Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the latest in a growing line of RPGs that revel in friction, purposefully asking players difficult questions and throwing them curveballs both narratively and mechanically. Senior game designer Ondřej Bittner of developer Warhorse Studios reckons the game is "quite welcoming" as hardcore games go, but defends its mechanical complexity and reckons that dense games with bite are "good for the industry and for the players" over massive but repetitive games.
"I think the mechanics you're describing – a little more involved gameplay – falls around the fact that players may be finally [realizing] that it doesn't really matter how long a game is," Bittner tells 12DOVE. "What matters is if your individual sessions are individual enough. If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored. A little more involved mechanics [means] more original content."
It's neighboring an old topic that's seen an uptick in debate recently: are games too dang long? Several well-known executives and designers have argued that extremely long games are out of place or outright fatiguing today. The question becomes: are games too long, or are some long games simply running out of ideas long before the credits roll? If they had more gas in the tank, more unique experiences to bring out, that long runtime may feel justified; players may be excited to have more of this thing they love, rather than fatigued by the long familiar road ahead of them.
Bittner offers an example of what sessions may look like in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – a unique adventure erratically strung together from boot theft, bar hopping, bandit hunting, and murder mystery. "Because these are vastly different, you don't get bored," he says of the experience.
"And it doesn't really matter if it's like 100 hours or 50," he continues. "And that goes for games like Elden Ring and all that. You know, with all the secrets. Elden Ring is kind of simple mechanics, but it's so involved in the levels of where you can go and what you can discover. Or Zelda games which, on the other hand, have the awesome mechanics and stuff. So I think this is good for the industry and for the players, that the entertainment is more qualitative than certain titles that are just very repetitive."
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an unflinching RPG, ready and willing to kick you with steel-toed consequences, but Bittner reckons it's also approachable. The goal with the sequel was to "keep the complexity, keep all the living world that can tell the emergent stories, but make it more accessible so we can break out of the niche and be like, hey, this is for everyone. You can do it. Everyone can enjoy it. After all, the game is not hard to play, because you can always do it somehow differently."
He compares this to the demands of a game like Elden Ring, which also gives players plenty of ways to overcome challenges, but sets a high minimum for what you have to do to progress. You can beat that boss however you like, but you do have to beat it and it's still very challenging. Bittner's experience with Elden Ring is an interesting example of how some games just don't click for you even if you recognize what makes them great. FromSoftware's flavor of action has been especially polarizing over the years – at 12DOVE alone, we have writers who love it (me) and folks who find it impenetrable.
"I'd say I can't play Elden Ring because I'm just not good at the combat and that's all there is," Bittner says. "It's super hardcore for me and I can never understand how people can play it. But I think Kingdom Come is way more, like, you can just walk around and wear nice clothes, and you can do it, you know. So I think it's actually quite a welcoming hardcore game."
This approach, a refinement of the first game's philosophy, has certainly resonated with players. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sold 1 million copies and recouped its development costs within a day, per Warhorse co-founder Daniel Vávra.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev weighs in on why it's getting harder to survive in RPGs.
