Warhorse Designer Credits a 2018 Boots Article for Building KCD2's NPC Theft Mechanic

Warhorse Studios' lead designer, Prokop Jirsa, has credited a 2018 PC Gamer article with inspiring the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 system that has NPCs steal items from the player. Jirsa, now one of two creative directors at the studio, told Joshua Wolens that a misreading of the original game by writer Chris Livingston shaped a deliberate design choice in the sequel.

The PC Gamer angle predates all of that. Livingston's February 2018 feature, titled Kingdom Come Deliverance, stole my boots, and I'm on a violent mission to get them back. It opened with Henry removing his muddy boots before bed on a character's instruction. He woke to find them gone from his inventory and not in the room, and assumed an NPC had taken them. Jirsa told PC Gamer the developers had built no such mechanic into the first game — the boots had simply despawned.

"We knew that our systems-driven world works because one of you guys thought that somebody has stolen Henry's shoes while he was in Talmberg. And we had no system like that in there. The boots just despawned. But he was really searching around the castle, 'Who actually stole the boots?' And he was looking at the clothing of the NPCs."

— Prokop Jirsa

I think the misread is the more telling part of the story, because Livingston searched the castle and checked NPC clothing on the assumption that the simulation already handled it. Warhorse built KCD2's theft system around exactly that reflex.

Jirsa said the layered systems in the original were aimed at exactly this reaction. He pointed to player reports of stumbling across confrontations between rival factions and assuming a designer had scripted the moment, when the encounters had emerged from the simulation. Those stories, he said, convinced the studio that the time spent building and debugging the systems was worth the cost.

Livingston's article documents a long chain of consequences from the assumed theft. He killed a bandit hoping for boots and found "footwraps and soles." He choked a man unconscious at his dinner table, took his boots, returned to town, and was caught looting a dead woman by a guard who had appeared from nowhere. He paid the guard off, was searched, and lost both boots. He later chased a bread thief, intervened in the dispute with a baker, choked the baker for his damaged boots, then choked a guard for a fresh pair before being caught a second time and stripped of both. He left town barefoot, found a murdered nun on the road, was accused by a witness of the killing, and killed the witness too.

The sequel turns that improvisation into a rule. In KCD2, NPCs will steal Henry's shoes and cap if he passes out drunk, and they will then wear the stolen clothing themselves. Jirsa said he pushed for the system specifically because of Livingston's article.

"I still remember that PC Gamer article, and for that reason specifically I pushed for KCD 2 that we actually had that system. So now in KCD 2 the NPCs — if you, for example, pass out drunk — they will steal your shoes. They will steal your cap, and they will start wearing that. So that was you guys."

— Prokop Jirsa

Wolens noted in his 90 percent review of KCD2 that he was chased from a fortress after walking past the owner of a ring he had stolen earlier and absent-mindedly equipped. I see that as the cleaner expression of what Warhorse was after, a world that punishes a small input through chains the player did not script.

Jirsa's appointment as co-creative director followed the departure of Daniel Vávra from leading the studio's next project, with Vávra moving to a Kingdom Come film.

On March 27, fired translator Max H. went public after more than three and a half years at Warhorse, saying his role had been declared obsolete because the company intended to replace human translation with AI. Moderators of the Kingdom Come subreddit verified his employment before allowing the post to stay up, and Warhorse has not issued a public response. The 1.4 patch and the Legacy of the Forge DLC have since added a secret ending for players who defeat Sigismund's army, triggered if Henry of Skalitz kills enough soldiers in the camp during "The Lion's Den" quest.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's Hardcore Mode removed fast travel, the compass, and the player's position on the map, and forces players to pick permanent negative traits at character creation. Senior game designer Karel Kolmann said the mode targets immersion rather than raw difficulty alone. Traits include "Somnambulant," which causes Henry to sleepwalk to random locations, and "Bad back," which cuts carry weight.

Read also, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 cut a karma-based dream combat system during development, reported by Czech outlet CzechCrunch. The mechanic would have produced nightmarish spirit battles for cruel playthroughs and dream loot for honourable ones, applying morality directly to first-person combat in a way no RPG has shipped.