Creators of Kingdom Come About Petting Dogs, Mods, and Pissing Against the Wind

Despite a rough start, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, released last year, turned out a real hit. This inaccessible, at times quite clumsy game had so much alluring realism, a great story, interesting missions and, above all, a wonderfully designed world that made the creators from Warhorse studio the rising stars of the European game dev in an instant. Fortunately, they haven't turned into mamsy-pamsy rockstars yet, and Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, one of the faces of the project, found a moment during gamescom to tell us about the future of the genre of historical RPGs, the compromises between realism and playability, and technical challenges he and his colleagues had to overcome. We also asked a few questions from fans who desperately wanted to learn about the easter eggs, possible expansions, and why the hell are dogs in the game if you can't pet them.

SEQUEL? WHAT SEQUEL?

During the conversation I, unsurprisingly, tried to ask about a possible follow-up — it's an open secret that Warhorse will not abandon such a well-known and warmly received franchise — but Tobias kept his mouth shut, and every sentence containing the word "sequel" severely impeded his ability to understand human speech. However, he's obviously just beating around the bush — we know that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 will eventually come to existence (and it's very, very likely that it's actually being developed right now), and he knows perfectly well that we know. Anyway, if you are expecting an official announcement of the sequel, you'll have to exert more patience.

Jakub Mirowski: Do you think that the success of Kingdom Come: Deliverance will affect the major publishers to more eagerly finance historical RPGs like this?

Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, PR manager at Warhorse: I would like to think yes, but publishers are usually very slow in their changing. So before they actually take a new course, many things need to happen. But then, our project was very successful, and hopefully, other studios, or other people or publishers, will be motivated by that. So I would love to think yes.

If could change one thing in KCD, what would it be?

The amount of bugs. That's a tricky thing – because of the Kickstarter thing, we had to give a set release date – it's just a rule of Kickstarter. And then, during the development, we found that things were way more complicated than we initially thought. So we changed the release date I think three times, and in the end, there was no way we could push it any further. So if I could change anything, I wouldn’t announce the release date so early, and take more time.

And what’s your favorite moment in the game?

Well my favorite moment is a spoiler so I cannot say this one. What I like in general is the building of quests, because all of them are unique. So my favorite moment is pretty much the quest with father Godwin. When you meet in the pub and then it goes downhill. I like the fact that most of the quests are really unique. If you remember, there’s a quest where you have to lock pick a horse because there were women in the forest, and they did some hocus-pocus on you, and then all of a sudden they’re not women any more, but you see animals. So there's really creative writing and I love that.

And what about the favorite and the hardest part of the development?

Recording of the fighting. I love the moments when we had the fighters in the motion capture sessions, because it was really cool to see them in action. The people who did our combat were really well-trained sportsmen. So it was very cool to see and to understand how the motion capture works. And the second. Favorite part for me was… probably gamescom in general, because I, as a half German guy, have the chance to meet many journalists and many fans of Kingdom Come, and I think the game was the strongest in Germany. Not in absolute numbers, but in percentual. So here we have many fans who recognize me and want high five and selfies. A guy from Nintendo knows me and we have friends and so on... This is cool and this is what I like a lot about this game industry and game development. So, my favorite part was meeting the people and recording the combat system.

And the hardest part?

Telling when we screwed up. You need to see it in a way that doesn't make people angry, but you also need to tell the truth. It’s not easy saying “Unfortunately, guys, we need to postpone the game.” This communication part for me was the hardest thing – just not to upset people. And then, from development perspective, the hardest part was to get many NPCs on one screen. We had big ambitions, and our Kickstarter said “large scale-battles and hundreds of soldiers.” And when we tried doing that in the CryEngine – impossible – frame rate plummeted down. There was a time we couldn't have more than six characters on each street, it was like “That's impossible, we cannot do this. We need more. And then we had to try and come up with fakes. Have some NPCs who just had to be there, but had nothing to do. It was very hard to use the CryEngine in this type of a game.

Are you going to use the same engine for the potential sequel?

We're not planning to change anything – simply because we made so many tools and so many things with the engine, adjusted it. It was never used for any RPGs before we did it. We did so much with the engine that we are afraid that changing it would mean starting from the beginning. And if you think of how long we needed to make the engine work for KCD before we could just start to... work with it – just too long. And hope on a good cooperation with CryTech.

Any cut element from the final game that you really regret giving up?

With the DLCs, we were able to finally put everything back. So for example, playing the women was something we had to scratch very early. And when we promised that at our Kickstarter. So we just had to put it back at some point. Another thing which kind of hurts is the mounted combat. You can fight on a horse, but it's very rough. We wanted to have cavalry troops and sophisticated combat – like the sword-fighting we know already –something similar, but on a horse. Unfortunately we weren’t able to. And the second big thing I personally regret a lot is blacksmithing, which also had to be binned.

