Although the crowdfunded game already has over one million sales, it did not launch in the best possible state.

Martin Klíma, Kingdom Come: Deliverance‘s executive producer answered a few community questions on their forums, where he admitted that the medieval RPG is between the AAA and indie approaches. (One similar example would be Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.)

„I don’t see KCD as competing with the likes of Assassin’s Creed or Shadow of War. We simply don’t have resources to create a game like that. I don’t view us as an indie game either, though. The trend I see in ‘real’ AAA games, like the ones I mentioned above, is toward making games more and more forgiving, better suited to the most casual and absent-minded players; they are games that in effect are ‘playing themselves’. So, you have all those different markers, prompts and handy hints that you never have to think about what to do next.

This is not entirely wrong. I can see why the companies that make these games take this approach and obviously there is a demand for it, as evidenced by the sales of these games. On the other hand, we see a trend among indie games that are both more original and less forgiving, but because of limited budgets they have to go for a format that is somewhat simpler to develop for, e.g., many of them are 2D platformers or top-down scrollers.

KCD is an attempt at bridging the two: it is an indie game at heart – more hardcore, more demanding, more fierce – but with the visuals and production values of AAA game. I freely admit though that I wish we had more time to polish the game before the release, that’s what AAA game deserves,” Klíma wrote. The Hungarian saying is right once again: little money, little football.

It looks like the publisher, Deep Silver might have rushed Warhorse to finish up the game development. (No matter, they got struck by karma: a day after the game released, THQ Nordic bought the publisher altogether…)

Source: Kingdom Come forums