Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, slated for release February 4, occupies a very weird place in the gaming culture war right now, largely because of its director, Daniel Vávra.
Vávra has been a controversial figure since Gamergate first surfaced – he’s expressed support for Gamergate talking points, spoken out against “woke… activists”, and famously made himself this shirt. In the months leading up to KCD 2’s launch, he has largely continued to align himself with the resurgence of Gamergaters, often referred to as Gamergate 2.0, which then led many figureheads of the movement to hold it up as the biggest anti-woke game of the year.
There’s some nuance to this, of course, that the people yelling over each other on Twitter won’t tell you. He denied that Kingdom Come: Deliverance represents his personal political views, saying that “90 percent of the actual writing” was done by other writers with different perspectives. He’s insisted repeatedly that the lack of diversity the first game was criticised for was in the service of historical accuracy. He put out a lengthy statement (albeit in 2018) that said he believes Gamergate, at its heart, is about “the freedom for artists to create art, free of political influence”.
Even if he doesn’t agree with every Gamergate talking point – which may or may not be the case, there’s only so much you can glean from tweets and old statements – the fact remains that he was fine with the association and didn’t speak out against the movement. He, in essence, voted for the leopards eating faces party. Now, the leopards are eating his face.
Related
Interview: With All Eyes On Sweet Baby Inc., The Devs Are Just Getting On With Their Jobs
Grant Roberts, a former narative director at Sweet Baby Inc., tells us that the studio’s work continues, even after facing overwhelming abuse.
Why Is KCD 2 Controversial?
As we all know, Gamergaters don’t want to see diversity in games – it’s kind of their whole deal. An unsubstantiated rumour about KCD 2 being banned in Saudi Arabia over “immoral scenes” recently made the rounds on Twitter, with people claiming this was due to an “unskippable gay scene”. Separately, they were also angry about black characters in the game and “lectures” about feminism.
KCD 2’s Steam discussion board was then inundated with troll posts and hate speech, and Vávra became a target of vitriol himself – he responded to one such person calling them a “Nazi sh*thead”, and controversy soon followed.
Publisher Deep Silver rolled out a new code of conduct on the Steam forums, barring a comprehensive list of behaviour including racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and various kinds of hate speech. This made the community even angrier, because they felt that their ‘legitimate’ concern was being censored.
Vávra also put out a statement that Gamergaters considered to be vague as it didn’t explicitly deny or confirm if there was an unskippable gay scene or not. “The game is exactly what I wanted it to be… Our goal was, and still is, to show life in medieval Bohemia as it easily could have happened and to tell an interesting story… it is purely up to the player what decisions they make and… they are responsible for the consequences that correspond to the morals and social norms of the time.”
He also said in another tweet that “its rather ridiculous to see those grifters making sh*t up out of one screenshot and a poorly translated tweet”.
He later put out a long thread to address the controversy. He clarified that there are no unskippable cutscenes, the game hasn’t been banned anywhere to their knowledge, the presence of racial diversity is historically justified, and that yes, the protagonist can have a “same-sex adventure”, and since it’s an RPG, you can choose whether or not to take part.
Our Features Lead Jade King called it, by the way.
6:37
Related
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Preview – Kingdom Come, Kingdom Come Again
Hear ye, hear ye, you can pet the dog.
Gamergaters Don’t Really Care About Nuance
That last part is important – most games aren’t forcing you to play a gay character. Apart from very rare exceptions like Horizon and The Last of Us, it is, on its face, an entirely true and fair thing to say: nobody is forcing you to be gay.
Unfortunately, Vávra seems to have misunderstood what Gamergate is actually about. While some prominent faces of the movement are saying that all of this isn’t really that big a deal, the replies are full of people saying they’ve refunded the game, that Vávra hid the inclusion of the same-sex romance because he knew it would be controversial, and that he should have just not added the romance at all.
That’s because the movement isn’t about developers having freedom to add what they want to according to their personal preferences or “forced diversity”, it’s about anti-progressivism. It’s not about players being able to play the way they want, but about not giving players the option to do anything that could be considered ‘woke’.
There’s no winning when you side with leopards, because the leopards don’t have your interests at heart. They don’t care about developers – they regularly talk about how they can tank studios that do things they don’t like. They don’t care about free speech, unless it’s so they can espouse hate speech with no consequences. They care about eating faces.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is an exhilarating Action RPG, set amidst the chaos of a civil war in 15th Century Bohemia.
You are Henry of Skalitz – an ordinary man doing extraordinary things – caught in a gripping tale of revenge, betrayal, and discovery as he embarks on an epic journey, ‘from a humble blacksmith’s forge to the court of Kings’, searching for purpose in this beautiful but brutal medieval world.
From bustling city streets to lush forests, explore this open-world Medieval Europe through an unforgettable adventure filled with action, thrills, and wonder.