Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is PC Gamer’s GOTY because it ‘trusts’ players and takes them seriously, says Warhorse co-founder: ‘I think you can only eat so much popcorn’

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is PC Gamer’s 2025 game of the year. No wonder. Warhorse’s intensely particular historical RPG is already a classic: filled with great characters, a memorable plot, and like a thousand shopkeepers to rob blind in the night.

It’s also, says Warhorse co-founder and KCD2 executive producer Martin Klima, a sign of the times. “This game is serious about taking players seriously,” he told me in a recent chat, “and I think we can see in the game industry in general, there is a [tendency] towards the games that offer this, kind of, more grown-up approach and offer less hand-holding. I think KCD really fits into that trend.”

(Image credit: Warhorse Studios)

So Warhorse isn’t surprised we loved KCD2 as much as we did. Klima says the “deep gaming audience”—I think that’s you and me—is getting older and more experienced, more prone to venture out beyond the familiar. “In general, I think you can only eat so much popcorn,” said Klima, “and once you discover that there is more rarefied food available, then you are no longer so keen on popcorn. So I think that certain audience tastes have evolved over the last 10, 15 years, and the successful games are testament to this evolution.”

But just because certain audiences are hungry for the arcane systems and mechanical friction of a KCD2 doesn’t mean everyone is, and Klima reckons the paucity of games with that kind of mad, systems-driven heart “really has a lot to do with risk aversion on the on the part of publishers and developers.

“As computer games are really getting more and more expensive, and the publishers are taking greater and greater risks, they want to be safe. Or they want their investment as risk-free as possible. And this leads to games that are sort of in the middle of everything, that are keen to please everyone… for a long time, publishers and developers felt this is the right way forward for them, because they perceive this as eliminating the risk that’s naturally present in a creative endeavor.” And so: popcorn—”this kind of food that really is not very exciting, but not not very offensive, either.”

(Image credit: Warhorse Studios)

Klima sees KCD2 as part of a lineage of strange, ambitious projects that includes games like Morrowind. “Games [like Morrowind and Oblivion] were created in happier times, when teams were smaller and overall cost of development was lower. At that time, this question of risk and risk mitigation was not so important for developers, and they were able to take greater creative risks and create games that were not so forgiving, and which were not one-size-fits-all products.

“[KCD2] design director Viktor Bocan is a great fan of Souls games,” said Klima. “I think this [was] like a general inspiration with the game: take the player seriously, and trust the player.”

Discussing why KCD2 feels like a breath of fresh air, Klima recalls a talk that Bocan recently gave in Prague. “He was talking about Elden Ring, actually, that there are many dungeons and treasures and bosses that are hidden, and the game doesn’t tell you, like, ‘You have to go there and you have to find this boss’.

“When you do it yourself, you have an amazing feeling of discovery and an amazing feeling of competence by doing so… And I think in this respect, this is something that we share with these games, that we allow the player to experience this feeling of being smart and competent and really finding their way around the world that we have created.”

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