Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer: RPG mechanics with “friction” help players feel they’ve “earned something”

Prokop Jirsa, now the new creative director of Warhorse Studios and previously the lead designer for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and the original game, never expected to rise through the ranks when he first joined the studio in 2014 with just a degree in business and economics.

He applied for the position of a “designer,” a term that was used generically in Czech back then, figuring out game design on the fly. Twelve years later, he’s one of Warhorse’s new creative directors alongside Viktor Bocan. According to Jirsa, the best way to make a great RPG like Kingdom Come: Deliverance is to make it deliberately tough for players.

In a recent interview with Czech Crunch, Jirsa explained the philosophy behind Warhorse's intentional refusal to iron out the kinks and rough edges that made Kingdom Come: Deliverance the medieval simulation and narrative epic for which it is renowned. 

He broke down the thought process behind Warhorse’s game design and said (translated), “The usual answer is, ‘OK, let’s get rid of the friction.’ We don’t operate that way here. We feel that if you overcome the friction, or the friction is intentionally there, then the friction helps you!

He continued, “Because you overcome the friction, you feel better about yourself; you feel that you’ve overcome some actual problem or difficulty.”

In a separate discussion, he doubled down on the same ethos and stated, “Friction makes you feel like you earned something. Especially with the second game, you start with nothing. It feels hard. That’s very intentional.”

Prokop Jirsa’s views do make sense, as in KCD2 you’re supposed to manually create a Fever Tonic to cure Captain Thomas and save Hans from execution in the time-barred quest “Whom the Bell Tolls.” During the first section of the very same quest, you’re also required to craft a horseshoe step by step as part of the game’s blacksmithing system.

This design philosophy was first introduced into Kingdom Come: Deliverance during the early days of its development. Warhorse was a tiny, cash-strapped studio betting on a Kickstarter campaign to create a simulation RPG set in 15th-century medieval Bohemia.

Jirsa, as lead designer, helped shape the campaign instead of designing quests. While the game was buggy and polarising when it shipped in 2018, it amassed a cult-like following for its complex mechanics, systems, and its unwillingness to compromise on realism.