Kingdom Come Deliverance is one of the greatest gaming success stories of the past decade. With its sequel earning GOTY-level adoration and millions of sales, it’s easy to forget that this all started with a crowdfunding campaign and a dream to create a historically accurate medieval RPG. Developer Warhorse Studios now has two hugely successful Kingdom Come games under its belt, but back in 2011, not everyone believed that all its ambitions were feasible. Most notable of these was Crytek, creator of the engine powering the KCD series, CryEngine.
Kingdom Come Deliverance design director Viktor Bocan explains the situation to Edge magazine, saying that CryEngine simply “wasn’t suitable” for a game of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2’s scale, but that Crytek was doubtful even the first game would work using the software.
“[Before making Kingdom Come Deliverance] we were talking to Crytek, who very proudly told us we can have six or seven fully animated AI-powered NPCs on the screen,” he says in the interview. “And we told them, ‘OK, we want 200 or maybe 500’. They just laughed.”
It’s a testament to Warhorse’s modifications to the engine that it managed to pull off large-scale battles with dozens of NPCs at once. For Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, the overall number of NPCs grew to 3,000, with half of them in the city of Kuttenberg alone. Clever tricks including roughly simulating NPCs further away from you helped to create one of the most immersive RPGs I’ve ever played.
Warhorse knows that CryEngine isn’t perfectly suited for RPGs of this scale, and perhaps that’s why it’s been hiring for developers with Unreal Engine experience. However, back in 2011, there were few options available.
“We were choosing CryEngine in 2011,” says executive producer Martin Klima. “The landscape was very different. Fortnite was not even a twinkle in [Epic’s] eye – [it] hadn’t found this money-printing press in the basement yet. Meanwhile, Crytek had been opening development studios all over the place, and, objectively, CryEngine in 2011 was better than Unreal 3.”
Whatever the case in 2011, Warhorse may struggle to top Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 if it continues to rely on CryEngine – even with its considerable modifications – for a threequel. Henry’s story may have come to its natural conclusion, but I believe in my heart that there’s still more Kingdom yet to Come from the Czech developer. Whether that’s the case or not, one thing’s for sure: Warhorse is the one laughing now.
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