Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Is PC Gamer's Goty Because It 'trusts'...

Martin Klima sat down for a chat with PCG after we named KCD2 our game of 2025.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is PC Gamer's 2025 game of the year. No wonder. Warhorse's intensely particular historical RPG is already a classic: filled with great characters, a memorable plot, and like a thousand shopkeepers to rob blind in the night.

It's also, says Warhorse co-founder and KCD2 executive producer Martin Klima, a sign of the times. "This game is serious about taking players seriously," he told me in a recent chat, "and I think we can see in the game industry in general, there is a [tendency] towards the games that offer this, kind of, more grown-up approach and offer less hand-holding. I think KCD really fits into that trend."

So Warhorse isn't surprised we loved KCD2 as much as we did. Klima says the "deep gaming audience"—I think that's you and me—is getting older and more experienced, more prone to venture out beyond the familiar. "In general, I think you can only eat so much popcorn," said Klima, "and once you discover that there is more rarefied food available, then you are no longer so keen on popcorn. So I think that certain audience tastes have evolved over the last 10, 15 years, and the successful games are testament to this evolution."

But just because certain audiences are hungry for the arcane systems and mechanical friction of a KCD2 doesn't mean everyone is, and Klima reckons the paucity of games with that kind of mad, systems-driven heart "really has a lot to do with risk aversion on the on the part of publishers and developers.

"As computer games are really getting more and more expensive, and the publishers are taking greater and greater risks, they want to be safe. Or they want their investment as risk-free as possible. And this leads to games that are sort of in the middle of everything, that are keen to please everyone… for a long time, publishers and developers felt this is the right way forward for them, because they perceive this as eliminating the risk that's naturally present in a creative endeavor." And so: popcorn—"this kind of food that really is not very exciting, but not not very offensive, either."

Klima sees KCD2 as part of a lineage of strange, ambitious projects that includes games like Morrowind. "Games [like Morrowind and Oblivion] were created in happier times, when teams were smaller and overall cost of development was lower. At that time, this question of risk and risk mitigation was not so important for developers,

Source: PC Gamer