Q&A with Warhorse Studios about all things Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is currently my most anticipated title, everything about it is fascinating, from the simplicity of its idea to the depth of the world it’s set in.

Since backing it on Kickstarter, I’ve been getting regular updates emailed to me on its progress and I also get access to the alpha and beta versions of the game once they are ready. I shall be feeding more information about that back to you guys as and when I can. To help give people a better idea of the game, I got in touch with Warhorse Studios’ very own Jiří Rýdl so that I could ask him some questions of my own and put across a few that others would like to know.

 

Since becoming a lot more well known and essentially becoming a success, have you had a lot of interest from the big studios trying to get involved on your project after the Kickstarter campaign?
We had been contacted by a lot of publishers even before Kickstarter campaign and we are still in discussion. But not about publishing the game, but more or less about partnership instead. We don’t need money as we did for instance in ALTAR when developing UFO series. We are an independent developer with enough resources to finish the game ourselves and with every new option to distribute the game online, we are stronger. On the other hand why not sit down to one table with a possible business partner if they have something to offer?

We have a huge interest in the settings of your game, swords, knights and castle sieges are about as badass as it gets, but what was it that made you choose this setting?
Take a look at this video update to see more about the Kingdom Come: Deliverance setting :-). Why the history instead of another might and magic slasher? Because we wanted to do something new, interesting and innovative. We want to be as realistic as possible and are proud that we are from the Czech republic, so why not show interesting parts of our history in the game?

Some people might think it could be boring without magical creatures and spells, but you can taste real life in medieval times, take a sword, jump on a horse and gallop towards your fate, which could be either victory or death. It doesn’t sound boring to me!

We know you have three Kingdom Come games coming but do you have any other ideas lined up for after you’ve finished these?
We have plenty of ideas! But for now we want to focus on Kingdom Come: Deliverance. We even need to throw away some ideas, as you can read in our last blog post

We are huge fans of single player RPG games, you get so much more depth and immersion than in multiplayer games and the gameplay is much more personal. Was there a point where the team wanted this to be a multiplayer game or have you had the same vision for this game right from the beginning?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a single player game from the beginning. We always wanted to create strong story and remarkable characters to offer a great experience to player. Our game is more about Henry and his fate then playing with your friends against army/dragon/aliens, which is fun too, but it is completely different experience.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance has faced some difficulties in securing investment, in the end largely relying on Kickstarter. What have been the difficulties of crowdfunding and what would you suggest to indie game designers?
Well, the reason we went to Kickstarter was not the investment, but lack of proof there is a demand for games without dragons. We had market research in our hands that showed some good numbers, but you can’t be sure, they become reality, when people should actually buy instead of just express their intention. Now we have the proof and our investor is happy :-)

Who should be looking out for this game? We are fans of games like The Elder Scrolls and Assassin’s Creed and it looks appealing to us!
Kingdom Come: Deliverance offers large living world full of people in the middle of historical events. The game offers an open world, branching dialogs, skill-based minigames and no dragons :-)

A lot of game developers become overly eager to provide a release date and often make it into the gaming headlines due to delays, are you confident you’re going to meet your release date? Because everyone’s dying to play this game!
We are confident we’ll do everything we can to finish the game on time. Of course we need to develop stuff that no one did before (like the character customization system which is used also in development of Star Citizen, see here and here

Are you guys ready for the success and riches that will be coming your way once this game hits the shelves?
Absolutely :-)

Through your updates we see your team keeps growing and growing, is it getting a little cramped at the office? Do you plan to stay where you are or will Warhorse Studios be getting a new, bigger headquarters?
Definitely! We are moving to our new office in July, you can see a nice picture from the building in our latest blog post

We’ve recently seen that you are interested in getting actors to play roles in your game, who are your top 5 dream actors that you’d pick to be in your game if you could have any actors that you wanted?
OK, let’s take a look at my personal favourites: Alan Rickman as an evil king, Roman Skamene as a thief, Karel Roden as a pope, and the main character should be Benedict Cumberbatch. But it’s not a movie, right?

Those that backed certain packages on Kickstarter will gain access to the alpha and the beta, will this be PC only or will the alpha and beta be available on console too?Unfortunately alpha and beta are planned for PC only. At least for now.

For people late to the party, is there a way for potential backers to get involved with funding Kingdom Come: Deliverance now that your Kickstarter campaign has finished?
Sure, you can support the game development here , thank you in advance!

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