As early as 1986’s Dragon Quest, high fantasy and medieval settings have been one of the most popular approaches to role-playing video games. It’s a well-worn genre across all mediums, and it makes sense that for a class of games as dependent on immersion as RPGs, players would want to explore worlds that are either fantastical and impossible or so rooted in the past as to be totally unrecognizable to modern audiences. However, some developers take that idea to granular extremes, finding ways to make the experience of a medieval setting grounded and historically accurate to a remarkable degree — and easily the most popular games to do this recently are the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series.
Released back in 2018, the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a first-person action RPG that stood out from the rest specifically because of its hardline approach to realism and authenticity, although the game’s interpretation of those concepts garnered a fair share of controversy as well. As a result of the acclaim, a sequel was released last year, and now the creative director of the games, Daniel Vávra, is bringing that conception of historical fidelity to the big screen.
