Kingdom Come: Deliverance Interview
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The folks at PCGamesN managed to corner Warhorse's Tobias Stolz-Zwilling and Prokop Jirsa this past weekend's Gamescom event for a meaty article-style interview about "the obsessive historical accuracy" of their forthcoming RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and how this attention to detail will deliver us a better gameplay experience. A four-paragraph excerpt:
To rebuild their own Stříbrná Skalice, Warhorse started with satellite maps of the area, digitally reconstructed constructed the buildings of the era, and massaged the geography just slightly to make for a more enjoyable space for the player, an “adjusted realistic map” as Stolz-Zwilling puts it that “moves the villages and cities a bit closer to each other to make it more densely populated and [makes] the forests a bit smaller.” It avoids the majority of your quests involving a necessary 10km trek across historically accurate and utterly barren grassland. However, the resulting game map is accurate enough that Warhorse could find their way around when they visited the real locations for field trips.
With all the love and attention that went into this inviting, at times even chocolate box, vision of 15th century Bohemia, it’s slightly unnerving to see so many players killing literally everyone they see in the alpha build. Not altogether surprising, of course, but you’d imagine slightly at odds with the way Warhorse wants you to play. You’d imagine wrong.
“We are trying to make almost anybody killable,” says Jirsa. “So if you want to go on a killing spree, we are trying to make the game still playable. You can't destroy the main quest, but you can do anything to the side quests, and we're even trying to make the side quests prepared for it.”
The example Jirsa gives is a side quest that begins with someone telling you to kidnap someone who’s transferring a large sum of money from one location to another. “And we know that players usually try to do everything except the objective. So if it should start in a castle it's not usually the brightest idea to attack [within] the castle. But you can, the money is physically there so you can do it, you can kill everyone who told you about it. We're creating dialogues for it and really trying to make it so it's as close to an open-world sandbox as possible.”
