Warhorse, the developer of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, has an extremely loyal and passionate player base whose crashed due to game snub at The Game Awards 2025 it was much louder than developer's own public reactionand according to communications director Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, that's really all you need to succeed anyway.
“I don’t think you need tens of millions of players to move forward or get better or be successful,” Stolz-Zwilling told GamesRadar+. “What you need is a group of really interested people who are your fans and biggest critics, in the most positive and negative ways.”
As someone who made it through the first Kingdom Come but gave up somewhere in the middle, I found that almost all of my disappointments were rectified in the sequel, which is by far my favorite RPG of 2025. In my opinion, this just shows how seriously Warhorse takes feedback from its community. This is also almost certainly the reason that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 succeeded break into the mainstream in a way, the first game never did that.
In the same conversation, lead designer Prokop Yirsa suggested that the sequel was more successful than the first game simply because of the refinement, and not because any major compromises were made.
“I truly believe there is great potential for original ideas that, if given a chance to hone, could become mainstream,” he said. “The same can be said about Death Stranding! It's a package delivery game and it's a very successful game for the masses.”
Indeed, what impresses me most about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is how it has played out so far. feels as a niche, hardcore historical period RPG that isn't a true sequel to the brutal first game, but which to me feels infinitely more accessible. My point is that in the sequel you can still die very easily by eating a bad apple in the wrong place at the wrong time, but for some reason it's not as frustrating as it was in the first game. Really, don't ask me why.
The developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 wanted negative feedback during playtests after deciding that players should initially “feel extremely weak”: “The confirmation of gaining power then feels earned.”
