Memory Card #004
Kingdom Come On, Man
Kingdom Come II: Deliverance came out on PC and consoles. It’s a medieval RPG developed by Warhorse Studios and is doing pretty well for itself. Look it up and you’ll see the million sales on Steam, the glowing reviews and the robust guides economy helping players make their way through it. You might also see regressive types getting in a huff about the game’s inclusion of an optional gay relationship and one whole black person under the pretence that it’s “inaccurate”. What you won’t see enough of is talk about the game’s director.
Daniel Vávra is the Czech co-founder of Warhorse Studios as well as the director and lead writer of both KCD games. He grew up in communist Prague, enjoys historical re-enactments and posts on Twitter like nobody’s business. He also goes to shooting ranges, invests in BitCoin and prints his own t-shirts from time to time.
Vávra is also the co-founder and chairman of the Society for the Defense of Freedom of Expression (Společnost pro obranu svobody projevu). The society works with many legal and political representatives but its key members are Vávra, the “Eurosceptic” Gabriela Sedláčková, analyst Natalie Vachat and other co-founder Vlastimil Veselý. They speak out against issues like the criminalisation of hate speech in the EU and wrote the Czech subtitles for Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he was removing fact-checking from Facebook. You can support them by buying Cancel Culture and 1984 t-shirts on their site. I think it’s fair to call them a single issue party.
Outside of this group Vávra has been very outspoken about his support of the harassment campaign GamerGate as far back as 2014. Speaking with TechRaptor (accessed through the Wayback Machine) about his beliefs, he said :
“I grew up during communism, when comics [sic] books were prohibited as capitalist decadent propaganda, western movies were censored, any book that could be in conflict with socialist ideology was prohibited and you went to jail for saying what you think. So I am allergic to any kind of censorship in the name of any ideology. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
When asked about Gamergate as a movement, he spoke of the “witch hunt” he felt subjected to by journalists regarding the representation of women in KCD, in particular the inclusion of a playable female character as a £600,000 stretch goal in the crowdfunding campaign (later followed up on with the “A Woman’s Lot” expansion) :
“If women in your game look good, you are sexist, if they look bad, you are sexist, if you can fight with them, you are misogynistic, if you can’t fight with them, you are using them as objects, if you don’t have any women, because there is no correct way how to have them, you are misogynistic.”
Vávra is missing the point of the criticism. There is no “correct way” to depict an entire gender of the population, but there are plenty of ways to portray them as lesser. In his review of the game Polygon’s Charlie Hall observed that :
“Women seem to have only three functions. They either perform as two-dimensional sex objects, fetch water from the river, or do needlepoint.”
Edwin Evans-Thrilwell at Rock Paper Shotgun echoed this sentiment in his review, noting that “female characters typically fall into the categories of maidenly love interest, prostitute or surrogate mother” before poking at the how the game compromises on its pledge of historical accuracy to bestow ability buffs “like “Alpha Male”, which confers a +2 charisma boost when you visit the brothel.”
Speaking with Stephen Totillo at Kotaku in 2015, those who questioned how historically accurate the game was regarding racial representation came up. Vávra was defensive, saying :
“Our game isn’t even out yet, but these people already know that it’s gonna be racist, because we said we will not have people of colour in 15th century Bohemia. [...] We need to cover all the problems of all the people in the world in that one game, otherwise we are very bad people. And that is A – impossible, B – Insane, C – bullshit.”
Outside of his own team, some historians are inclined to agree with Vávra. When reached out to by Gamespot for a video on Accuracy vs. Authenticity in Video Games, historian David D’Avray said :
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the existence of any people of colour in late medieval Bohemia was impossible, but we would be talking about a statistically minute proportion of the population.”
In her review of the game IGN’s Leana Hafer criticsied how the game tended “to fall back on some old-fashioned ideas of medieval historiography in a couple of places”. She highlighted how the nomadic Cumans are treated as either “faceless token foreigners” or “Stormtrooper-esque mooks” with the world’s treatment of them unchallenged by the game. “It comes across as trying to paint the shades of complexity [...] in this era as purely black and white.”
