What were the Czech Middle Ages like? Find out in Kingdom Come II
The first installment of the Czech video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance has sold more than six million copies globally. The highly anticipated sequel, which continues the story of Henry of Posázaví, is set to be released on February 4.
In the prequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, players are not portrayed as superheroes defeating enemies individually. Instead, they must exercise patience and wait for the opportune moment to catch their opponents off guard with a well-timed strike. This, as noted by one of the game's designers, Viktor Bocan, is a key strength of the game.
"In typical games, you often try to keep players entertained. When the path winds, there's something around every corner—one corner might feature an ambush by bandits, another could lead to a wolf den, and a third might reveal an incident involving someone. But in our game, we want authenticity, so there's no such thing.
"At first glance, it may seem like this approach could be less enjoyable, but it creates a feeling of being transported to the Middle Ages. You truly feel as if you are traversing the landscape, convincing yourself that this is how it would have looked back then and what you would have experienced in that time."
But in the sequel to the popular early fifteenth-century video game, the combat system undergoes a change.
"It's a continuation of the previous game, so he can already swordfight a little bit. Even if he's a new player, or he's played the game a long time ago, or he hasn't played it at all, he should be able to get into the system faster because his character is already a pretty skilled swordsman.
"We shot the combat with real swordsmen—these are people who have spent their whole lives recreating historical swordplay, which is not the same as what you see when you go to a castle and watch people dressed up for fun, hacking at each other with swords. We capture the swordsmen using the 'motion capture' method—they come to us in a room full of cameras, dress up in a black suit with white balls, and perform individual fighting techniques that we capture and then turn into game animations."
The main character of the story is again the short-haired Henry, originally the son of a blacksmith from Stříbrná Skalice. The second installment gives players much more freedom. Players can either talk their enemies out of a fight, for example, or choose to ignore the diplomatic alternative altogether.
"The protagonist has character traits that are very subtly sketched out, and it's up to you. It's an RPG, a role-playing game. That means the hero is you, and you can basically do whatever you want.
"There's a story that you have to follow to a certain extent. And the plot reacts to how you behave, but in day-to-day play, it's up to you what you do. You can be nice to people, you can beat them up. The whole point of the game is really that we're putting you in the Middle Ages, and you do what you want there."
The development of the first game cost the studio hundreds of millions of crowns, while the average Czech big-budget film typically costs around 35 million crowns. For the sequel to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the team has doubled in size, with many more people working on the project.
According to Warhorse studio boss Martin Frývaldský, the release had to be postponed several times.
"The funny thing was that in the social media feedback, we had a lot of comments like 'you're the only studio that's moving forward' or 'everyone's moving backward,' and just a few months before, we did the same thing. We picked the February date to give us more breathing space because the pre-Christmas market in November was getting very crowded, so we thought, 'Well, let's go into February; we'll have a bit more air and space.' And apparently, we weren't the only ones with that idea."
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