Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Translator Says Warhorse Replaced Him With AI

Max Hejtmánek worked at Warhorse Studios as a Czech-to-English translator for nearly four years, contributing to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, its DLCs, and its marketing materials. That work mattered in a game where players cannot simply follow a map marker to solve a quest. KCD2 is built on NPC dialogue: a miller's evasive directions, a guard captain's coded warning, a forger's cautious haggle. When that language collapses into literal, characterless text - the kind a large language model produces when processing Czech syntax it has no cultural stake in - players do not just feel less immersed. They get lost. Quest directions become ambiguous. Character motivations disappear into flat exposition. Hejtmánek was the barrier between that outcome and what shipped. Now Warhorse has removed him.

Hejtmánek posted to the game's official subreddit in a post verified by Reddit moderators, describing an abrupt meeting. "Yesterday, March 27th 2026, with no forewarning, I was invited to a meeting and promptly told that, in an effort to 'make the company more effective' and 'save finances', as of next month, my position at the company would become 'obsolete' in favour of using AI for all translations going forward," he wrote. Subreddit moderators claimed to have verified his identity, and his LinkedIn has since been updated to reflect that, as of March 2026, he no longer works at Warhorse Studios.

He had been working at the studio since July 2022, covering English localization across dialogues, quests, item descriptions, and marketing materials. The timing is striking given that Kingdom Come: Deliverance II earned a Game of the Year nomination in 2025 - a reception in part built on English writing that felt earned and specific. Just 14 days before Hejtmánek's termination, Warhorse director Daniel Vávra argued publicly that AI could let more developers make games at scale, speed up localization, cut crunch, and accelerate animation and worldbuilding. He framed it as expanding output. What happened to Hejtmánek reads more like substitution.

According to Hejtmánek, his access to company systems was revoked immediately after the announcement. He was simultaneously asked to remain available through a 60-day pay period, an arrangement he described as contradictory and painful. He noted that conversations about AI-driven translation had come up at Warhorse previously, and that he had "always been strongly and vocally against" such changes. "The topic of using AI for translation had come up regularly before - I was always strongly against it," he wrote. "But I naively believed my work at Warhorse was valued enough that I wasn't at immediate risk."

Hejtmánek noted there is one other in-house localizer still at the studio, at least for now. He closed his post with a direct statement: "I feel incredibly betrayed by the management of the company I've come to care about." Warhorse Studios had not issued a public response as of March 29, 2026, though coverage spread across Kotaku, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Destructoid within 48 hours.

The studio's calculus presumably treats localization as a text-volume problem. It is not. The English version of KCD2 works because someone understood that a corrupt bailiff's dialogue cannot sound like a corporate memo, and that a frightened serf's deflection carries quest-critical subtext a model will flatten into a statement of fact. "Warhorse if you're in here you're gonna set your next game up for failure with decisions like this," one fan wrote on the subreddit. "People don't like this kind of crap." For a studio whose brand rests on historical authenticity and immersive writing, replacing the person who maintained that voice with a system that has never played the game is a gamble no efficiency metric can fully price in.