Warhorse Studios kicked their core Czech translator to replace him with AI for 'saving finances'. Reddit is malding, and here is why this is a massive self-report.
I was just sitting here, debugging some spaghetti shader code at 3 AM, when I stumbled upon a massive shitstorm brewing on Reddit regarding Warhorse Studios. If you're a tryhard who loved the first game and have been eagerly waiting for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (KCD2), this news might actually make you rage quit before the game even drops.
A studio previously praised for its hardcore historical accuracy and attention to detail is now catching flak for kicking an employee to the curb in favor of AI, using the classic corporate excuse: "saving finances."
For those who skip the patch notes, here’s the TL;DR. Max H., the main Czech-to-English translator and editor for KCD2 and its DLCs, had been grinding at the studio since mid-2022. Dialogues, quest logs, item names—if you play KCD2 in English, you're looking at his carry.
But out of nowhere, with zero warning, management invited him to a meeting and hit him with an instant ban hammer. His position was declared "obsolete" to make the company "more effective" and "save finances" by switching entirely to AI translations. Max H. was in shock. He had vocally opposed handing the reins over to AI in the past, but he never thought the boss would actually drop him from the roster over it.
Unsurprisingly, the Reddit thread blew up with nearly 3K upvotes and players spamming F for the translator while flaming the studio. The community is ripping this decision apart from multiple angles:
1. Cutting Costs, But Keeping the $70 Price Tag User oAha hit the nail on the head: "They will reduce costs, but the games won't be any cheaper." Sacrificing a highly skilled dev to save maybe $50,000, only to take a guaranteed hit to localization quality and PR? That’s some negative IQ min-maxing right there. It’s an extremely short-sighted move that screams corporate greed.
2. Goodbye Immersion, Hello Zoomer Chatbot This is the real game-breaker. KCD2 relies heavily on medieval immersion. Imagine 15th-century peasants throwing around modern slang because a chatbot parsed the dialogue. AbaconflavouredD summed it up perfectly: pouring your soul into medieval Czech dialogue only to be replaced by a bot is tragic. The AI is likely going to use modern Czech structures, completely nuking the historical vibe RPG fans crave.
3. Daniel Vávra's Aggro Gamers are also pointing fingers at the lead dev, Daniel Vávra. Between incessantly defending DLSS 5 to the death and now pulling this AI stunt, it leaves a incredibly sour taste in the community’s mouth. It feels like the higher-ups are getting way too obsessed with tech buzzwords and forgetting the soul of the game.
As a dev, I’m not an AI hater. I throw my broken code into Copilot or ChatGPT daily. But you have to understand the meta: AI is a buff to your workflow, not a solo-carry for your core mechanics.
Handing over the entire localization of a lore-heavy, historically rich RPG to a bot is asking to get review-bombed on Day 1. To all the game studios out there: don't cheap out on your core stats (human passion and localization) just to save a few bucks. You might save some pennies today, but when players refund the game because the dialogue reads like machine-translated garbage, you'll be spending double trying to hotfix it.
Bottom line: I’m still interested in KCD2, but my hype just took a massive FPS drop. What do you guys think? Waiting for a Steam sale, or still pre-ordering?
