Warhorse Studios co-founder Daniel Vávra once wrote a scathing article listing over 100 reasons why The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim sucks. Years later, the Bethesda RPG apparently went on to become a massive inspiration for Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Asked about the open-world influences behind the two Kingdom Come: Deliverance games during a recent Reddit AMA, studio content director Ondřej Bittner says "that huge inspiration for Dan" was "Skyrim even though he wrote famous article where he listed 100 reasons that he hates about that game." Bittner's favorite game in the genre is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, for what it's worth.
Vávra's Skyrim takedown is an absolutely brutal read (at least with the machine translated version I was looking at). His 116-point list rips apart small details, like the fact there aren't any toilets in Skyrim, or that most merchants don't stock lockpicks, to more sweeping complaints aimed at how the game looked and felt back in 2011.
Aside from the pokes at Todd Howard, the article is quite an enlightening look at what might have been going through Vávra's mind while working on the first Kingdom Come game. He seems particularly aggravated by the little things that don't add up in Skyrim: How do three-pound pieces of iron create a 12-pound sword? How does our character float in water wearing a suit of solid armor? Why does an imperial soldier simply go to bed when you're clearly trespassing in their home at night? That isn't to say you can't poke similar holes in Kingdom Come: Deliverance's internal logic, but it's a game that seems more fixated on the 'realism' of it all.
Most of all, Vávra's biggest lesson here is probably a crappy one. More toilets equals better game. Last month, he tweeted that Crimson Desert has usable toilets so it "must be a good game." It's an important metric, game devs, don't forget it.
Elsewhere in the AMA thread, design director Martin Ziegler says he's "always admired the philosophy of Fallout: New Vegas and both of the older Fallouts of just allowing everything to happen and taking whatever happens in stride." The team apparently wanted Kingdom Come: Deliverance "to be more restrictive in order to keep the quests more tightly on rails towards their key moments, but the freedom and responsivity of these games was certainly inspiring in a lot of ways."
