Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev says the RPG is a "welcoming" hardcore game, and he "can never understand" how people play Elden Ring: "I'm just not good at the combat"

gamesradar.com:

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.

Bittner offers an example of what sessions may look like in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – a unique adventure erratically strung together from boot theft, bar hopping, bandit hunting, and murder mystery. "Because these are vastly different, you don't get bored," he says of the experience.

"And it doesn't really matter if it's like 100 hours or 50," he continues. "And that goes for games like Elden Ring and all that. You know, with all the secrets. Elden Ring is kind of simple mechanics,