Kingdom Come Deliverance 2's director thinks gen-AI is "an opportunity," but I worry his pursuit of tech could spoil the RPG's special sauce

Daniel Vávra, the director of medieval epic Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, maintains gen-AI is “here and it’s not going anywhere,” and says he considers it “an opportunity for everyone to make great stuff without the big money from corporations.” He even addresses the possibility of historically accurate, dynamic NPC dialog generated by AI in RPGs like KCD 2, although I’d argue that such systems forget what makes its world feel so earnest and memorable in the process.

“Everybody hates AI (well actually not everybody). But I told you it’s (the) unavoidable future,” Vávra writes via social media. “Hate me as you wish. It’s the truth.” The head of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 developer Warhorse Studios is discussing an AI-generated video from ‘PJ Ace’ that’s based on the Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel, The Way of Kings.

The self-styled ‘AI filmmaker’ says they used the tools in Kuaishou’s updated Kling 3.0 video generator, which include the ability to set up continuous sequences with multiple camera angles, to create a 90-second trailer from the opening action sequence of The Way of Kings in just two days. You can watch the result for yourself below.

Personally, I’d argue with the creator’s claim that their video is “100% photorealistic,” and it doesn’t take much to start picking out inconsistencies and weird aberrations throughout the clip. That said, these technologies are likely to keep improving, and it will become increasingly hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t – especially as fully human-made creations are rarely entirely flawless either.

Vávra, at least, is impressed. “This is [a] fan-made trailer. Made in two days. By one person. [The] movie (and gaming) industry will never be the same. You can see it as a game over or as an opportunity for everyone to make great stuff without the big money from corporations. But it doesn’t matter what you think. It’s here and it’s not going anywhere.”

One commenter asks if Vávra considers his work not “as art that you enjoy working on, but as a product that you want to release as soon as possible?” He responds, “My ‘art’ is just a materialization of my thoughts, the result of my brain guiding my hands. It’s as if you were saying that driving cars is unnatural cheating to reach something faster, and [the] only people who really arrive [at their] destination are those who walk.”

It’s a strange statement to come off the back of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, a sprawling game packed with hundreds of hours of handcrafted places, people, and interactions. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, though, given Vávra’s recent comments that he’s “all for” using AI to cut down on production times, citing actor Tom McKay (KCD protagonist Henry) spending “500 hours in the studio recording completely generic heckling and generic bars.”

Indeed, when one person suggests that “Dynamic AI dialogs filtered for historical accuracy would be the perfect fit for the KCD DNA,” and that they’d like games to let them talk to NPCs using a microphone, Vávra responds, “Soon, very soon. And most likely in archaic language if you wish. The only limit is hardware now.”

While we’ve already seen some games adopting this reactive dialog technology in various ways, it feels so antithetical to one of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2’s greatest strengths. There’s a real humanity and character to even the smallest of interactions in that game, whether it’s the banter between Henry and his erstwhile companion Hans, or the offhand insults tossed at you as you pass by someone in the street. Every tiny moment adds to the experience, and stripping those out for something a machine thinks I’d like to hear is, in fact, the opposite of what I want.