Kingdom Come: Deliverance II - Exploring Bohemia
Exploring Bohemia: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
The world of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II provides two very different, yet equally authentic visions of 15th century Bohemia.
In Trosky you have a playground where the rich and powerful play political games with the population’s fortunes. Elsewhere, the natural beauty of the Bohemian Paradise provides a backdrop for the simpler - yet no less vital - struggles of village life.
In our own medieval history, there were two key factors that would have determined how these sorts of settlements and cities evolved over time. The first is obvious enough: wherever there were rich food supplies or natural resources to exploit, village life - followed by towns and cities - would inevitably have sprung up. The second is a little more surprising.
“Societies formed near any kind of monastery, because they were always rich, even if the surrounding area wasn’t the best!” explains Ondřej Bittner, senior game designer at Warhorse Studios. "The monasteries were able to hire many people from all around the local area and start new branches of industry.
“They were the first ones to have vineyards, for example, or the first to have fishponds. In the beginning these industries weren’t started by the lords of the land, they were started in the monasteries because they had the money!”
From this broad starting point, the developers and historians at Warhorse then look to historical records and cultural artefacts to help recreate a society that feels authentic to its time, yet remains immersive as a game world that’s fit to accommodate a crafted narrative adventure.
This is not always a simple process, however. Joanna Nowak, historical consultant at Warhorse, talks of the detective work that lies behind some of the detail.
“Written or visual sources mostly tell us about the rich, or they just focus on the most significant events from history,” she says. “They don’t really describe everyday life in the village, and what people were talking about.
“They were also talking with a mixture of different languages in different regions, but we do have oral history in the form of folk songs. Even if they were written in the 19th century, they are proof of history being told through the generations.
“Our biggest helpers are often the nuances,” Nowak continues. “Even a flower that’s just an ornament in a painting helps us [understand the world]. The villagers who appear in the background are sometimes a little bit of a caricature, but they still provide us with important information.
“And although I’ve studied history, I try to think like an engineer, or a scientist. If I see something repeated a hundred times, there’s a big probability that it really happened.”
Bittner explains that we can gain further indirect insight by looking at the social rules that would have provided crucial structure for even this simpler side of Bohemian life.
“Their social life is more complicated [to recreate] but we can look at town laws, for example. If there’s a town law for something, you can be pretty sure it’s happening!
“When I studied data mining I worked on historical data, where statistics can also tell you a huge amount. If you analyse what people were throwing out, for example, you get a really good grasp of their life.
“You understand that pottery was a little bit like our plastic. You could break things, throw them out and very cheaply buy a new one! There were also the little pilgrimage pins that they made in their hundreds of thousands. These were then sold at the pilgrimage sites as a mass market thing.
“And of course we have bones too. We can read so much from the teeth of people, like what they’ve been eating and so on.”
In other words, it takes a careful combination of historical fact, indirect detective work and imaginative world-building to bring Bohemia to life! Brought together it all makes for a deeply immersive vision of the past you’ll be able to explore for yourself when Kingdom Come: Deliverance II launches on 11th February 2025.
