Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the latest in a growing line of RPGs that revel in friction, purposefully asking players difficult questions and throwing them curveballs both narratively and mechanically.
Senior game designer Ondřej Bittner of developer Warhorse Studios reckons the game is "quite welcoming" as hardcore games go, but defends its mechanical complexity and reckons that dense games with bite are "good for the industry and for the players" over massive but repetitive games. "I think the mechanics you're describing – a little more involved gameplay – falls around the fact that players may be finally [realizing] that it doesn't really matter how long a game is," Bittner tells GamesRadar+. "What matters is if your individual sessions are individual enough.
If a game is 150 hours and all of your sessions are the same, you're gonna get bored. A little more involved mechanics [means] more original content." It's neighboring an old topic that's seen an uptick in debate recently: are games too dang long?
Several well-known executives and designers have argued that extremely long games are out of place or outright fatiguing today.
The question becomes: are games too long, or are some long games simply running out of ideas long before the credits roll? If they had more gas in the tank, more unique experiences to bring out, that long runtime may feel justified; players may be excited to have more of this thing they love, rather than fatigued by the long familiar road ahead of them.