What about modding support? How will it work?

Mod support is the last thing we are doing right now, the last thing we want to release for Kingdom Come Deliverance. Right now, we are working on modding tools so that people can do their own stuff – Steam Workshop is already working, but only with the tools you can write your own quest, for example. We are thinking of a way out to cleverly release that. Unfortunately, consoles are out because they're not supporting this – it's not because we don't want to, but because Microsoft and Sony haven’t agreed on anything yet, so I can tell you: PC – yes, and we’ll see about the rest, I’m not sure.

Ok, so if it’s the last think you’re releasing for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I can probably scratch the Horse armor and battle royale DLC questions…

Well actually, if the modding tool is as cool as we hope it would be, then please do these kind of things, we are more than happy to support this.

Still on the DLCs – were you tempted to create something completely different from the core game? Something like, say, Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption?

Well hypothetically – of course. However, you need to consider that the KCD is such a complicated RPG that this would mean that the entire studio would have to focus on making sure that the systems are still working in the way they’d worked before, and that would require our all effort. That's why we didn't do a Czech localization – it would halt all the work on the DLCs. We don't have enough men to do crazy stuff like that. The entire team must do one thing at a time.

But have you ever thought about bringing some fantasy elements into this realistic setting during the creative process?

Slightly, but in a somewhat believable way. So, in the game there's a guy called Charlatan, and he’s selling magical talismans, unicorn powder and stuff, and he's talking about ghosts. He's more like a jester type; he's scaring the people and selling his stuff. That's the only part of purposely doing any fantasy stuff. However, our graphic artists are hiding easter eggs here and there. In the last DLC, for example, there's a Polaroid camera. So if you go in the dungeon and you see a flash all of a sudden, there's a Polaroid camera coming out. We have a camera. We have a traffic cone. We have a car tire. Lots of things like that.

Do you think that there is still an easter egg that the community hasn't found yet?

Definitely. Even our musicians had made some easter eggs, and I only recognized them because they told me, and once I saw that I was like “Ah, I understand.” So yeah, there's some hidden stuff still there.

So Dan Vávra (one of the original creators of Warhorse) likes extreme music. We know that Kingdom Come: Deliverance was first supposed to be called Hammerheart, as a reference to Bathory music band. Any other references like that?

I think they changed the name because they were afraid that it would be misleading. There’s maybe no references as such, but there are some tidbits. Arakain, which is a Czech metal band, they were recording the in-game music, medieval music but on metal instruments, and it’s in the credits in the end and. I cannot think of any other metal reference, but do you know the series Red Dwarf? There are some references to that in the dialogs.

About historical accuracy: What were the compromises that you had to make to ensure the gameplay is fun but also realistic?

Well. That was probably combat. We had the real fighters in the studio, and they told us that fights need to be unpredictable, end with a single hit and that’s it. The fighter is lazy, not interested in the cool, big-ass fighting; you want to be quick and that's it. And we said “Yeah. Well, in this game, it's not gonna work.” The player has to see what's happening. Most of the compromises were on technical grounds, making the game more player-friendly and more interesting. Another example would be the that doors have regular height – usually, those were smaller so they kept more heat inside. Now, programming NPCs to crouch would be possible. However, when you come to a fighting situation, this would go south pretty fast.

What’s the story behind the saving system?

That was actually community feedback. So we were thinking all the time about the saving system, we asked on forums, and all. And one guy said – I forget his name, I think he was Czech – and he said “Well, we are Czechs right? Whenever you go in a pub, you save.” And I thought “That's not a stupid idea.” However, at the beginning it was a little too hard – expensive, and people are just used to saving. So we compromised, and now you can always save & quit.

Have you been thinking about implementing seasonal changes is Kingdom Come: Deliverance?

We thought about this, but then we said this doesn't make sense with the storyline. Because we are talking about events that happened in Bohemia, and they happened in the early summer of 1403. So it wouldn't make sense to have seasonal changes because several years later, we already have the Hussite Wars. So if you play too long, it would be 1410 and that makes no sense. So we said okay, the time of the year is always the same. Days go by, but it’s always early summer of 1403. To tell the story you want to tell.

Were you inspired by Andrzeja Sapkowski’s (the writer of The Witcher) “Narrenturm,” set in about the same times?

