Since its announcement in April, Warhorse Studios has been revealing more and more about the game, and now the dynamic NPCs and storytelling that comes with side quests have been revealed.

Martin Ziegler, one of Warhorse’s developers, spoke on the Epic Games Store blog (well, you wouldn’t have guessed they’d expand that much), where he explained that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 will feature dynamic NPC routines, so the actions of non-playable characters will sometimes change for us, and sometimes not, depending on certain events: “If you follow them around, you will see that they will behave as you would expect a real person of the time to behave: having breakfast with others, going to their respective jobs, maybe shopping a bit, relaxing in a pub or on a walk in the evening, maybe interrupting their agenda if they unexpectedly see a street fight, meet a friend walking by, or see a vagrant being publicly punished at the gallows in the town square. They will change this routine if there has been recent violence or theft in the area – perhaps staying home instead of going out for a beer, perhaps carrying a weapon, or calling for increased patrols in the area. And all of this happens all the time all over the world, whether you are there to see it or not,” Ziegler said.

Players will have a lot of freedom in the side quests (the main storyline is more linear) because Henry, our protagonist, is not a noble, so he doesn’t have as much influence in the squabbles between the kings: “I really like our approach to quest design, especially in our side quests, how we’re trying to give a lot of freedom for different players to approach things in their own way and for the game to be able to respond to that. I like how the emergent storytelling that comes out of that complements the more linear and directed narrative of the main quest line. The politics and the violent conflict in our particular time period are really at the core of the main story. They play out through your particular story…you’ll also see them all around you as you explore the world. There are bandits in the wilderness, foreign mercenaries brought in by an invasion, and the locals react to all of that.

One of the challenges was to have your character, Henry, play an important role in these events (so that you feel like you have an impact on the story), but at the same time be true to the reality that Henry is just the son of a village blacksmith who, in the social realities of the time, would have very limited ability to influence anything. In the end, I think we figured out how to strike that balance and get the best of both worlds,” Ziegler added.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 does not yet have a release date. It’s in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC.

Source: WCCFTech