‘Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’ Director Says Devs “Self-Censored” To Avoid Outrage From “Oversensitive People”, Hired Consultants “For Every Group”
Straight from the horse’s mouth, Kingdom Come: Deliverance series director Daniel Vávra has confirmed that in seeking to avoid offending “oversensitive” audiences, the game’s dev team at Warhorse Studios sought the advice of various sensitivity consultants to help them “self-censor” their work.
Vávra, who not only helped found Warhorse Studios but also serves as its current creative director, provided this insight into the recently released second entry’s development process during a recent appearance on the Insider Podcast, as hosted in his native Czechoslovakia by noted local media reporters Tomáš Jirsa and Michal Půr.
Invited on to speak about his experience developing the Kingdom Come sequel, the director was at one point asked as how he felt about the fact that some of the same critics who previously wrote both him and the first game off as “controversial” due to his pro-GamerGate stance were now singing his praises.
“Honestly, I don’t really care,” Vávra replied in turn, per a machine translation of the interview’s auto-generated Czech YouTube subtitles provided by ChatGPT. “What you can buy bread with is money you earn. So I go by my conscience. I don’t need anyone’s approval to know what I can or can’t think. Of course, it’s annoying, because it does interfere with work.”
“For example, I wanted [politically liberal Czech actor] Ondřej Vetchý for a role [as King Sigismund in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II], and I was really worried he’d turn us down because someone would tell him what I’m supposedly like,” he then recalled. “But he took the role – he knew who I was. When he showed up, I thought, ‘Okay, is there going to be a fight?’ because he’s known for being intense. But we actually got along well. We even talked politics – not avoiding it – and though we didn’t agree on everything, it was an intelligent debate.”
“I’m always afraid of that – that this stuff will hurt potential collaborations,” Vávra admitted. “It certainly makes personal relationships harder. Some people just can’t handle it. I’m not like that. In fact, I think conservatives are more thick-skinned about this stuff than liberals. Maybe because they had to keep quiet for 20 years and are used to separating politics from work. Liberals often act like everyone should think the same way – and when they realize that’s not the case, they can’t handle it.”
On that note, Jirsa and Půr next asked Vávra if, during the development of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, there was ever a moment “where you thought ‘Damn, now I’ve stepped over a line and it could actually hurt the business or complicate what I’m trying to do’?'”
In turn, he admitted, “Obviously, ‘Sword of Damocles’ was hanging in the air for quite a while. I was really afraid that they’d dig those things up again—the stuff they pulled the first time. And that’s why—back then, when the first game came out—they pulled out those controversies, right? That it wasn’t diverse enough, and that there weren’t enough black characters in it.”
“And since then, you know, I’ve basically reengineered myself on the Czech internet—on Facebook. I told myself, ‘Well, today we have automatic translators, right? So checking out my Facebook in English is no big deal anymore.’ So it was only a matter of time before someone did that and started saying: ‘Whoa, this guy’s a Trump supporter, he’s against this and that, and he’s writing these kinds of texts.’ “And honestly, I really thought that was a serious risk. I was actually ready for the possibility that I might get fired, because the company doesn’t belong to me anymore. And I said to myself—I was prepared to accept that. Because I’m not going to let this drag me down.”
“But what happened in the meantime is that things flipped so much that the other side started attacking us—saying I’m a leftist, or whatever else. So basically, for the very things we were worried we’d get slammed for by the left, we got just as hard-hit, but from the right, because we added some things in response to earlier criticism, but we did it in a historically accurate way.
“But look, the game is apolitical. It really doesn’t try to send a message in that kind of ideological direction. Still, I did want to respond a bit to past criticism. So we added some elements that they claimed were totally normal, and we put them in—just as part of the world—but in a way they might realistically have appeared. And I suspected that the people demanding that stuff wouldn’t actually like it.”
“And the result? The other side hated it even more. So now, to a certain group of people, we’re suddenly considered the bad guys. And I don’t want anything to do with either side. I actually realized I’m a centrist. So it’s created this totally bizarre situation where the group that hated us last time now supports us—just because they hate the other group even more. And most people are just tired of this whole culture war thing. Honestly, I think it might’ve even helped us a bit, because this hate from the anti-woke crowd kind of softened the hate from the other side. But either way, it’s just… dumb. Completely dumb.
“And actually, that wasn’t the intention at all. For me, it’s just a story from the Middle Ages, as it could have happened, I just wanted to portray the Middle Ages as I studied it, as it interested me, how it looked when I studied it, that’s how I wanted to portray it. I definitely don’t want to give any statements about today’s politics or what people think today and how they see things. It just isn’t that. And if someone sees it that way, it says more about them than about me, as I’d say.”
Following an audience clarification from his hosts that this latest round of backlash was an “ultra-conservative” one coming from the “fundamental Christian right”, Vávra asserted, “I’ve written a few times in the past, that I was actually a bit afraid that when the pendulum swings from the extreme left to the extreme right, it’s not going to be pretty. And now I didn’t expect that I would be one of the first victims of this, and it’s really not pretty.”
“Those people are just as extreme, if I may put it politely,” he described of this particular sect of his critics. “And someone correctly pointed out to me, these are not different people, they’re the same people, just swinging with the pendulum to the other side, like, it’s just completely different now. And now it’s funny how they started yelling at me yesterday again that we don’t have accessible churches, so I’m a Jew and a Satanist, and that’s why I’m trampling on Christians, saying it’s a Christian game. I say, ‘I made this game, I’m not a Christian, so it’s not a Christian game. There’s Christianity in it, because that’s how it was back then. I’m depicting it as it was. I’m not trying to put any of my religious visions into it, but it’s just not a Christian game, it’s just a game from the Middle Ages, and back then, there was Christianity.’ And when I asked one critic when they last opened a Bible – nothing. Silence. Probably a Christian like my pet fish is Christian.”
As is sadly not unusual in this age of monetization, though Vávra still had more to say, Jirsa and Půr locked the conclusion to their conversation behind the paywall of the official Insider Podcast Patreon account, the relevant portion was eventually translated by a supposed Czech citizen and later shared (alongside an excerpt of the original audio) to the /r/KotakuInAction Reddit community
Therein, asked by his hosts if any of the game’s various producers ever those to “interfere with the [game’s] development in any way,” especially given “this age of culture wars”, Vávra clarified, “No, we were rather careful.”
“They were interested in what we were doing and were informed, but they liked it and didn’t tell us what to add or remove,” he recalled. “Perhaps it was also like that because we self-censored, of course you self-censor, there are things you think really hard about, how you portray them, because in this age of oversensitive people….”
Asked if he could provide “any examples” of this self-censorship, the director stated, “We verified everything with a ton of different consultants to make sure that no one will complain that we portray anyone differently than it should be.”
“For every religion, for every minority, for every group of people, we had consultants we sent our script to, and we asked them whether we have something wrong in the script,” Vávra noted. ” And the things they said to us were cool, in the end the game is better thanks to that as they told us what to remove”.
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