Earlier this year, Warhorse Studios finally satisfied the many fans of its debut title with the announcement of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. The Czech developer had been quiet for a very long time but came out of the shadows promising a 2024 launch and a bigger, better game in every respect.
The release had to be delayed a little beyond the original plan to February 11, 2025, but the rest of the promises remain intact, as testified by Chris's recent hands-on preview. At Gamescom 2024, I also got my hands on the game, although the session was much shorter than the one available at the dedicated press event.
A game like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 doesn't lend itself well to a quick 45-minute demonstration. The combat system is similar to that in the first game and remains highly unique, taking a bit of time to get used to after all these years (I finished Kingdom Come Deliverance at launch, so over six years ago). Even so, some of the improvements were obvious from the get-go, such as better movement animations and facial animations. It was also great to experiment with the 'chat system' that allows Henry to seamlessly interact with passersby NPCs without entering the classic dialogue window, in a fashion that reminded me of Red Dead Redemption 2.
The visuals looked amazing, too, and the game already ran smoothly, which is very promising for the full game's optimization. After the demo, I interviewed Warhorse Executive Producer Martin Klima to dive deeper into what we can expect from Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 when it launches in less than five months.
When did you start working on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2? Was it immediately after the launch of the base game, or did you wait until the release of the final DLC?
It's hard to say, as developing a game is a complex process. I think we gradually shifted from supporting Kingdom Come Deliverance, and I would say that only after the release of the last DLC and the last update were we able to focus on the sequel.
I know that you've kept the CryENGINE. Did you consider any other engine early on?
When we finished KCD, we took a look at the technology we were using and were considering our options, but we decided that keeping CryENGINE made the most sense for us because we spent a lot of time customizing it for our needs and I think we are very happy. I'm quite proud of the performance we have now.
Did you get the latest version from Crytek or are you still using your own from the first installment?
We have access to the latest version of the engine. Of course, we also wanted to keep our customization. In the end, although the engine that we have is not quite the same engine that Crytek uses for Hunt: Showdown, it is very close.
Do you support hardware ray tracing and/or multiple upscalers in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2?
We support upscaling tech, both NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. We are not using hardware ray tracing; CryENGINE has very good software ray tracing. [After the interview, I learned from Warhorse that the game actually uses Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination, or SVOGI. It was already featured in the first game, although it has since been improved]
I know the game is a lot bigger than the first one. What was the main challenge?
It was a challenge in terms of production. We had to increase the team to deliver the content, not to mention the amount of effort that was required to improve certain aspects, such as facial animation and dialogue animation. We had those in the first as well, but we wanted them to be much better. In terms of performance, the larger size is not much of an issue when you have a good streaming engine. We put a lot of effort into improving the performance since that can influence the perception of the game, and we wanted to have a smoother experience.
I remember the first Kingdom Come Deliverance to be quite heavy on PCs.
It was. There were a lot of things that we were doing just by brute force, and I think this additional time we had in the development for this sequel allowed us to optimize a lot, parallelize, and utilize CPUs better. Of course, hardware is faster now, and the consoles have more memory and better performance.
Will the game run at 60 FPS on consoles?
60FPS is something that's not out of reach for us.
I know that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has two maps. Can you move from one to the other at any point in the story, or is it gated by certain events?
It's gated by the story. You will start in a certain situation, which gives you a limited amount of possibilities. At a certain point, you will travel to the second map, and from that point onward, you can move freely.
During the presentation, we were told that you strived to make combat more accessible. How did you achieve this?
I think it's a confluence of several decisions that we made. We wanted to streamline the way you control combat. Previously, we used three buttons: one for slashing, one for stabbing, and one for blocking. It felt too cumbersome, so we streamlined that, and now we have just one button for attacking and another for blocking.
The attack zone determines whether you are stabbing or slashing (provided you have a weapon capable of doing so, as blunt weapons cannot). Currently, we have four attack zones. Because we limited the number of attack zones, we were also able to limit the number of guards, leading to a much smoother transition between attacks and blocks. Combat looks much clearer and more natural than before.
We were also able to hire more people to guide us through the true medieval fencing techniques and we employed more people for motion capture. Each weapon has a more distinct style to it. Also, enemies won't repeat the same animation like in a synchronized swimming competition, making combat look more realistic.
I know you are introducing new weapons in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Can you talk about them?
Yes. We are introducing polearms and firearms, which obviously is the biggest change. We are also adding crossbows, which is something that's typical of the time period. Polearms were actually there in the first game, but they were too cumbersome and you couldn't put them in your inventory, so they were kinda useless.
I guess they have very different use cases.
Definitely. Bows have a higher rate of fire and are more difficult to aim, and usually, they deal lower damage, though not necessarily. Crossbows take a lot of time to load but are much easier to aim and can deal high damage. Firearms are also really difficult to load and can be inaccurate, but they are really powerful, so if you happen to hit something, the damage will be substantial.
Can it malfunction?
I won't comment on this.
Can you craft your own bullets for the firearms?
No, not really. But we have introduced a certain level of crafting to the game, so you can create your own weapons.
Is it possible to craft armor as well?
No, only weapons.
Alright. Talking about character progression, did you make any notable changes in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2?
The skill tree is, I would say, not completely different but quite different from what you know, even like the basic skills, but the core principle that you improve by doing stuff stays the same. So, if you ride a horse, you will get better at horse riding; if you fight a lot, you will improve at using weapons, and so on.
I know one of the big changes with the sequel is also the lively world enabled by more dynamic NPCs. Can you talk about those improvements?
It was always our ambition to create a living world where NPCs have their routines rather than just standing there and waiting for the player to go talk to them. I think we improved on this a lot in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. We were able to create a world that I think behaves more believably and reacts to player actions in a more nuanced way.
To give you an example, we have been recording a huge number of dialogue lines, and almost half of that is not related to the game story at all. They are NPC reactions to the player's actions, such as when you steal something, when you enter an area where you shouldn't be, when an NPC finds a body, or when they open their chest and realize it's been emptied. It is very nuanced; even depending on what was stolen, you might get different reactions.
You also have a reputation system in place.
Yes. That was in the first game as well, but it underwent a certain evolution. It's a little bit more fine-grained here.
I noticed that you can also briefly interact with the passing NPCs in a way I've only ever seen before in Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2. Was that the inspiration?
It is a new feature we added to the game. In Kingdom Come Deliverance, you could only talk to NPCs through the dialogue system, which also switched the camera and stopped whatever the NPC was doing. It's really good for those story-based moments dialogues so that you get this movie-like experience of different camera angles and custom animation created for that dialogue. But we also wanted a more lightweight method for interacting with NPCs where you don't switch to another camera angle, and the animation just keeps doing what they are doing.
It's more seamless that way.
Yeah, exactly, and this is what we call the chat system. It was originally developed for those moments in the story where you just need to tell somebody something, or somebody asks you something, and you answer just yes or no, without launching the whole heavy dialogue system. Once we had it, we realized that we could do a lot more with that. Greeting passersby was the natural expansion of this system. I don't think it was a conscious reaction to Red Dead Redemption 2. Of course, we are gamers, all of us play other people's games. I am sure some 70 percent of the team probably played Red Dead Redemption 2 so it would be silly to deny that it might have been even subconsciously influenced by them, but then, we are influenced by every game we play.
Yeah. It's just that when I first saw it in that game, I thought many games would borrow the system, as it added a lot to the interactivity, but actually they didn't. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the first game I've played since that really has something similar.
True. Again, though, I don't think it was a conscious decision.
Thank you for your time.
