Love KCD, but it is not a game one can easily pick back up.
And this is exactly why Vavra is in for a rude awakening.
Back in 2019 I first pirated the game, because I wasn't sure I would enjoy it. The beginning was annoying, because the mechanics are unusual and everything is poorly explained. I still soldiered on, because I like challenging video games, even if they seem clunky at first. After about 10 hours it all clicked somehow and I ended up enjoying it so much, I bought the Royal Edition on Steam. It has become one of my favorite video games. But I'm not a regular gamer.
Some of my friends also tried it, but got filtered by either lockpicking, or the combat (they never bothered to train with Bernard of course). One guy couldn't figure out how to get out of Talmberg, because the game has no big red arrows and flashing items, so he didn't know what to do. They dropped the game and never looked back, even though I was singing praises about how good it was, for months on end. Normies who tried the first game and got filtered will not be coming back.
So, Warhorse has to rely on those whom were willing to play their game for longer than a few hours, or even bothered to finish it. That's 11% of all the people who bought KCD on Steam, over the course of 7 years. KCD remained a relatievely obscure title till the announcment of KCD2. Now that the devs had more money, they could generate hype, so it caught the attention of a wider audience. They saw how Vavra was acting redpilled on X and seen his claims about how he values historycal accuracy, so people thirsting for non-woke games, rightfully assumed they could finally have an RPG without forced diversity and faggotry. This assumption was all destroyed in the past 1,5 weeks and we still have 2 weeks to go. Vavra is melting down on X, he even lashed out at some YouTubers, so finally some of them stopped coping and making excuses and started biting back. More and more people will learn about the controversy, so it is safe to say, Vavra betrayed the core audience and scared off the new Chud audience, whose primary interest in the game relied solely on the perceived lack of wokeness. I'm pretty sure the pre-orders and potential sales are affected, to what extent it remains to be seen. It is a great shame and pity, because I'd like to see complex games succeeding, as I really dislike the dumb AAA goyslop, designed to be accessible for everyone between ages 0 and 99.
