Despite doubling in size, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 team maintains its punk roots

It's not often you hear a CEO talk about punk ethos, but that's just the kind of developer Warhorse Studios is. Following the recent Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 announcement, its top man Martin Frývaldský sat down with CzechCrunch to discuss the inner workings of Warhorse and how the studio has changed since its first game (an interview then translated to English). Turns out, not too much, despite growing from around 130 developers to 250.

"We are trying to stick tooth and nail to [our] punk [roots] with a totally flat structure, where there is a maximum of one person between the top management and anyone in the company," he says.

Naturally, this is a challenge with such an enormous staff, which he acknowledges.

"It's not a complete all encompassing punk [though]. We have a number of standardized processes and, unlike when working on Kingdom Come: Deliverance, 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 [here], there just have to be rules."

Corporate punk, huh? You'd think these approaches would be horrifically at odds (and no doubt some purists won't approve - bless 'em), but if nothing else, it's an improvement on the 'designed by committee' approach that so often is rightfully lambasted in this wild, wonderful industry of ours.

If you're curious, all the extra manpower has gone largely to cutscenes and world building ("If you let the designers write hours and hours of [them] and [...] imagine making an almost perfect digital replica of Kutná Hora, then you can't be surprised at such increases", remarks Frývaldský), so you can expect a more epic and detailed tale this time around.

I look forward to being inundated with medieval history when Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launches sometime later this year on PC and next-gen consoles. While we wait, check out my 7 Things I Want to See in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 wishlist here on Pro Game Guides.