For his review, Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese spoke with a historian who outlined the possibilities of people of colour passing through the region during KCD’s time frame :
"We know of African kings in Constantinople on pilgrimage to Spain; we know of black Moors in Spain; we know of extensive travel of Jews from the courts of Cordoba and Damascus; we also know of black people in large cities in Germany," the historian, Sean Miller, tells me. Czech cities Olomouc and Prague were on the famous Silk Road which facilitated the trade of goods all over the world. If you plot a line between them, it runs directly through the area recreated in Kingdom Come. "You just can't know nobody got sick and stayed a longer time," he says. "What if a group of black Africans came through and stayed at an inn and someone got pregnant? Even one night is enough for a pregnancy."
A lot of the artwork compiled by this Tumblr blog supports the idea that non-white people were known of and immortalised at the time. History is famously written by the winners and even when the existing literature points to one narrative, it’s important to remember that reality is not so neat.
There’s a lot more he’s said online on social media, in talks, and in interviews that I could pick apart but I’m not sure there’s too much to be gained after ten years of people doing the same. Vávra is steadfast in his beliefs about what “they” say, acts on what he believes in and doesn’t tolerate Nazis or grifters (or critics). That he can’t see how thin the line is between the people decrying KCD2 for “inserting woke DEI” and himself is unfortunate but ultimately, I think he needs to get offline more.
I started working on this article after seeing Polygon’s launch coverage of the game. They didn’t get a review code in advance like most outlets did, essential for release day reviews and taking part in the guides economy a lot of sites rely on these days. At release, they covered the one million sales, as you’d expect from any games news outlet, but the next day their UK Games Editor put out an article that perplexed me.
The first installment of their “GOTY Watch” for 2025, the article collates praise for KCD2, dubbing it “a solid contender”. Apart from a brief allusion to Vávra being “politically controversial” the article is pretty uncritical of the context surrounding the game, talking more about the Metacritic scores than anything else. I mentioned how Polygon was at a disadvantage thanks to the delayed review code and the article comes across as an attempt to keep the site in the conversation while they work on their review, although they aren’t alone in putting out articles like this. I’ve reached out to Polygon for clarification on this but have not heard back at the time of publishing.
I was also inspired to write this after seeing people in an online games community I’m part of regret buying the game after learning about Vávra’s political leanings, time and time again. Outside of a few places covering him baiting controversy and the irony of him now fighting cranks and a few more briefly mentioning his controversial nature like in the Polygon article there hasn’t been much coverage, especially compared to the amount in the run-up to the original’s release. He hasn’t been less vocal over the years, moreso than ever if you count his Instagram presence, but sites seem less keen to shine a light on him. Whether that’s a reluctance to give him a platform, a desire to separate the art from the artist or wanting to stay in Warhorse’s good graces, the result is that a lot of people aren’t making as informed purchases as they might have been with the first game.
That isn’t to say there hasn’t been any pushback. Despite how much talk there has been over the single black man in KCD2, reviews like Richard Wakeling’s for Gamespot highlight how lacking the “historical representation” still is, especially in Kuttenberg :
“While there is a character hailing from Mali, Kuttenberg is also conspicuous for its scarcity of people of color, despite being a major trading city. You would expect a small population of merchants from places like the Middle East and North Africa to exist within its market stalls, so they're notable for their absence.”
It’s important to remember that whatever your feelings are about Vávra, he is only one part of Warhorse Studios, albeit an influential part. As he said himself about the first game at Reboot Develop :
"I wrote ten per cent of the game. Six other people wrote it with me[...] there are more people with the opposite political views to what I have in the same office.”
"They wrote the game, like 90 per cent of it - yeah, I wrote the heart of the main story, but 90 per cent of the actual writing is done by someone else. So even if I wanted, it would be quite tough to force all those people to do something against their will. It doesn't work like that. We have an open, flat-like structure to company so anybody can tell me to fuck off, basically."
The credits for KCD2 stretch on for 13 minutes, packed with hundreds of contributors to Henry’s story. Their YouTube channel has developer livestreams highlighting the diverse skillsets of the team and blog posts inviting the team to speak to their audience.
The team is tired of being tied to the push and pull of politics too. Speaking with PCGamer, Warhorse’s Global PR Manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling focused on the community backlash, saying :
“It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool videogame.”
I reached out to Tobias in the hopes of getting a comment or even an interview for this article in relation to Vávra and he responded :
“Thanks for reaching out, but we said everything and don’t want to return to this topic any further.”
