Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 developer Warhorse has an extremely loyal and passionate player base whose collapse following the game’s snobbery at The Game Awards 2025 was much stronger than the developer’s public backlash, and according to communications director Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, that’s really all you need to succeed anyway.
“I don’t think it takes tens of millions of players to advance, improve or succeed,” Stolz-Zwilling told GamesRadar+. “What you need is a group of truly committed people who are your fans and your biggest critics, in the most positive and negative ways.”
As someone who plodded through the first Kingdom Come but gave up halfway through, I found that almost all of my frustrations were addressed in the sequel, which is by far my favorite RPG of 2025. To me, this shows how seriously Warhorse takes feedback from its community. It’s also almost certainly why Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 managed to break through to the mainstream in a way that the first game never really did.
In the same conversation, lead designer Prokop Jirsa suggested that the sequel was more successful than the first game simply because of its polish, not because any major compromises were made.
“I honestly believe that there is great potential for original ideas that, if given the chance to be refined, could reach the general public,” he said. “The same can be said of Death Stranding! It’s a package delivery game, and it’s a very successful mainstream game.”
Indeed, what impresses me the most in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the way in which it feels as a niche, hardcore, historical RPG, and one that makes no effort as a true sequel to the brutal first game, but which to me feels infinitely more accessible. What I’m saying is that you can still very easily die in the sequel by eating a bad apple in the wrong place at the wrong time, but for some reason it’s not as frustrating as the first game. Really, don’t ask me why.
The developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 wanted negative feedback during playtesting after deciding that players should initially “feel extremely weak”: “Then the validation of strength gain feels earned.” »