It was our main inspiration. Vávra said he was one of the best to describe the Husites, even though he had fantasy stuff in there. But he was one of the best to describe the area, the atmosphere, the living, and so on. So this definitely heavily influenced us. This and The Witcher. His favorite quest was the Bloody Baron, he liked the formula of a long, complex quest. Two big inspirations.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is also a game praised for its realism. And I'm wondering what’s the one thing that you envy about Red Dead Redemption 2 and Rockstar?

Money! They have such a huge development money and so many people. I don't mean it in a bad way, of course. They have many, many resources, which let them try new things, they can cross bridges without, well not without any problems, but it's easier for them – they have a big publisher, they did tens of games already that were all super successful, and they have some cash so... That's very good. We, on the other hand, had to be very “punk rock” in many things. But it was the first project, and now we started to roll. We moved to bigger offices. We became successful, Koch Media is having us as a flagship in a way, so that's really good that we have… say, a basis, and think of it like The Witcher 1 and 2 – maybe our game was like The Witcher 1 and 2 combined, in terms of success. So let's hope the next game is even bigger.

Are you planning to crowd-fund the next game?

Now that we’re part of Koch Media, it’s no longer up to us.

Now to the silly questions. Here’s a simple one: why can’t you poop? Wouldn’t it be fun to take off all your chainmail, clothes, and all, and go to do the thing in the bushes just to be attacked by bandits half way through?

I’d say it would be funny once, maybe twice or three times, when you show it to a friend. But then it wouldn’t be so funny after that, so yeah, whenever. But during the tests, I think it was beta or alpha, I can't remember, we showed people one or two villages, to gather feedback and they said “Yeah well. It's a shame there are no toilets. Where are the toilets?” So we created those quickly. You cannot do anything with it, but if you sit on a toilet, you get a big bonus on reading skills. That's a compromise I guess.

We also noticed that in the castle near Rattay, the walls are covered in poop… Whose idea was that exactly?

Actually, the toilets in the castles were often small windows, and the poop just landed there on the ground. So this is actually historically correct. There was no flushing, right? The stuff usually went to the moat, so there was a bit of defense strategy in that.

Why can’t you pet dogs?

You can’t, but I found a cheat. You just need to crouch – Henry spreads his arms a little then, and you can pretend to pet the dog. You can also say „good boy”, which boosts your hound master skills. And you can feed them, that’s something.

Who came up with the line “Jesus Christ be praised?”

I have no idea. But it became the catchphrase of the game immediately. And funny story – the actor playing Henry is called Tom McKay. He did a commercial in Czech Republic, for Peugeot, the car brand. And if you look it up on YouTube, there's only comments about “Oh it's Henry Jesus Christ,” “Oh look Henry coming up.” I don't know if Peugeot knew, but I wish to believe they did it on purpose.

About Henry – he looked more badass in the concept arts. He then changed during the development, and I was wondering if this decision was influenced but the actor himself, who looks a lot like Henry.

When we started with alphas and betas of this concept, we used some generic faces – just to see them, you know. Then we went looking for the right actor. First, we wanted some other actor, but he was busy with a TV series, so then we found Tom McKay, who was perfect. And we would also change the face more towards Tom. Then the concept artist kind of stuck to their guns and wanted to have Henry the badass. That's fine. That's just the concept right. But ultimately the player then decides if he's a badass or not.

Why is Konus the single character that has to die?

You can finish the game without killing anyone. Konus is an exception, but he dies in a cut scene. And this is the one of the shifting points in Henry's mind. It's a dramatic thing – he stops thinking about personal revenge, and will then start to understand the bigger meaning of all this war and so on. Why does he have to die? Because Henry needs this shift of minds. Besides, Konus was an a-hole.

Were all Czech millers thieves in the 15th century?

No, but it's almost a given fact. See, millers were usually living outside the cities, they had something going, they were the ones who were carrying goods back and forth. So it wasn't done to imply that millers were thieves, but there is some evidence of that in historical sources – they were not a thieve guild, but they did some shady things. Constantly moving in and out the city, they had the perfect opportunity for that, and we needed a typical, RPG thieve guild.

How does it feel to have developed such an awesome game?

Amazing! This game was released a year ago, and you are still interested in talking to me. I was today at the Microsoft booth, since we will be releasing the game on Xbox Game Pass tomorrow. It's amazing to still have such big interest that we can go over gamescom. It's amazing. And the best thing is that we were pissing against the wind and still won. Many people said in the beginning that no one will be interested in Czech Middle Ages, that we should make a Facebook game, because no one is interested in those big RPGs. Then we had problems with accusations of racism… In the end, when it was released, people said it’s actually a good game. In the first months, it was super buggy. We knew it, and hated it. However, people stayed with us, and waited for the patches, they wanted the game to be good. So they waited, and really wanted the game to be good. And that’s a great feeling.