It’s not often you hear a CEO talk about a punk vibe, but that’s exactly what developer Warhorse Studios is. Following the recent announcement of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, its main man Martin Frývaldský sat down with CzechCrunch to discuss the inner workings of Warhorse and how the studio has changed since its first game (interview then translated into English). Turns out, not too much, despite growing from about 130 developers to 250.
“We’re trying to stick tooth and nail to (our) punk (roots) with a completely flat structure where there’s at most one person between top management and anyone in the company,” he says.
Of course, this is a challenge with such a huge staff, which he acknowledges.
“It’s not a complete all-encompassing punk (though). We have some standardized processes and, unlike when working on Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a fairly large department of producers. We have a quantitative and qualitative process in place for how an idea goes from birth to realization, if it does, and then to alpha and beta and so on So, I say ‘punk’, but I also mean a bit corporate (here), there just has to be rules.”
Corporate punk, huh? You’d think these approaches would be terribly out of place (and no doubt some purists won’t approve – bless them), but if nothing else, it’s an improvement on the “designed by committee” approach that is so often rightly frowned upon. this wild wonderful industry of ours.
If you’re curious, all the extra manpower went mostly into cutscenes and world-building (“If you let the designers write hours and hours of cutscenes and let them imagine making a near-perfect digital copy of Kutná Hora, then you can’t. be surprised at such increases ”, notes Frývaldský), so you can expect a more epic and detailed story this time.
I look forward to being inundated with medieval history when Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launches sometime later this year on PC and next-gen consoles. While you wait with me, check out my 7 Things I Want to See in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 wishlist here on Pro Game Guides.
