Months after Warhorse Studios co-founder Daniel Vávra said AI is “here to stay,” a translator/editor who worked on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 revealed that he was let go in favor of the same.
Posting on the KingdomCome subreddit (with mods verifying their identity), “Max H” worked at the studio since July 2022 on the sequel and its DLC. His job was to translate “dialogues, quest logs, item names, and various other things, as well as some occasional marketing materials here and there” from Czech to English.
“Simply put, if you’ve ever played KCD2 in English, you’ve quite likely seen my work.”
However, on March 27th, his position became “obsolete” to “make the company more effective” and “save finances.” Warhorse Studios is seemingly pivoting towards AI for its translations, and while Max didn’t rule it out entirely, “I naively thought my work at WHS was valued enough that I might not be at immediate risk.”
As heartbreaking as it is, he wanted to get the word out about AI, especially as it relates to Warhorse (which generated more than its fair share of revenue off the success of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2). “The growing use of AI greatly affects people in the games industry and many others, and I thought you should know how much the company that makes the games you love value the work of their employees, not to mention the environment.”
Despite this, he asked that fans not harass anyone from the studio or review bomb its games. “That isn’t my intention at all. All I want is for people to be more informed about what’s going on in the games industry behind closed doors.”
While there’s been extensive pushback against AI over the past several months – the backlash against Nvidia DLSS 5 is one example – it hasn’t stopped companies from pursuing it in some manner. Some games, like Horizon Steel Frontiers, use it extensively for coding and art. Meanwhile, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn uses it for prototypes and placeholders, with the developer assuring that they will be replaced with “100 percent” human-made assets.
How extensively Warhorse intends to dabble with the tech is unseen, but for now, you probably shouldn’t expect the best translations in its next game, whenever that will release.
