In a recent interview with PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens, Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima traced the inspirations for Kingdom Come: Deliverance back to boredom with the typical RPG—kill the dark lord, romance a companion or two, and so on. Klima added that this formula is still a mite too widespread even now for his tastes, and wondered if gamers haven’t outgrown it by now.
“I play a lot of RPGs, it’s a genre I really like,” he said. “I was really and I still am bored and tired of all the RPGs when you are this chosen one, when you have this grand task of saving the universe .. The games that are these really straightforward power fantasies. It’s not that I think it’s somehow wrong in principle. There is nothing bad about a good power fantasy. It’s just, it’s so repetitive.”
He likened the typical fantasy roleplaying game to the old idler Progress Quest, a satire which lampooned EverQuest and its ilk for being time vampire-Skinner boxes. “It’s really a distillation of what the common RPG is. So I found that there must be many, many people who are really tired of this formula and who want something new and different,” he said. That formed the seedling which eventually germinated into KCD.
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But things haven’t changed much since then, in Klima’s estimation. “The games that were and sort of are being made are still the games for teenagers,” he said. “If you are 16, 17, you love playing these power fantasy games because it’s something that you need. But the audience is much older today … everybody’s going to think that I am hating on Expedition 33 right now, but that’s definitely not the case.”
As for why this sort of ‘chosen one’ story is still so prevalent, Klima reckons that publishers are primarily interested in trying things that have worked before. “They are really best at recycling the same formula over and over. When I’m talking about this, I really mean more games like games from Ubisoft, for example.
“I played the original Assassin’s Creed, and the original Far Cry, and the original Watch Dogs, and most of these games in the first iterations, and it was fun. But once you play the same game for the 10th time, it sort of becomes stale.” While Far Cry and Watch Dogs aren’t exactly RPGs, it is notable that Assassin’s Creed went through a whole era where it was doing its best Witcher 3 impression.
“Craftsmanship wise, [Ubisoft’s] games are excellent. I mean, the beautiful animations, beautiful models. They are pretty much bug-free. It’s a very polished experience,” he said. “But I can’t help but feel that this craftsmanship would be better served by creating a game that’s a little bit more innovative.” That said, he acknowledged the financial risks of experimenting with the sort of money Ubisoft throws around for all its flagship series: “I appreciate the dilemma that they have, and I don’t have any easy answers for it.”