Following the long-awaited announcement in April, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 developer Warhorse Studios is working on finishing the game for the scheduled late 2024 launch window on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
In the meantime, Lead Scripter Martin Ziegler was interviewed by the Epic Games Store blog to discuss some of the game’s features. One touted enhancement for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is dynamic NPC routines, which will be altered based on certain events, some player-driven and some not.
If you follow them around, you can see that they behave quite like you would expect a real person of the time period: they eat their breakfast with others, leave for their particular work, perhaps shop a bit, chill down in the evening in a pub or on a walk, maybe interrupt their agenda when they unexpectedly see a street brawl, meet a friend walking by, or watch some vagrant being publicly punished at the town square’s gallows. They will alter this routine if there was violence or theft in the region recently—perhaps stay home instead of going for a beer, maybe carry a weapon with them or call for increased patrols in the area. And all of this is happening continuously in the entire world, whether you are there to see it or not.
Ziegler also said that Warhorse injected a lot of player freedom in the side quests, while the main questline of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is more linear. This is explained by the fact that Henry, the main character, is not a noble and couldn’t possibly have that much agency in a kingly dispute.
I really like our approach to quest design, especially in our side quests, in how we’re trying to provide a lot of freedom for different players to approach things in their own ways and for the game to be able to respond to them. I like how the emergent storytelling evolving from that complements the more linear and directed narrative of the main questline.
The politics and the violent conflict related to them in our specific time period are indeed at the core of the main storyline. They’re taking place through your particular story…you can also see them everywhere around you just as you explore the world. There are bandits in the wilderness, foreign mercenaries brought to the country by an invasion, and the locals are reacting to all of these.
One of the challenges was to make your character, Henry, play an important role in these events (so that you can feel that you have an impact on the story) but at the same time remain true to the reality of Henry being just a son of a village blacksmith, who in the social realities of the times would only have a very limited agency to impact anything. In the end, I think that we did figure out how to strike that balance and keep the best of both.
There is still no specific launch date for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, but we’ll let you know when that changes.
