There are philosophical arguments to be made about the quality of innocence and children's morality – St. Augustine, for example, states cynically in his spiritual autobiography Confessions that "the infant’s innocence lies in the weakness of his body, and not in the infant mind," having once observed a baby be jealous of another's piggish milk-drinking. But 2025 action RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 decides not to bother with discussion and instead simply eliminates all evidence of children, just so players don't slaughter too many of them.
If you think that's cynical thinking, let me bring your attention to Skyrim, for which players gleefully download child-killing mods in order to shoot arrows through what some consider to be the game's most grating NPCs.
Proving my point, there's a popular YouTube video showcasing the diverse ways one of these mods allows bad Skyrim babysitters to execute medieval tweens (in their beds, to their faces, etc.), to which one unrepentant reply with 2,000 upvotes says, "This is probably the most satisfying video on the internet."
So Kingdom Come developer Warhorse Studios was correct to assume its players might be unscrupulous NPC killers in the making, as CzechCrunch reports, Warhorse executive producer Martin Klíma shared during the recent Prague Comic-Con.
At the event, Klíma explained Warhorse had initially planned to add children to its historical fiction game for the sake of realism, and to break up visual monotony. But the developer started to worry about the same plague that spread among Skyrim players – unbridled violence against bald baby NPCs and stuff.
Ultimately, Warhorse had the same conversation that any serious people have before taking the next step, and it decided that kids weren't worth the hassle. The developer wasn't interested in seeing any Twitch clips of "a pile of child corpses" or receiving bad PR.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 now drowns in a sea of NPC adults, who tend wide-eyed to their cows and pints of beer. You'd think a place so manufactured and devoid of youth would be sad to play in, but it's actually not so bad. Things could be worse. You could be smited by God.
