There have been many Kickstarters that have seemed promising in the past. The abandoned Kickstarter project CLANG was never finished because its director Neal Stephenson decided that although it was realistic, it was not very fun. What separates Kingdom Come: Deliverance from projects like that?
With Kingdom Come: Deliverance we want to do a realistic historical RPG, but we know that we are doing “just a game." So compromises are unavoidable. Actually, this is our everyday struggle – to find the right balance between Realism and fun gameplay.
HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) practitioners study medieval manuscripts and images to discover how people fought in the middle ages.
Did anyone on your team study HEMA when developing Kingdom Come’s combat system?
There are also RPG systems involved: as you level up, your strikes are faster (and those of enemies slower because you perceive them so and you read your opponents more easily). We recently released a video that explains a lot of these concepts. [Video below]
Games these days often struggle to have high graphical fidelity and satisfying gameplay, but Kingdom Come looks like it balances the beauty of Crysis with gameplay even better than Mount & Blade or Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. How did you achieve this?
Of course you always have to adjust parts, but that’s why we have a full-time historian in our team. So again it’s a question of effort and love we put into this project to create something outstanding that wasn’t seen in this way before!
Although swings may be telegraphed more than they would be in real life, Kingdom Come’s gameplay is impressive and challenging nonetheless
How important will role-playing be in Kingdom Come? We are aware that it takes place during real events, but how big of an impact will your decisions have?
In general we want every action of the player to have a proper reaction. These reactions can either have a local or even global impacts. But it’s very important to understand that you’ll not be able to change history, but you will tell your personal story inside the historical, real story. So it’s up to you how you behave, how you shape your character. Are you the negotiating type, or do you solve problems with your swords? There are many more choices you’ll need to deal with.
Although it seems like suicide in a game such as Kingdom Come, will there be an option for unarmed combat?
With each new bit of information we get on Kingdom Come, it is looking better and better. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is set for a 2016 release, and although it has left Kickstarter behind, players can still back the project now on Kingdom Come’s website. The game currently has near 50,000 backers who have raised $2.5 million. We look forward to hearing about its release date sometime in the future.
