When you do it yourself, you feel smart and competent
In an era when major studios increasingly smooth every rough edge to maximize accessibility and audience reach, Warhorse Studios has chosen a different covenant with its players. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is built on the older belief that difficulty, opacity, and the freedom to fail are not obstacles to enjoyment but the very conditions that make discovery meaningful. Producer Martin Klima traces this philosophy to a leaner, less risk-averse moment in game development history — and bets that a hunger for that experience still lives in the audience.
- Modern AAA game design has drifted toward constant reassurance, and Warhorse Studios is openly pushing back against that current with Deliverance 2.
- The tension is real: building an unforgiving, opaque game in an industry where broader accessibility is treated as both ethical imperative and commercial necessity is a genuine gamble.
- The studio draws its counter-model from two sources — the budget-constrained creative freedom of early Bethesda RPGs and the deliberate, trusting silence of FromSoftware's Soulslike design.
- Design director Viktor Bocan shaped the game around the idea that secrets should be stumbled upon, not signposted — that the player's competence, not the game's guidance, should be the engine of progress.
- The bet is landing as a clear philosophical statement: that feeling lost, and then found, is worth more than never being lost at all.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is not trying to be everything to everyone. That refusal is deliberate, and it begins with a historical argument. Co-founder and executive producer Martin Klima points to the smaller budgets and leaner teams of an earlier RPG era — the world that produced Morrowind and Oblivion — as proof that constraint can be generative. When studios couldn't afford elaborate risk-mitigation machinery, they made games that trusted players to tolerate mystery, dead ends, and genuine difficulty. That trust, Klima believes, produced something irreplaceable.
The other pillar of Warhorse's philosophy is more recent: the Soulslike movement, and particularly FromSoftware's approach to player agency. Design director Viktor Bocan brought that sensibility into Deliverance 2's DNA. In a FromSoftware game, hidden bosses and secret passages exist without announcement or pointer. Elden Ring is the clearest example — a world so layered with optional discovery that a player could spend fifty hours and never encounter entire dungeons, not because they are locked away, but because the game simply waits to see if you find them.
Klima's argument is ultimately about a particular kind of feeling. When a player solves a problem through their own effort and intuition, without a quest marker or tutorial nudge, they feel genuinely capable. That sensation — of being trusted, of earning your own way — is what guided experiences, however well-crafted, struggle to replicate.
The studio knows it is swimming against the tide. Most major publishers now invest heavily in accessibility systems and difficulty options designed to keep nearly any player moving forward. The commercial logic is obvious. But Warhorse is wagering that an audience still exists for games that do not apologize for their edges — players who understand that being lost is not a failure state, but the necessary precondition for the satisfaction of being found.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 arrives as a deliberate act of defiance against modern game design. It is unforgiving, opaque, and uninterested in smoothing its edges for players who might prefer a gentler experience. This is not a bug in Warhorse Studios' thinking—it is the entire point.
When Martin Klima, the studio's co-founder and executive producer, sat down to discuss the game's philosophy, he reached back to an earlier era of RPG-making. Games like Morrowind and Oblivion, he explained, emerged from a different economic moment. Development teams were smaller. Budgets were tighter. The machinery of risk mitigation that now governs AAA game production simply did not exist in the same form. That constraint, paradoxically, created freedom. Developers could take chances. They could make games that refused to be all things to all players. They could trust that their audience would tolerate mystery, difficulty, and the occasional dead end.
Klima's vision for Deliverance 2 draws directly from that lineage. But it also reaches toward something more recent: the Soulslike movement, and specifically the work of FromSoftware. The game's design director, Viktor Bocan, brought that sensibility into the room. Bocan wanted to build something that took the player seriously—that extended trust rather than instruction. In a FromSoftware game, you might stumble into a hidden boss, or discover a secret passage, or find a weapon that changes how you approach a problem. The game does not announce these things. It does not point. It does not hold your hand.
Elden Ring exemplifies this approach. The game is vast and layered with secrets that exist entirely outside the critical path. A player might spend fifty hours and never encounter certain dungeons, certain bosses, certain challenges—not because they are locked behind progression gates, but because the game trusts you to find them or miss them as your curiosity and skill allow. There is no achievement for discovering everything. There is no checklist. There is only the world, and you in it.
Klima argues that this restraint produces something valuable. When you discover something yourself, when you solve a problem through your own effort and intuition, you feel competent. You feel smart. You feel the weight of your own agency in a way that a guided experience, no matter how well-crafted, cannot quite replicate. That feeling—of being trusted, of being capable, of finding your own way—is what Warhorse Studios wanted to preserve in Deliverance 2.
This is a bet against the current grain of AAA game design. Most major studios now build elaborate accessibility systems, difficulty sliders, quest markers, and tutorial sequences designed to ensure that nearly any player can progress. The logic is sound from a business perspective: broader appeal means larger audiences. But Klima and his team are wagering that there remains an audience for games that do not apologize for their difficulty, that do not explain themselves, that do not assume the player needs constant reassurance that they are on the right track. They are betting that some players actually want to feel lost, at least sometimes, because being lost is part of what makes being found so satisfying.
Citações Notáveis
Games like Morrowind and Oblivion were created in happier times, when teams were smaller and development costs were lower, allowing developers to take greater creative risks and create games that were not so forgiving.— Martin Klima, Warhorse Studios co-founder and executive producer
When you discover something yourself, you have an amazing feeling of discovery and an amazing feeling of competence by doing so.— Martin Klima
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does Warhorse Studios think players want a harder game? Isn't accessibility a good thing?
Accessibility and challenge aren't opposites. The studio isn't arguing against accessibility—they're arguing for trust. They want players to feel capable of figuring things out without being told.
But doesn't that exclude people who don't have time to get lost, or who struggle with complex systems?
It probably does. That's the trade-off they're making. They're not trying to be a game for everyone. They're trying to be a singular game for people who want that particular experience.
So they're looking backward to Morrowind as a model. What made that game different from what studios do now?
Morrowind didn't have a quest marker. It gave you directions in text and expected you to navigate. It had systems that could break if you weren't careful. It assumed you were paying attention.
And they think that's what players are hungry for again?
Some players, yes. The ones who felt like modern games were doing too much thinking for them. The ones who wanted to feel genuinely lost, because that's what makes discovery real.