Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 couldn't compete with Assassin's Creed or Dragon Age: The Veilguard's budgets, so Warhorse had to "change the rules of the game"

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an absolutely huge game by pretty much every metric, but it was made on a much tighter budget than comparable RPGs like Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Shadows and EA's Dragon Age: The Veilguard. However, instead of trying to directly compete with those giga budget projects, Warhorse decided to forge its own distinct path forward.

Talking to Edge Magazine for issue #420, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer Prokop Jirsa explained the game's brilliant balancing of hardcore RPG and survival elements with approachable systems that, in my experience, always feel just on the edge of being too demanding, resulting in an incredibly rewarding feeling when mastered.

"We basically made a bet that there's a sizeable [number] of players that want to feel like they are playing something that doesn't play itself," Jirsa said. "On the other hand, I think we played it very smart in a way, because the game feels more hardcore than it actually is. For example, we have most of the mechanics that you're used to from real hardcore survival games, but there are way fewer mundane tasks that you have to do."

This illusion of insurmountable difficulty, which when peeled back reveals a challenging but extraordinarily rewarding RPG, is what sets Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 apart from games like Assassin's Creed Shadows and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, enjoyable games in their own rights but much safer bets on paper.

"If you think about it from a risk-analysis perspective," executive producer Martin Klíma said, "we are talking about games like Assassin's Creed or Dragon Age: The Veilguard. These games have much, much bigger budgets than we do, so you really can't compete with these games on their own terms. It would be suicide to try to do so. We really have to change the rules of the game."

Now feels like the right time to point you toward our list of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 tips in case you're having a hard time.