Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev on launching an RPG in a brutal month for games: "I think if this happened with the first game, morale would be crushed"

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has all the gleam of the AAA RPGs like it, or the medieval armor in it, but there was a time when developer Warhorse Studios wouldn't have been able to handle the fact that the open-world sequel is releasing in the same stuffed month as high-profile games like Civilization 7.

"I think, if this happened with the first game, morale would be crushed," senior game designer Ondřej Bittner tells us. When Warhorse released the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance back in 2018, the Czech studio was independent, feeling out the future with its debut title. But after Plaion acquired Warhorse in 2019, the developer gained the opportunity to deliver glossy games with more self-assurance.

"Now we learn, kind of, to sit at the big boy table," Bittner says. "We're positively confident in our own product."

Assassin's Creed Shadows was, in hindsight, mercifully delayed out of February and into March, so that's one behemoth Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 won't have to contend with. In any case, Bittner notes that none of February's big releases – including Obsidian's fantasy RPG Avowed – are exactly substitutes for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's slow and faithful adaptation of medieval Bohemia, as we put it in our review.

"Some of the games releasing [this month] are just the things that will steal media coverage, but the player bases are not really alike, so you're not afraid [of] that," Bittner says.

"The industry, I think, is going in a way where I have to buy on the first day, but, with the amount of games out there, people don't do it as much," he continues. "So it really is lucky that this whole thing is changing a little bit. You can't really do anything about it to be honest."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance creator says his RPG series only exists because he was “p***ed” at the lack of historical games.