Interview: Kingdom Under Fire 2 devs are “not ashamed” of 12-year development hell

In a recent trip to Burgweg’s Castle Reichenstein to check out the upcoming Kingdom Under Fire 2, we got the chance to sit down with the team behind the title.

Announced back in 2008, the unique blend of MMO, RTS and Hack-and-Slash has stumbled often on its journey to become a completed product. Numerous delays, a missed console generation and fighting the label of “development hell”, we spoke to the team about the game’s rocky development and the freeing feeling of a close release.

Of course, our biggest question was the one that every journalist had on their minds: just what took Blueside and Gameforge so long to release the title? The answer is simple: “trial and error”.

“We had a very strict goal, or a purpose, that we never compromises regardless of what the technology is,” revealed creative director Jupo Kim. “This game, over the course of 12 years, has faced a lot of different trial and error.”

It’s no secret that Blueside has faced numerous struggles in realising their vision for Kingdom Under Fire 2. According to the team, it’s been a long journey to find a balance they’re happy with: discovering a way to perfectly meld the worlds of character action games, RTS games and the persistent world of a large scale MMO has been challenging, appropriately so.

Kim admits that the long development time has helped them find a point of release that Blueside is happy with, even if it did take twelve years and $80 million.

[shunno-quote]“We don’t deny the fact that our game is development hell,” Kim told us.[/shunno-quote]

“Finding the balance and, like I said, this game has a very long history of repeating trial and error… finding the perfect balance took us a long time because no one’s ever done this before,” Kim told us. “No one had experience [with this.] We couldn’t foresee what problems we were going to experience. We did that through trying; that’s why it took us a longer time than usual.”

With the game’s long development cycle being by far the title’s biggest point of contention, we spoke to Kim about the phrase “development hell”. With the phrase being attributed to the title after its frequent delays, unreleased console versions and infamously long developmental baking time, Kim spoke out about how the team has handled this label.

“We don’t deny the fact that our game is development hell,” Kim told us. “The fact is it took twelve years to develop… you know, people call our game development hell, how does that make us feel? We are not ashamed it took us this long. We don’t deny hat it took us a long time. And the reason that takes a long time is because there are problems and this game has a long history of repeating itself [throughout those twelve years].”

“We’ve faced a lot of trials, we’ve overcome a lot of issues. We have our pride in this game, it’s the first attempt at bringing these very opposite genres together. It’s a very unique game, it has no equal. You know, if someone points fingers at us and says, ‘Hey, your game is in development hell’, you know we have our reasons, but we’re finally ready to show something back.”

“Twelve years on… We’re just satisfied that we’re able to finally able to present something that we’ve intended to do in the first place. But like I said, throughout the 12 years, we’ve finally started to feel a great amount of satisfaction, you know? It’s time we finally receive the fruits of our labour.”

For more Kingdom Under Fire 2 coverage, check out our preview of the interesting title.