In light of everything I’ve seen researching this article, I completely understand. How much should one man overshadow an entire team?
I want to make it clear that I’m not interested in doing a hit piece or character assassination of Vávra, just pointing out what I’ve seen many people wish they’d known before buying the game in one handy place. While we’re here, I’d like to highlight how personable he seems when actually speaking to people instead of at them and his interest in highlighting the work of the studios’ historians as the public face of the company. Speaking to BBC Newsbeat as part of the press junket, lead actors Tom MacKay (Henry) and Luke Dale (Hans) said of him :
“He’s absolutely the kind of head and heart behind this whole machine and behind these characters. And he’s a total pleasure to work with. He’s a brilliant director. [...] We’ve spent hundreds of hours together in the motion capture studio and I think working with someone who has that kind of passion and belief and clarity of what it is they’re trying to make is actually quite unusual in creative industries so in that respect it’s been a complete pleasure.” (Tom)
“He’s a complete genius [...] and really good at helping us [distill notes on a scene from multiple people] because, as Tom said, it’s his brainchild and he knows exactly what he wants every time.” (Luke)
And as controversy bubbled over KCD2 he hasn’t hesitated to leap to the game and the team's defense. In the past few weeks it’s been clear that he has no patience for those trying to spread conspiracies about the game and has been quick to quash rumours about more mundane things like unskippable cutscenes or player agency. (You can access that thread here.)
Writer. Father. Activist. Gamergater. Self-aware. Ignorant. No one person is any single thing and I hope you’re able to consider everything I’ve highlighted and discussed here and decide for yourself if you want to support the work and politics of Daniel Vávra and the rest of Warhorse Studios. Call things out when you see them, listen to criticism when you get it and don’t be afraid of a little research.
Hope You Like (Game) Jammin’ Too
I love a good gimmick. Whether it’s the 3DS AR camera, the PS4 touchpad or the Guitar Hero…guitar, games can be at their most interesting when making the most out of unusual hardware. I’m not alone in this as my local Game Development Society held a “GizmoJam” on the 8th-9th of February. I went along for the last leg to talk with the developers and try out the games.
(Disclaimer : I know, and in some cases live with, many of the people spoken to and spoken about in this article.)
Teams were assigned a gizmo to build a game around over two seven-hour sessions. By the end of the weekend there were two games in the world that weren’t there before.
First let’s look at the game developed using the DualShock 4’s gyroscope. You tilt the balls littering your flooded ship to dodge a Kraken’s tentacles as they crash down and into the whirlpool that appears every few seconds in the middle of the deck. How many balls can you rescue in the time allotted?
The original concept was to fling the balls at the Kraken in the background but it was difficult to implement within the time allotted. Now the focus was on protecting the cannonballs and resisting the water flooding the ship to do so.
Maddie, a first-year with computer science experience, focused on the programming and balance while Duncan Cummings, a fourth-year fresh off of a placement, focused on the graphics, adjusting pre-existing assets and fashioning a Kraken in Blender based on a Runescape model.
So why make a jam all about gizmos? I asked the committee, who were judging the games made at the event.
“We were thinking of ways to spice up a jam,” said Lara Cuttriss, the president of the society, “Originally we thought about putting mini events in the jam and one of those was Guitar Hero. And that brought up the idea of maybe using goofy controllers.”
“We looked around us and thought “What weird controllers do we have?” You know, unorthodox ones like the DJ Hero one, gyro steering wheel, there’s a flight stick – stuff like that.”
“I have the DJ Hero controller,” said Dan, the secretary of the society, “And I saw it on the floor, ‘cause I’ve not used it in ages and I was like “What if we made some kind of game with that?” I thought : “I have loads of weird controllers. Why not bring them in and challenge people to make games with them?” Sounds like fun, I guess.”
Now let’s look at the other contender : the raccoon game. Based around the DJ Hero turntable, you spin the world around a raccoon clinging to a turret as scientists approach it. Try to line them up so they get in the path of your shots. Earn enough experience points by killing them and get an upgrade, coloured to match the buttons on the controller.
