Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: A mammoth acting challenge | Global News Avenue

You’ll hear a lot about the role of actors and life, but for Tom McKay and Luke Dale, that’s especially important.

Over the past nine years, they have dedicated most of their work and life to two video games – Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) and its sequel.

Together, the epic script of role-playing in the 15th century Bohemia plays to over 3 million pages and thousands of lines.

It is believed that KCD 2, released last week, is probably the longest video game script ever.

Both actors talk to the BBC Newsbeat to understand what it feels like to be such a huge project and work with the controversial director in the game.

The original KCD is a slow burning sleeper. Its review score at the time of its release in 2018 was highly respected, but it has not received widespread praise.

However, it found a passionate fan base a few months and years later, and its appetite for the sequel increased.

KCD 2 received positive reviews within 48 hours of release and sold 1 million copies within 48 hours.

The sequel follows Tom’s character Henry (Skalitz), the blacksmith’s son becomes a knight, and Luke’s character, the impulsive Sir Hans Capon.

It’s a huge open game that allows players to carve their own path through it.

This means that important characters or projects that surround them can be found outside of the storyline, and the game will respond to these variable possibilities.

This is something that developers of the game must consider, and Tom, in particular, has to act over and over again every time.

This means hundreds of hours of studio time and repeated trips to Prague, where developer Warhorse Studios is located.

He said it was “one of the most amazing and unusual performance challenges” he faced.

“You go along one channel of decision, then go back to another channel, then go back to another channel, and then maybe all the way back to the beginning and down,” he said.

“This is not the performance challenge you’ve ever faced in TV or movies.”

The video game industry is a secret, and both Tom and Luke spent three years under an undisclosed agreement in the second game.

Tom refers to the British Intelligence Agency, and Tom said: “It’s almost like working for GCHQ or something.”

“In some cases, you can’t talk about it with anyone, and people in the studio can’t even talk to their partners about what they’re doing.”

Tom said that when he works on other projects, he occasionally runs into fans of the game and when they bake the sequel, they will have to avoid the issue.

He said it was a difficult time when he met fans of the Czech Republic, where celebrating the game was a national success story.

When they asked him why he spent so much time in Prague, Tom admitted that he had to bend the truth a little.

“I thought, ‘I just love Prague. I come here a lot of holidays,'” he said.

Luke said that given the six-year gap between the two champions, many fans “abandoned hope” sequel.

But when the new game was revealed, he said: “This incredible reception, everyone got really crazy”.

It also reignited an online discourse that exploded around the release of the original KCD.

Daniel Vávra, co-founder and creative director of Warhorse, is a regular poster on social media that will be answered by critics soon.

He defended the first KCD, when it was criticized for its lack of diversity because it historically had been accurate in time and location of its environment, although it was not universally agreed.

At the time, he also issued public statements to people against the attempt to impose diversity into the game, saying that his growth in Communist Czechoslovakia made him an “opponent of censorship in the name of good will.”

This won his supporters in the so-called Gamergate movement, which appeared online in 2014 and is widely regarded as an objection to attempts to make the game more inclusive.

Members celebrate Vávra with their outspoken, uncompromising attitude.

However, with the release of KCD 2 with some of these voices against him, as the sequel has black characters and gay romance scenes, it can play a role if the player makes certain decisions.

“I think it’s a really interesting thing,” Luke said.

“In the first game, the left-wing mentality was more strongly opposed, and then this time there was some strong opposition from the right-wing mentality.”

Luke and Tom both spent days after the KCD 2 release conference fans, saying they believed the complaints were from non-representative minorities.

“This is a barometer of distortion between online interaction and real-world interaction,” Tom said.

“We did it for nine hours, but not once.”

Luke added: “I want to be honest with you, those real game fans, this game doesn’t bother with this stuff.

“It seems like people who are really involved in politics, they care very much about politics, not games, they just use it as weapons, but they don’t have to be games.”

Both actors praised Vávra’s “forensic understanding” of his vision for the game.

Luke noted that although the director has the final say, many people were involved in the competition.

“So you can do the scene, you have three different people coming to you,” Luke said.

“Can you do it? Can you know this?

“Tom and I were like, ‘Well, can we distil it?’

“Daniel is really good at helping us do that because it’s his creativity and he knows exactly what he wants every time.”

Apart from the relationship with the boss, another question is whether the co-stars also keep moving forward after all this time.

“Of course,” Tom said.

“It’s really organic to spend so much time together.

“So you kind of get this friendship for free.”

Luke added: “It’s like wearing a very comfortable pair of clothes.

“Ironically, in the motion capture studio, you’re actually wearing a head-to-toe Lycra.”

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