I've sunk about 200 hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 at the time of writing, but today I learned something new about it: Henry isn't complimenting my sick photo-taking skills just to be nice; he's doing it to prevent me from being a dirty, rotten cheater.
If you've played the game and tinkered around at all with its photo mode, you'll know Henry loves to loudly comment on your pictures when you exit photo mode, sometimes alerting nearby guards you would've rather remained hidden from. Talking to PC Gamer, KCD2 lead designer Prokop Jirsa explains why this happens. KCD2 is a gorgeous game, and it deserves the extensive photo mode it has, but its developers didn't like how "you could start photo mode and look around corners" to gain an unfair advantage during stealth sections. Fair enough.
"So what we did is that, when you end the photo mode, Henry will comment about how nice the picture was. So he'll say 'Oh! What a nice view!' But this is actually heard in the game, so the guards will hear you," explains Jirsa. This was very much an intentional decision to curb cheating, but also to foster the sort of chaotic scenarios developer Warhorse thrives in.
"I still think it's quite a clever way to solve the cheating issue, but we also knew that it would create these weird, 'what the fuck' moments that are funny and shareable, and that work in our community," Jirsa says, adding that Henry's infamous 'I'm quite hungry' line was added for "exactly" the same reasons. "We knew it's just insane, but yeah, we're playful like this," he says.
