Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was our game of the year for 2025, and I personally hailed it as a “New RPG classic” in our KCD2 review. Why? Because you can kiss Hans. There’s some stuff about emergent, systemic gameplay; an uncompromising design vision; and a well-told, politically complex story in a setting no one else is working in, but make no mistake: I’m just here to hold Hans’ hans. Hand. Hands.
I kid (mostly), but the development of Henry and Hans’ romantic relationship—if you choose to pursue it—and the pair attempting to interpret their feelings for one another through contemporary chivalric traditions, was really well done. It’s a big jewel in the game’s crown.
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KCD2’s creative director Daniel Vávra—who has since departed that role to focus on a Kingdom Come movie—welcomed the nomination on X, writing that he was “really proud” of the Hans/Henry relationship. And then, well, he wrote a whole bunch of other stuff, like a long-winded and less amusing riff on the famous Hideo Kojima “not a gay” tweet.
“I absolutely stand by the fact that the way we did it is exactly how something like this should be done,” said Vávra “Non-coercively, naturally, and educationally (because we show how things really were in the Middle Ages without idealizing them).”
You can probably see where this is heading. Vávra wrote that KCD2 did gay romance right where so many others, apparently, do it wrong: “without shoving it down anyone’s throat or trying to re-educate them like so many titles that are rightfully called ‘woke’ these days.
“We made the gay community happy and gave them the CHOICE to be themselves, just like we did for others in other choices and quests, and anyone who isn’t interested probably didn’t even notice.”
By way of conclusion, Vávra would like you to know that—though the inclusion of gay romances in KCD2 “was my idea, my decision and my responsibility and I had to convince others to do it”—it does not mean that he doesn’t “find the abundance of forced ‘woke’ nonsense in the entertainment industry annoying at the same time.”
Vávra is a peculiar figure. In the time of KCD1, his vocal support of the far-right Gamergate movement made him, and the game he directed, something of a saint of right-wing gamers, who perceived him and Warhorse as some sort of bulwark against a scourge of “woke” content they perceived to be laying waste to the games industry.
As someone who plays a lot of RPGs, I don’t recall any of them forcing me to kiss anyone of the same gender or indeed, to be “woke,” for whatever definition of that word its opponents are using today. Perhaps I’m just playing the wrong ones.
It’s worth noting that this precise same contingent of rabidly conservative gamers promptly turned against Vávra and Warhorse the second they put a prominent person of colour—and, of course, a gay relationship—into KCD2, which suggests they were never really as concerned about this kind of content being done “the right way” as they were about it being present in any capacity whatsoever. For its part, the wider Warhorse studio has said it’s “fed up” with being dragged into culture wars.
Personally, I’ve never gotten the impression Vávra has a particularly cogent or well-considered politics; rather he just seems like a very sensitive person who reacted badly to criticism of the first Kingdom Come and has kept up that tradition in the second game, too.
But regardless of its director’s tweets, KCD2 is a very good and very well-written videogame, and I think it fully deserves the plaudits it earned for its depiction of Henry and Hans’ romance, whether that makes it woke or not.
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