Kingdom Come Dev Is Done With 'Power Fantasy' RPGs Built for Teenagers

Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima has gone on record saying he's "bored and tired" of RPGs built around the chosen-one power fantasy — and he thinks a lot of other players feel the same way.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Klima described the typical RPG setup — player is the chosen one, grand task, save the universe — as "repetitive" and a "distillation of what the common RPG is." He argued the genre is still largely designed for 16- and 17-year-olds who need that kind of power trip, while the actual audience has aged well past that. He was careful to note he wasn't taking a shot at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which has been dominating RPG conversation lately. His frustration is structural: major publishers, he says, are "best at recycling the same formula over and over." Ubisoft came up as a specific example — Klima praised the technical craftsmanship of its games, calling out the polished animations and clean bug counts, but said he'd rather see that same quality applied to genuinely new ideas. He acknowledged there are no easy answers when a publisher that size is weighing financial risk against experimentation. He also recalled enjoying the original Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs on their first outings — it's the tenth iteration of the same game where things go stale.

Klima's comments land with some credibility behind them. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launched earlier this year to strong reviews — IGN gave it a 9/10 — and the series has built its reputation on exactly the kind of grounded, historically rooted design Klima is advocating for. Warhorse deliberately avoided the chosen-one template, dropping players into a medieval Bohemia where Henry is nobody special and survival requires patience rather than destiny. That approach has clearly shaped how Klima thinks about the genre at large.

The comments are already generating discussion, with plenty of RPG fans split between agreeing with the diagnosis and defending the games being implicitly criticized. Klima has been outspoken recently on industry topics — he also weighed in on GTA 6 and game pricing — so this reads less like a one-off provocation and more like a consistent design philosophy he's happy to defend publicly.