I was approximately 3.7 seconds into my playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 before I muttered to myself ‘Huh, pretty Oblivion-y’. This is the second-highest praise I can offer a videogame, right beneath ‘Huh, pretty Morrowind-y,’ which I went onto say almost verbatim in our KCD2 review.
Turns out I wasn’t just seeing old-Bethesda-shaped ghosts in a fit of nostalgia. Games like Oblivion and Morrowind were right at the forefront of Warhorse’s thinking when it was making KCD2. In a chat with GamesRadar, the game’s senior designer, Ondřej Bittner, said Henry’s latest adventure was deliberately harkening back to those brilliant open worlds of old.
“I’m more of a Morrowind person,” said Bittner, adding that “Most of our designers are in their mid 30s—like, 30s to 40s—so these games had a huge impact on us.” So, naturally, those classics were a big reference point for the KCD games. “Instant gratification in games has become a problem,” Bittner said, with so many games that revolve constantly assaulting players’ senses with info, stimulation, and direction. That’s not Warhorse’s approach: “We kind of go back to the roots of RPGs where it’s sort of like: well, you can do whatever you want, and maybe go and do the main story.”
Which if you’re like me—someone who loves a clockwork world to inhabit and make your own goals in—is a dream come true, but it can put others off. A lack of hand-holding “can clash with players from a younger generation,” reckons Bittner. “They can be like ‘I don’t know where to go’—well, have you thought about where to go? If I tell you where to go, it’s not really as fun, is it?”
Not wanting to scare off the zoomers—who, I have to say, I feel like Bittner is underestimating just a tad—is why KCD2’s intro has a bit more direction than the first game’s. Maybe you can think of it as the same kind of leap that Bethesda made between Morrowind and Oblivion, although I don’t think Warhorse sacrificed nearly as much as Todd Howard and co did.
“We wanted to make mechanics more approachable,” said Bittner, “so that they’re hard, but not so hard that players don’t even know what to do.” That means you should be able to start exploring Bohemia without immediately getting decapitated by a bandit, and it means there’s even someone who is, in essence, a tutorial NPC to give you some direction: Bara, the Troskowicz beggar who was added as “road sign for players who were like ‘I don’t know what to do’.”
I reckon Warhorse pulled it off, creating a world that reminded me of all the best bits of Oblivion (and some of the best bits of Morrowind—Henry never gets to kill god), that doesn’t leave you helplessly lost, and that doesn’t sacrifice the depth and complexity that made the first game such a rare and exciting thing.