At Gamescom 2024, I checked out the highly anticipated medieval RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and interviewed Martin Klima, Executive Producer at Warhorse Studios. The full interview will go live soon, but in the meantime, here’s an excerpt related to the game’s technology.
I know that you’ve kept the CryENGINE. Did you consider any other engine early on?
When we finished KCD, we looked at the technology we were using and considered our options. However, we decided that keeping CryENGINE made the most sense for us because we spent a lot of time customizing it for our needs. I think we are very happy. I’m quite proud of the performance we have now. We put a lot of effort into improving the performance since that can influence the perception of the game, and we wanted to have a smoother experience.
Did you get the latest version from Crytek or are you still using your own from the first installment?
We are working closely with Crytek, so we have access to the latest version of the engine. Of course, we also wanted to keep our customization from KCD 1. In the end, although the engine that we have is not quite the same engine that Crytek uses for Hunt: Showdown, it is very close.
Do you support hardware ray tracing and/or multiple upscalers in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2?
We support upscaling tech, both NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. We are not using hardware ray tracing; CryENGINE has very good software ray tracing.
I remember the first Kingdom Come Deliverance to be quite heavy on PCs.
It was. There were a lot of things that we were doing just by brute force, and I think this additional time we had in the development for this sequel allowed us to optimize a lot, parallelize, and utilize CPUs better. Of course, hardware is faster now, and the consoles have more memory and better performance.
Will the game run at 60 FPS on consoles?
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is not finished yet, so we’re still working on it, but 60FPS is not out of reach for us.
After Gamescom, I followed up with Warhorse PR Manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, who confirmed that the software ray tracing mentioned by Klima is actually an improved version of SVOGI, which stands for Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination. SVOGI was already available in the first Kingdom Come Deliverance game and in a few other CryENGINE-powered titles like War of Rights and SNOW. I also got confirmation that SVOGI will be available on consoles, too, for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
The game is slated to launch next year on February 11. Meanwhile, check out Chris’s recent hands-on preview.
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