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“History rhymes. It’s not repeating itself. It rhymes.” Warhorse’s global PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling is paraphrasing an aphorism often attributed to Mark Twain—though its origins are actually unknown. He is bemoaning the fact that, once again, the Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 studio has found itself embroiled in the exhausting culture war.
Back in 2017, before the launch of the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the game caught some flack from critics who questioned its lack of people of colour and if that was truly historically accurate. This prompted some genuinely interesting discussions about medieval Europe and its portrayal, but it also saw battle lines being drawn.
Some wrote the game off as an ahistorical, overly homogenous view of Czechia, while others rushed to its defence and celebrated it for pushing back the ‘woke’ agenda. And this was all before most people had even played it. Game director Daniel Vávra’s support for Gamergate only served to fuel the flames.
History rhymes. It’s not repeating itself. It rhymes.
Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, global PR manager
Then it launched and most people agreed it was actually pretty great. It wasn’t some scholarly project that gave us a 100% accurate portrayal of Bohemia, and there were some valid criticisms about how it presented, for instance, Cuman mercenaries as evil, barbaric marauders, but otherwise it was a fun, flavourful and often fascinating romp around the countryside. To characterise it as an ‘anti-woke’ champion refusing to be censored was patently ludicrous. But the label remained.
Now the same crowd that pretended to care about historical accuracy have turned on Warhorse—all because Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 features an optional gay romance and a larger array of non-white, non-Christian characters. While the studio continues to use the expertise of its in-house historian, Joanna Nowak, and is just as obsessed with historical authenticity as before, now it’s apparently been pressured into becoming woke by a shadowy cabal of evil leftists. Scary!
It is, of course, laughable. Or would be if this hadn’t inspired an outpouring of bigotry and abuse. All because some folk are just trying to make a videogame. “Several years ago, we were branded differently,” says Stolz-Zwilling. “Now we are branded that way. It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool videogame.” He’s adamant there is no agenda here, just videogame developers doing their job. Developers who are now pretty “fed up” of being dragged into someone else’s war.
“We’re definitely not the problem,” adds senior game designer, Ondřej Bittner. “We think the extreme voices are just never happy.”
Stolz-Zwilling says that nobody at publisher Plaion or Embracer told Warhorse what to include in the game, and the only outside influence comes from the community, through feedback. The main reason the sequel features the kinds of characters that it does is down to the setting and the historical record. “Everything makes sense. Everything we put there was double and triple checked.” Warhorse and Nowak have been able to go deeper into the research since there was already this foundation from the original game, and it’s been easier to approach universities, museums and academics.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s wider range of characters makes perfect sense when you consider the switch from tiny villages in the countryside, which was the focus of the first game, to Kuttenberg, the second most important city in Bohemia and the country’s financial centre.
I think that it’s important to not just include these people, but their vision of the world.
Ondřej Bittner, senior game designer
“There’s more ethnicities in Kuttenberg because Kuttenberg is the royal mint,” says Bittner. “It’s almost one of the most important cities in the Holy Roman Empire. So there are people from Italy. There are a lot of German people in the game, and they use German words. And then there’s the Jewish Quarter, because we wanted to portray how Jewish people were in the Middle Ages. Because there’s a city, there’s loads more effort to show how these people actually view the world, which is, I think, way more important than showing their fashion choices or or how they look. It’s how they view the world and the society around them, which is predominantly Christian and Czech-speaking. I think that it’s important to not just include these people, but their vision of the world, which can sometimes feel lacking in games or media that call themselves diverse. You don’t really actually know these characters. They’re just there.”
So, as Henry—KCD’s blacksmith-turned-knight protagonist—travels across Bohemia, he meets Romani people, people of different faiths and denominations, and even has an opportunity to become drunk BFFs with a group of Cuman mercenaries. In the first game, these mercenaries would have merely been fodder for his sword, cut down during his quest for vengeance over the destruction of his village. This time, these once almost faceless villains tie into the theme of war being a dirty business where nobody’s hands are clean. These are mercenaries who had a job to do, and Henry has done and will do many of these things himself.
Stolz-Zwilling says that, in the first game, Warhorse wanted to include so many features that it didn’t have time to give every character their due—some of them were painted in very broad strokes. “I think generally in KCD2, with the research we did, we delved way deeper into the different characteristics.” This goes for the Cumans, who are no longer one-note villains, to individual characters like Father Godwin, who’s been elevated beyond his original status as a funny boozed-up priest. Warhorse wants to dig into Bohemia’s denizens, their motivations and history.
The result is a game that feels so much richer, telling stories shaped by different perspectives. That it’s upsetting the bigots is merely a bonus. But for Warhorse, which is now being accused of being part of some global DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) conspiracy, it’s understandably exhausting. “In an ideal world,” says Stolz-Zwilling, “we would like not to be connected to these fights at all.”
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Kurt Indovina
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