Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 producer wanted a return to Morrowind and Oblivion-style RPGs where devs could "take greater creative risks" with "games that were not so forgiving"

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an uncompromising game, much like the original, and that's no accident. Developer Warhorse Studios wanted its historical sequel to exist within a canon of other odd, singular games that were made without trying to appease every type of player.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Warhorse Studios co-founder and the game's executive producer, Martin Klima, says "games [like Morrowind and Oblivion] were created in happier times, when teams were smaller, and overall cost of development was lower." That lower cost in particular meant "this question of risk and risk mitigation was not so important for developers, and they were able to take greater creative risks and create games that were not so forgiving, and which were not one-size-fits-all products."

Klima's not alone in that belief, either. He also points to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's design director, Viktor Bocan, who's apparently a big Soulslike guy and wanted to "take the player seriously and trust the player," just as FromSoftware tends to do in its mysterious, brooding RPGs.

The exec producer points out that Elden Ring, specifically, features all sorts of dungeons and secret bosses and hidden challenges that the game never explicitly draws attention to, but that minimal handholding is actually a good thing. "When you do it yourself, you have an amazing feeling of discovery and an amazing feeling of competence by doing so," Kilma adds. "And I think in this respect, this is something that we share with these games, that we allow the player to experience this feeling of being smart and competent and really finding their way around the world."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead says AI "may mean the demise of humanity" and the "end of most big publishers," but if "AI can help me make an epic game in a year with a smaller team like in the old days, I'm all for it"