Kingdom Come: Deliverance Interview

Gaming Bolt has interviewed Warhorse Studios creative director Dan Vávra about Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the studio’s open-world historical RPG, which was recently partially funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. Here’s an excerpt that piqued my interest:

Rashid Sayed: You guys recently claimed that the map size of Kingdom Come Deliverance will be as big as Red Dead Redemption. Is this the case of all the three acts combined or is this the size of the first act?

Dan Vávra: First Act only. Second Act will add a new map, which will be little smaller and will take place on both maps and third Act will be very big.

Rashid Sayed: How are you tackling level design in such a massive open world, given that there a ton of activities you can do?

Dan Vávra: That’s is one of major challenges make it all work together =). We are developing set of tools to make it as easy as possible. We have our own software for writing quets which directly exports data into the game. We have set of rules which are applied to every quest design. But it’s still going to be hard =).

Rashid Sayed: The game promises to tell a non-linear story. In that case how are you handling the mission structure? Is the player allowed to complete missions in any order and whenever they want?

Dan Vávra: We needed to find balance between good story and nonlinearity. So we are not going to be as free as lets say New Vegas or Witcher 2. The main story has some branches, but still leads to one historic event that can’t be changed. What can be changed are fates of different characters and their relationship to you. All quests on the other hand could be completed in several different ways.

Rashid Sayed: Most role playing games seem to deviate from providing rich side questions by making the player do silly things. How are you planning to keep side quests relevant to the main story line?

Dan Vávra: We did lot of research at the beginning and the world really lives. So when we will try to utilize all of our knowledge, world mechanics and situations, while sticking to our (authenticity is everything) philosophy, we have tons of interesting believable and natural situations for quests.