Warhorse Studios and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II at GDS Prague 2024!

Kingdom Come 2 has a completely redesigned user interface that took us several years to develop, is almost entirely in 3D, and is so complex that it took as long to develop as a small game. Let's take a look at how it went from first design to final implementation.

When designing a large open-world RPG, you face the challenge of creating inherently complex systems in a way that doesn’t overwhelm or intimidate players. Behind straightforward mechanics — such as an NPC kicking the player out of their room — lies a fascinating web of interconnected elements. Let’s take a look at how we approached these aspects in Kingdom Come 2.

KCD II contains over 250 thousand lines of voice overs, totaling over 240 hour of recording. There were 2.6 million words of translate. In order to manage this extraordinary volume of text and audio, we had to develop robust pipelines and our own tools. This talk will start with the data model we use in our dialogue system, branch into description of translation and recording pipeline and showcase the tools that we use.

A game-side music logic module in the game code was implemented to receive and process and respond to the game’s real-time input. The Sequence Music Engine middleware was used to schedule the individual scenes and their transitions. Sibelius has been equipped with custom macros to enable the scoring of non-linear music. Custom macros have been written also for REAPER, to enable the transfer of timing data from Sibelius, as well as the recording the non-linear music in near-real-time.

Storytelling in RPGs is far more complex than just plot and writing. This talk explores the surprising number of elements that shape a narrative in games and how these unseen factors are key to creating an immersive player experience.

The lesson will show the path we took from KCD to KCD2 regarding CI (continuous integration) and the tools connected to it, challenges we needed to overcome including the CryEngine-specific struggles connected to it, how we overcame challenges and give some tips what needs to be considered when developing such a robust system. We will talk about how our build pipeline works and explain the technologies used, such as Teamcity, ansible, cloud services, and our custom tools built on top of it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 features a vast simulated open world, where nearly 2400 persistent NPCs follow their daily schedules at all times. Since the game aims to be realistic and historical, NPC daycycles can be quite complex. This not only challenges the game's performance but also requires a nontrivial amount of manual labor to place all these NPCs in the game. Furthermore, many NPCs are featured in various quests, which interact with their daycycles. Let's have a look on how we have dealt with these issues in Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

A few lessons that we at Warhorse Studios have learned from making the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance and then applied to making the sequel, mostly from the technical and organisational perspective.