Jay Orford-Home, the solo developer of the game, showed me a guaranteed way to win the game : spin, spin, spin the wheel while spam pumping to fire. Picking the “More bullets per shot” upgrades does slow this down as the game fires the first and then the second bullet when you pump, and won’t register another pump until it’s done with that.
One idea he was toying with was an upgrade option that places barriers around you that you could theoretically spin the approaching scientists into to destroy them. As he had lost half of his project from Saturday thanks to a Unity save error, he had to focus on getting the basics working instead.
I also spoke to the committee members about the challenges they had in setting up and managing the event. Other than Lara’s placement making it hard to balance the society and work, the standout issue was getting people to come and join in. There were eight people at the jam, excluding myself.
“Actually getting people to come into the game jam is always an issue, really,” said Dan.
“It’s fun to try and get a group together, as hard as it is with computer science students ‘cause they aren’t very social,” said Lara “But it’s nice to create that sort of group and organise stuff, have stuff going on.”
“It’s been very interesting seeing what people are working on, the ways you can use the controllers. Good fun.”
There were some issues with the controllers too. Maddie was originally assigned the dance mat controller but it would not register when connected to the PC adapter. She instead moved to work with Duncan who was already tinkering with the PS4 gyro controls.
Dan, who owned most of the “massive, old and clunky” controllers used in the jam, faced the extra challenge of lugging them there and back both days in three bulging carrier bags.
One thing I was curious about was the choice of engines each team used; “Kraken” was made in Godot while “Raccoon” was made in Unity. Some games modules at the university do require students to use Unity, so it being used here isn’t unusual. Godot makes a lot of sense too as it was one of the popular engines for people to migrate to after Unity burned bridges with the “runtime fee” revision in 2023. For Duncan, it was “the first engine that clicked” and better to use than Unreal. While for Maddie, the engine she uses is a matter of if she wants to focus on the “low level” side of development with full control or the “high level”
Needing to be out of the room by 5pm, the jam wrapped up a little after 4pm so everyone could try out the games, the judges first of course. First up was “Kraken”. The highest score on this build was 9 cannonballs rescued (I got 12 on a more frictionless build). Everyone had a go and one person came back to replay!
And next was “Raccoon”. Again everyone tried their luck, with some playthroughs going surprisingly long as people locked in. No score tracking here, so we’ll never know who was the best sadly. I suspect the people who figured out the “wildly spinning the turntable” meta did the best.
Standing out in the cold February evening, the committee called a vote from everyone and “Raccoon” unanimously won. As impressive as both projects were, that was the more cohesive game, people said. What will Jay spend his £10 Amazon voucher on? Only time will tell…
Even though I only swooped in at the end for this article, I enjoyed attending the jam and watching the teams tinker. Everyone who made something now has a great portfolio piece and it was great to see people with a passion for game development come together like this. I chatted with people about ideas for games based on the Steel Battalion controller, I got to see people troubleshoot in real time and I learned that Bristol houses the most training buses in the UK (according to Reddit).
If you’re interested in game development, I’d encourage you to seek out a local game jam. And if there isn’t one going on, why not set one up? I think reigning champion Jay said it best :
“#GameJamsAre Fun”
The Week Ahead
24/2 I Just Want to be Single!! Season One (Tsundere Studio) – PC
25/2 Taiji (Matthew VanDevander) – Switch
26/2 I See Red (Whiteboard Games) – Switch
27/2 The Local (Tobey Gronow) – PC
28/2 Monster Hunter Wilds (Capcom) – PC, PS5, XBox Series S/X
1/3 Discover Old D'Hanis (Saltbox Interactive) – PC
2/3 Lou Reed’s birthday
Now Saving…
Thanks for reading! And thanks for your patience – the bulk of this newsletter was done a week ago but I wanted to wait in case I could get some quotes and make the Kingdom Come piece the best it can be.
On the horizon, Steam’s Next Fest is next week so I’ll probably dive into some demos if I have the time. I’m also in the middle (final third?) of Citizen Sleeper 2 and plan to do a comprehensive review of it when I can. When I say “comprehensive” I mean “I have the artist’s French graphic novel on my reading pile right now”, so it won’t be too soon.
If you’d like to support the work I do, consider backing me on Patreon and get my articles one day early. Follow me on Bluesky and share this newsletter with anyone you know interested in video games. See you next week!