Playtesters Said Remove the Friction. Warhorse Said No.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Jirsa laid out the philosophy that separates Warhorse from most of the RPG space. "For example, if you do playtesting, they especially measure these points of friction," he said. "They say, 'Okay, this is the friction point. People are getting confused, or a little angry, and this percentage of people said they would stop playing the game at this moment.'" The standard response, he explained, is to eliminate those friction points entirely. "We don't work like that. We feel if you overcome the friction, or the friction is intentionally there, then the friction helps you. Because you overcome the friction, you feel better about yourself, you feel that you've actually overcome some actual problem or difficulty."

I think this is one of the most honest things a designer has said publicly in a while, and I respect it even when I disagree with specific implementations. There's a real difference between friction that teaches you something and friction that wastes your time, and KCD2 doesn't always land on the right side of that line. But the philosophy itself is sound, and it's the reason the game feels so distinct in a genre increasingly obsessed with accessibility sliders and quest markers that do the thinking for you.

The Accidental Designer

What makes Jirsa's conviction more interesting is his background. He didn't come from game development at all. He studied economics and business administration at university and joined Warhorse in 2014 on something close to a whim, during the studio's desperate pre-Kickstarter days. "When I saw the information that Warhorse was looking for somebody, I immediately said 'Well, I have time,'" he told PC Gamer. He scrolled through open positions, ruled out engine programmer and character artist, and landed on a generic "Designer" listing. "I said, 'Well, I can try.'"

Warhorse at that point was months away from running out of money. The Kickstarter for the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance was, by Jirsa's account, somewhere around "plan D, or F, or G." Publishers had repeatedly turned the studio down. Nobody was eager to fund a deliberately obtuse RPG where your character had to literally learn to read. The Kickstarter's initial goal of £300,000 eventually pulled in £1.1 million, which still wasn't enough to make the game but was enough to prove to larger investors that the audience existed.

Twelve years later, Jirsa is running creative direction on one of the most acclaimed RPGs of the past decade, and the studio's design ethos hasn't softened. If anything, the success of KCD2 has validated the approach. Jirsa said the friction-first philosophy is likely to carry forward into whatever Warhorse builds next, whether that's the rumored Lord of the Rings RPG, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 3, or something new.

There's something refreshing about a studio that gets the data showing players are frustrated and responds not by sanding down the edges but by asking whether that frustration is doing useful work. Most developers would never survive that pitch in a boardroom. Warhorse can make it because KCD2 proved the audience for it is real, and it's large. The game sold well, reviewed well, and built a passionate community precisely because it refused to play it safe. Jirsa didn't plan to end up here, and Warhorse didn't plan to become the studio synonymous with punishing medieval realism. But the fact that neither of them compromised when the data told them to is exactly why both are in the position they're in now.