How Kingdom Come: Deliverance II became a beacon of Czech culture
1.23.2025
By Phil Iwaniuk, Contributor
Having the institution that runs a national currency sliding into your DMs is a pretty good indication that your game has some support from your home country. But for Prague-based Warhorse Studios, creators of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series, the alliance between state and studio runs much deeper than a limited edition Koruna. The upcoming Kingdom Come: Deliverance II means much more to Czechia.
Warhorse isn’t unique for being a Czech studio. Operation Flashpoint developer Bohemia Interactive is just down the road, Wargaming.net has a Czech studio to complement its Nicosia headquarters, and smaller indie creators like Samorost developer Amanita Design have also found a way to reach a global audience from the country.
The success of the first game certainly helped to distinguish it among its compatriots, selling over six million copies globally as of 2024. But its significance to the country’s institutions goes deeper: It wasn’t just a game made in the country, but a game about the country.
KCD I and II are set in Bohemia, the lands that became modern day Czechia, and its creators’ dedication to adding period-authentic detail wherever possible means that the series has taken on the significance of an interactive historical record, as well as a major export and a driver of tourism. The day it was released, national TV news ran stories about it. “Imagine if the BBC talked about the next English game in the evening news,” says Stolz-Zwilling.

“Because this is what happened here. On release day, we were on the public broadcaster’s [Česká Televize] evening news—‘There's this big thing going on.’ And why do they care? It's because of the topic we are trying to cover, which is Czech history, medieval history, European history."
While some corners of the media may have still held onto old, ugly stereotypes about video games being only violent first-person shooters, here was a game that shattered those notions among non-gamers. There's blood, yes, and no shortage of weapon-flailing. But Kingdom Come: Deliverance makes historical accuracy its foundation.
And thanks to help from everybody from historians and the Czech Mint to the mayor of a UNESCO heritage town, Warhorse aimed for an even more rigorous recreation of 15th-century Bohemia this time. The trick, of course, is to turn all that historical research and accuracy into fun.
The first place the player sees it all pay off is in the scale of KCD II’s major city. A few miles northwest of Warhorse’s studio headquarters in Prague is Kutná Hora, once home to the royal seat and the national mint, now a remarkably well-preserved medieval settlement whose fairytale architecture gives the visitor a sense of having slipped back a few centuries on entry. It was a site of such significance in 15th-century Bohemia and contains such a unique insight into life at that time that it’s no surprise that Warhorse has painstakingly recreated it, as close to meter by meter as is possible, in KCD II. It’s a level of historical accuracy only made possible by the cooperation of the town itself.
“When Kutná Hora figured out that we will do KCD II here,” says Stolz-Zwilling, “they opened all gates for us. They invited us everywhere. They wanted to take part in it.”

It’s a mutually beneficial deal. Warhorse gains information that fuels its mission for unprecedented accuracy, and the region gains an increased interest from tourists, a phenomenon that began with the first game, says Stolz-Zwilling. “It attracts a lot of people: Americans, Germans, everyone. They’ve started to travel to the Czech Republic and check out the places.
“KCD I is set in a really rural place and most of the areas are destroyed nowadays. So when people come there, they wonder where the castles are. But still the tourism [board] there noted a huge spike in visitors and now, of course, they [expect] that Kutná Hora will have the same kind of boom.”
Known in-game as Kuttenberg, this virtual preservation project addresses one of the prevalent complaints about its predecessor—that there was no true metropolis among all the similarly sized towns on the world map. By the standards of the 1400s, Kuttenberg is a vast and diverse city, considerably bigger than any of the hamlets Henry visited in the first game.
The town was founded after silver deposits were discovered nearby. Initially, the nearby Sedlec Abbey used that silver for its own economic gain, but as word of its plentiful silver spread, Kutná Hora attracted settlers from disparate regions. By 1300, King Wenceslaus II issued a new royal mining code there specifying exactly who could operate the mines and to what end. Shortly after, Kutná Hora was established as the seat of the central mint of the Czech lands, where Prague groschen were minted. That commemorative coin offer makes a lot of sense in this light.
As Kutná Hora prospered, its population became bigger and more cosmopolitan. Germans and Italians made their home there, drawn in by mining jobs and (in the latter’s case) purposefully coaxed from their native country since Renaissance-era Italy was considered to be at the forefront of many cultural, financial, and scientific frontiers. The city’s Italian Court, now a museum, was named after this influx of learned Mediterraneans.
That’s important for KCD II. Because if we learned nothing else from the last decade of open-world game design, we know square mileage isn’t enough. We all know we can go and visit the landmark far off on the horizon by now, and it’s become rote. Developers have to fill that space with meaning and intrigue. So a city full of citizens from different backgrounds gives Warhorse many more stories to tell.

Stories like the German master swordsman installed in Kuttenberg at King Wenceslaus II’s decree, only to find himself turfed out by the local council, who backed a rival challenger to the throne. Henry finds this unfortunate Teutonic tutor outside one of Kuttenberg’s taverns, and as typical for KCD, he has the option of helping him or ignoring the situation and leaving him to his fate.
Of course, once the player gets into the meat of KCD II’s quests, the game must take liberties. It’s not simply a fusty digital museum where only events documented in the history books can take place. Again, the research has to ultimately lead to fun, and to that end Warhorse has a rule: don’t change history, fill in the blanks instead.
“The historical elements,” Stolz-Zwilling explains, “you cannot change. Those have to happen the way they happened. You can explain how they happen, and you can see them through your own eyes.
“But the side quests are the ones where we try to deal with everyday problems in the Middle Ages. What people [at the time] really dealt with.”
That creative license allows the team to build storylines about feuding blacksmiths, tavern quarrels, and other medieval minutiae that Warhorse has such a knack for depicting.
”We’re not saying that this is an educational game,” says Stolz-Zwilling. “Absolutely not. This is not the focus of it. But we are trying to tell a story that happened in a fun, interesting way, [and] show how the world what happened here in central Bohemia, and pretty much what happened here affected the whole of Europe.”
Nevertheless, it’s become an important touchpoint for several Czech institutions. The Czech ambassador in Mongolia has bought himself a PS4 to play KCD on and show to his political friends. The Czech Center, an organization run by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, plans to install KCD exhibitions in its branches from Berlin to Tokyo.
“Like, this is really weird, if you think about it,” Stolz-Zwilling reflects. “It's still a video game, right?” But in its home country, KCD II is already a cultural phenomenon.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II will release on the Epic Games Store on February 4.