistic gameplay. The focus is on immersion; you need to eat, drink, and sleep. Getting drunk will have short-term benefits and longer-term negatives. Even the combat is designed with realistic swings and parries, combos, and breaking through the enemy’s defenses as you sway about with your amateur sword skills.
Because of this, choosing the right perks is more important than you might think. Traditionally, you might be spending perk points on magic spells or big combat abilities. Instead, you’ll be spending your points on more grounded talents, like making sure you make good use of your wilderness traversal, making combat easier, or improving your ability to haggle with the local shopkeep.
8First Aid
This encompasses the entirety of the First Aid skill line (I, II, and III) and is one of the most important skills you can get, especially if you’re new to the game. Remember that this game is basically an immersive historical sim as well as an RPG; there are no healing spells. Wounds will be serious, and taking care of them is all the more paramount.
With these skills, you’ll be able to use bandages to heal yourself, as well as increase the effectiveness of healing. It will even unlock first-aid options in dialogue.
7Savage
Many perks in Kingdom Come: Deliverance are “one or the other” perks. This means you’re able to pick one of the perks, but it subsequently locks you out of its partner perk. Savage and Burgher are two such perks.
Burgher gives you bonuses to your stats while in cities and towns, and Savage does the opposite; you’ll get an increase to your stats while out in the wild. Of course, choosing either one of these perks is a good choice, but Savage is more useful as you will be spending most of your time outside of cities and towns, especially combat.
6Well Worn
Another defense perk like Perfect Block (another skill on this list), this skill allows you to equip armor much lighter than it says in your inventory.
This is great because it will allow you to equip heavier armor without worrying about how heavy it is, which can become an issue in a game with this type of immersive setting. Heavier armor will protect you more, but it will also be much more cumbersome to wear and move in.
5Mule
The Mule perk line is very simple: you can carry more. In a game like this, the last thing you want to do is be over-encumbered, as it will lock out your ability to fast-travel, make you lose stamina, and, if pushed too far, lock you out of riding your horse. Themap may not be MMO-size, but you still don’t want to get trapped sluggishly walking through the wilds, unable to ride your horse.
There are other ways to increase your equip load, such as increasing your strength stat (which will be happening in the background if you take perks like Local Hero and Savage), but Mule is a very good, easy way to get that limit up.
4Contemplative
This is a perk that helps you if you’re not the biggest fan of how hardcore the game is with its systems.
What Contemplative does is prevent you from losing sleep or hunger while not moving. This will greatly reduce how often you have to worry about eating and sleeping if you are doing things like reading or waiting. There are other perks that help with both sleep and eating separately, but this perk will help both at once.
This perk is only available in the normal modes and not in the higher difficulty. However, if this is the type of perk that interests you, you will unlikely be playing on hardcore anyhow.
3Silver Tongue
The Silver Tongue perk will increase your speech skill when haggling, which is great as it will allow you to get better prices and succeed in haggling when it comes to shops and merchants.
In this game, you will often buy things like food and bandages, rent rooms at inns, and do a variety of other things, so saving (and making) as much money as you may is crucial to survival.
2Perfect Block
Due to the realistic nature of the game design, and the way your character moves, combat is much scarier in Kingdom Come: Deliverance than in other first-person RPGs.
The combat system takes a lot of getting used to, and any perks that can help alleviate some of that learning curve are essential. The Perfect Block perk will allow you to perform…well, perfect blocks. When you see a green circle in the center of your combat reticle, that will let you block perfectly, taking no damage and, more importantly, costing no stamina.
1Local Hero
Local Hero is another of the dual perks, with its opposite being Infamous. This is another perk that provides bonuses to your stats. In this case, it is based on your reputation with the townsfolk.
Unlike with Savage and Burgher, where you can make a case for either one being as useful as the other, Local Hero is the much better choice over Infamous. For your first playthrough, it is much more likely you will be a friendly citizen, a Local Hero, as the perk says. This makes it one of the most useful and well-invested perks, both from a role-playing and a gameplay perspective. Unless you are more inclined to an evil nature for your first playthrough, but hey, no judgment here.
