The presentation of Kingdom Come 2 was carried out in style, while the first game was presented less spectacularly. How do you feel about the transformation of Warhorse into the creator of the highly anticipated game?
Of course, being in the outsider position was nice. And this despite the fact that we sometimes had to face negative reactions from potential publishers who did not believe in such a project at the time. Now, on the contrary, we might slowly fear that we are burdened with very high expectations. Anyway, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is not a revolution, but an evolution. We took each stone and turned it over five times to see if something could be improved.
Do you see this change from an outside perspective as well, do you have feedback from your competitors in the gaming industry?
We also received a few congratulations from our competitors. That is surely pleasant. But again, let's not lie to ourselves that it's over. It isn't. We've shot a nice commercial so far. Patting ourselves on the back about how awesome we are is premature.
Six years have passed since the release of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. How has the Warhorse studio changed in that time?
We are trying to stick tooth and nail to "punk" with a totally flat structure, where there is a maximum of one person between the top management and anyone in the company. And even so, anyone can come to me or Martin Klíma (executive producer of Warhorse Studios, editor's note) to our office or write on Teams, which many people do. And sometimes with such incredible ease and immediacy they enter our office in the middle of a conversation. But it's still better than having some imaginary consultation hours.
But then again, it's not a complete all encompassing punk either, we have a number of standardized processes and, unlike when working on KCD1, quite a large department of producers. We have a quantitative and qualitative process in place for how an idea goes from birth to fruition, if it does at all, and then to alpha and beta. And so on. So, I say "punk", but I also mean a little corporate. With 250 people there, there just have to be rules.
How difficult was it to keep the development of KCD2 under wraps over the years?
Rather than being difficult, it was frustrating at times. It made it quite difficult for us to recruit people, because we couldn't simply say, "Come and work on KCD2 with us!" Instead, we demanded confidentiality during interviews. We made it a little more complicated for ourselves. But it made business sense for us to announce the game only at the moment when it is practically finished and entering certification.
You published the first game so to speak on your own, the second is being created under the game publisher Plaion from the Embracer group. What did it mean for the development of the game and the functioning of the company, did something have to change?
Fortunately, it didn't have to. The Warhorse acquisition took place at a time when Kingdom Come 2 was already decided upon and we had a clear concept. That Kingdom Come can continue and that it is actually a saga was already clear during our crowdfunding campaign in 2014. But at the same time, we always said that we would make KCD1 and then we would see. Without the success of the first game, there would be no KCD2. To put it simply, part of the deal was to become closed off hermits for a few years and work on KCD2. Transferable procedures and experiences between studies are actually quite rare in the group, and what distinguishes good games from mediocre ones is that they offer a great experience that you can't get anywhere else. And we have to program such an experience ourselves.
The just-mentioned parent group Embracer has been announcing significant changes and restructuring in recent days, and in recent months it has been going through quite a stormy development. Did that not affect you?
I dare say that we are a bit of a pearl in Embracer's portfolio of titles. It would make no sense to throttle the development of a product that is potentially materially important to the group.
For the first game, a development budget of around 400 million crowns was mentioned, plus some marketing costs. How much has Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's budget increased?
I understand questions about the amount of investment rather as spreading an awareness that games are in the first league of the entertainment industry. In Czech business environment, there probably isn't a project – for example a film project – that would cost as much. On a global scale, I can imagine that for the price of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a mid-budget Hollywood movie or even an entire Netflix series could be made. I understand that you are asking for a specific number, but I will stick with the fact that it is in high hundreds of millions of crowns.
Can you at least approximate the rate of budget increase?
The increase is significant, but beware, the world has changed a lot since 2018. A completely unexpected wave of inflation and other events swept past us, which in turn had an effect on the pace of work, i.e. a slowdown, resulting in an increase in costs. Today, you can't even build a family home for the same money as six years ago. It is what it is.
Kingdom Come 2 is supposed to be twice the size of the game, in addition to the budget, the studio has also grown. How much?
We will spend approximately ten thousand man-months on KCD2. About 130 people worked on KCD1 at its peak, while on KCD2 we currently have 250 people and I wouldn't be surprised if we grew a little more. And that's not counting the completely different level of outsourcing and testing costs. After all, at KCD1 we were criticized around release - quite rightly - that the game was full of bugs, so we're doing a lot of testing now.
How much of the original team remained in Warhorse? Did you manage to retain a high percentage of KCD1 developers?
Yes, we did. So it is not so much in terms of percentage, because we have grown significantly. Even if no one left the team after KCD1's creation, there would be around fifty percent of the people here from the first game. The reality is that there are about a third of those. Almost all the seniors of the KCD1 remained in Warhorse.**Now a question about the opposite development - what need for reinforcements did the creation of Kingdom Come 2 bring?**
In general, we were quite far off in the predictions of the number of people. We planned to have a maximum of 160 people, which is what we sized our offices for, after all. And we have almost a hundred more.
Where did you strengthen the team the most?
The increases went across all departments, but probably the most we underestimated at the beginning of work on the sequel was the size of the team of animators and graphic artists. But if you let the designers write hours and hours of cutscenes and let them imagine making an almost perfect digital replica of Kutná Hora, then you can't be surprised at such increases.
And what was the most challenging part of development?
Tell yourself enough is enough and stopping of adding more new stuff to the game all the time.
The first game set the bar at six million copies sold. What is the measure of success for KCD2?
Of course we have big aspirations. I've been at Warhorse Studios for eleven years and now "only" our second game is coming out. Everyone here leaves a piece of their life here, maybe a decade or more. How many such creative projects can one manage in a lifetime? What I mean by this is that for most people in Warhorse, the main measure of satisfaction is good player feedback. And of course, if the game is good, it will sell well. And that's great too.
The release of the game is planned for the end of the year. Are there any talks going on now about the future direction of Warhorse Studios?
It is clear that we are not going to break up at the end of this year. We'll be busy fixing bugs for a while, because the best testing in the world is nothing against hundreds of thousands of players, so there will definitely be some patches. Of course, we are full of ideas for new projects. I can reveal that we are actually a little further than the idea and we are already slowly starting the future project.
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