We are the developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, ask us anything

y, I have to ask how hard it is for developers of a game like this to balance realism with overall amount of fun the player has

Hey, josh!

​

This one is a tricky one but I hope it's obvious that we try really hard to give you a very immersive experience while also making sure you have as much fun as possible without crossing a certain line. But yes, it's very hard sometimes and we might end up fighting over little features a lot :X

What Chris said is very correct. The cinematic department is a very playful department and we didn't hold ourselves back much. But little jokes aside, there's something not many people (even in Warhorse) know about and I'm gonna tell you about it because I like you. There actually is a running joke throughout all cutscenes. In every single one of them, appropriate or not, there's a hen somewhere in some form. And let me tell you, sometimes it was very challenging to find a spot for it and we had to be very creative.

Thats an interesting question, as it really needs the combined powers of me as a community manager, with the power of indepth knowledge of what the community is aware of, and the ability of Martin, to know about easter eggs in cutscenes. I know about at least one easter egg in a cutscene, which seems wasn´t been discovered by the community yet. But it is also very hard to see, to be honest. It is part of the opening cutscene of the game. There is a very short frame, when you can watch through the window of a barn, and peeking at a amorous couple there, who are coming very close to each other. I think the lighting in the final game made it nearly impossible to see.

Yes, of course. Blacksmithing is such a point. Or proper horseback combat. We had prototypes of both, but it turned out to be very hard to get right and fun. This is something that didn´t made it into the game for the reason of limited resources which would be really great to have it in the game.

You are welcome :)

Because we didn´t wanted to create another power fantasy. We wanted to be close to realism and normal people. Telling the story of a humble person, as we believe, that normal life can often tell very interesting stories, sometimes more interesting than fantasy or fiction. Although I have to admit, that Henry itself is a fictional character.

Thank you for caring and stopping by.

As I understood the story, it was never meant to be the 'you're the chosen one' narrative. Many times in interviews Dan asks himself the question what it was like to live back then and I feel like that was a big driving force behind this project. Just showing a story of somebody of a higher rank in society doesn't give you the whole image. What I love about it? It's unique.

To be humble and honest here. Our biggest mistake was probably, to not plan enough time into the game for bug fixing in the beginning, while believing, that the output of our development would be good enough in the first attempts. But Kingdom Come: Deliverance came out as a very complex game, and at the release there were more bugs in the game, than expected. It took us a lot of work to fix them with patches, and right now, we are still working on a patch, because we want to fix as many bugs as possible. Now we are at a point, where we are quite happy with the game, thats why we came up with the royal edition. But this was a hard lesson for us and for future projects, we need to keep in mind how important bugfixes are.

Believe it or not, I have not finished the game yet in my proper personal playthrough. Shameful, I know. I think I have around 100 hours on Steam right now and I still have one third of the story ahead of me. I'm useless...

Would you enjoy it?

Game development is often a question of compromises. We mainly want to tell a story, and of course also want to offer options for the player, on how he wants to resolve the challanges of the game. But every option which you have as a player, needs to be developed and created. Ad a developer, you don´t have endless resources and time, so you have to think of the most important solutions. But I have to confess, having this option to join a more darker path would be very nice and unique indeed.

Glad you like it! :)

Mainly it is the strong focus on reality and history, as most rpgs of this kind have a fantasy, post-apocalyptic or sci-fi setting. But reality can be really interesting as well, and even more shocking and thrilling than fantasy, as it is more immersive. Another factor, which seperates Kingdom Come: Deliverance for a lot of other games is the freedom of choice of the player. There are often really a lot of options, how you can interact with the world. It is about the question "What would I do, if I would be Henry", and then you should be able try to do it, without too much game limitations. This is some experience, which you often only have with Pen&Paper adventures, as a human game master can react and offer more creative solutions. A computer on the other hand, only can react on what you told him to do as a developer. And in this case, that means, that we had to think about a lot of options for players to choose from, on how to solve quests. But thats very awesome.

The base of the trees was made with Speed-tree. But then we put a lot of work and efford into it, to change it to the form, which they have in the game, also using pictures and scans of real trees and leaves. Color and lighting are some of the most important factors, to let the plants look realistic.

I'm sorry beforehand that I'm not going to be very specific as the list would be long. With KCD the thing is, we are a team of very passionate people and even after we have a final build we can't modify anymore, we're still coming up with ideas what could be done differently and so on. I've never felt a lack of ideas in Warhorse Studios in this regard.

A co-op mulitplayer sequel would be fun indeed. We were thinking about this since the beginning of the development, as we also see some potential here. But on the other hand, this is really complex, in regards of storytelling and other technical problems. We may dream about it (as most gamers do), but no, we don´t have plans regarding it.

Ivan, our character artists just went by so I forced him to stop and got the answer out of him for you. He said it's 60, 000 but he was caught off guard and also thirsty.

Many ideas were out there when we were finishing the game. For example, Theresa as a playable character and a dog as a companion were promised in the kickstarter campaign so this we knew we needed and wanted to do. As for the cutscenes, we even had some recorded from the main game mocap sessions (namely Capon/Karolina).

Actually, it came directly from the community. We wanted to have a different save system, in which you can´t save whereever you want, to let the player feel the consequences of his actions. So we asked out community in our forum, what their thought about it. One idea, which came up, was, that the game could save every time you sit in a pub and drink a beer, because this would make taverns and places to rest way more important, and this would be save places in the game. Because you would probably not drink a beer in the middle of combat. At the same time, let the character drink a beer from time to time is a very Czech thing, so that could be funny. We were inspired by that idea and changed it to our Saviourschnapps, which you can take with you, with the debuff of getting drunk after saving. And sleeping in a bed also added to the idea, to make resting places more important for the game, not only a thing you would do for immersion, but also give the player a real reason to do it.

In the cinematic department, there were scenes we really wanted to be run in-game because we care about you having the correct clothes and hair and everything but some of the scenes were just too much for lower end systems to handle so we had to render it. Also we wanted to capture a motion performance of horses but they just wouldn't fit in our studio. Can you image how dope would that be?

Many! Ideas are simple, to manifest them is hard. It is difficult to talk about numbers. Everyone can dream about the perfect game, and we do it as well, but to actually do this is very difficult. Game development is always a question of compromises. And often there are no easy and light minded choices.

if all hidden games are revealed you cant buy the monthly anymore.

You can subscribe to get the monthly bundle and then buy the royal DLC package to upgrade to the Royal edition. This is possible. :)