Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Got Shut Out at The Game Awards – But the Real Story Is Who Beat It

The Medieval Epic That Walked Away Empty-Handed

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 went into The Game Awards 2025 in a position most studios would kill for. It had strong word of mouth, a fiercely loyal community, and three heavyweight nominations: Game of the Year, Best Narrative, and Best RPG. For a grounded, historically driven role-playing game from a mid-sized European studio, that alone was a serious statement.

Then the envelopes opened.

In every single category where it appeared, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 ran into the same wall: Expedition 33. The French RPG didn’t just edge it out once – it swept all three categories, and several more on top of that. One game walked away with an armful of trophies. The other left with none.

On social media you’d think this was a simple “KCD2 was robbed” story. Look a little closer, and you see something more interesting: a snapshot of where big, narrative-heavy RPGs are heading, and which design philosophies are getting rewarded in 2025.

Two RPGs, Two Totally Different Design Religions

Put side by side, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Expedition 33 might share genre labels, but they are not chasing the same fantasy.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – Immersion Through Inconvenience

Warhorse doubled down on the identity it carved out with the first game:

• A historical setting that refuses to romanticize the Middle Ages.

• Combat that feels awkward, weighty, and clumsy by design.

• A world that does not revolve around the player, but grinds on with its own politics and routines.

• A narrative built less around cinematic setpieces and more around social standing, survival, and gradual change.

It’s the kind of RPG that demands patience. You don’t step into its world to be a demigod. You step into it to be just another person trying not to get killed, humiliated, or starved.

Expedition 33 – Curated Emotion and Sharp Direction

Expedition 33 approaches the genre from almost the opposite direction:

• A stylized visual identity that pops instantly on a big screen.

• Turn-based combat with clear, readable rhythms and attention-grabbing animations.

• A tightly directed story about inevitability, sacrifice, and facing a ticking clock.

• A structure designed to move players through big emotional beats without a huge amount of friction.

Where Kingdom Come 2 is messy on purpose, Expedition 33 is polished, paced, and theatrical. One wants to simulate a world; the other wants to stage a performance you inhabit.

Given how The Game Awards are structured – short clips, big music, quick emotional hits – it’s not shocking which one plays better in that format.

The Game Awards Aren’t Just a Popularity Contest

Players often talk about The Game Awards like a high-budget popularity poll. In practice, they’re a mix of jury taste, industry politics, and broadcast logic.

A few realities worth remembering:

• The show is built around spectacle. Games that look distinct and explain themselves in five seconds do better.

• Jury members are working through dozens of games; strong direction and coherent pacing are easier to appreciate than sprawling simulation.

• Awards like Game of the Year and Best Narrative naturally gravitate toward projects that fuse story, presentation, and mechanics into something cleanly unified.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is proudly not clean. Its ambition lies in density and friction – a world where navigating a conversation can be as fraught as a swordfight, and where systems constantly bump into each other in unpredictable ways.

Expedition 33, by all accounts, hits a different sweet spot: a story that feels focused, a combat system that looks great in motion, and a presentation style tuned to impress quickly.

That doesn’t make Kingdom Come 2 “less deserving.” It explains why one game owned the room on that particular night.

“Blame the French”: How Warhorse Turned a Loss Into a Moment

Warhorse’s social media team clearly knew the sweep would sting. The way they handled it was telling.

Right after the show, the official account posted:

• The classic “this is fine” dog meme sitting in a burning room.

• A mock dialogue screen with three options: “It’s Not My Fault,” “Blame the French,” and “Say Nothing,” with the cursor hovering on “Blame the French.”

• A follow-up message thanking fans, expressing appreciation, and asking everyone to be kind.

On the surface, it’s just a joke. Strategically, it’s a smart move:

• It acknowledges the disappointment directly, instead of pretending nothing happened.

• It defuses potential anger by making the first “salty” joke itself, before the fanbase spins up into conspiracies.

• It frames Expedition 33 as a friendly rival rather than an enemy, preventing a pointless studio-vs-studio narrative from forming.

Warhorse didn’t win a trophy, but it did something many studios still fail at: it lost in public gracefully, and it did it in a way that made people like them more, not less.

Players vs. Juries: When “My GOTY” Doesn’t Match the Show

If you follow any RPG community for more than five minutes, you’ll see the same pattern.

After the awards, a lot of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 players planted their flag: “I don’t care what the jury said, this is my Game of the Year.” That isn’t cope; it’s a reflection of how differently players and juries experience these games.

Players live with a game:

• They save-scum broken quests.

• They tell stories about physics bugs that somehow fit the world’s chaos.

• They remember a random encounter in a village more vividly than a scripted cutscene.

Juries, even when they play extensively and in good faith, are still evaluating within a limited window. It’s much easier to reward a game built like a beautifully directed film than one that tries to simulate a culture at scale.

So after a night like this, two truths can exist at the same time:

• Officially, Expedition 33 dominated 2025’s awards narrative.

• In the heads and hearts of many players, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the one they’ll be talking about five years from now.

Both realities matter, just for different reasons.

What This Means for Warhorse’s Next Move

From a cold business perspective, Warhorse walks away with:

• A game that’s already done the hard work of establishing a strong fanbase.

• Plenty of critical respect, even without trophies.

• A new, unplanned brand identity as “the underdog that got swept and took it like a champ.”

The lack of awards may hurt short-term marketing lines, but in the long run it gives the studio something just as valuable: narrative fuel.

They can lean into the idea that:

• Their games are for people who care more about depth than about accolades.

• Their path is the slower one: build the audience, let the guilds and historians argue, come back sharper.

If they deliver DLC, expansions, or a potential third game that meaningfully evolves their historical-sim approach, the 2025 sweep becomes a piece of their origin story, not the end of it.

Bigger Picture: RPGs Aren’t Done Changing Yet

Zoom out beyond these two games and the 2025 awards tell you this:

• European RPG studios are not just nipping at the heels of the genre – they’re leading it.

• Stylized, emotionally dense projects like Expedition 33 can go head to head with gigantic, systems-heavy sandboxes and win.

• At the same time, there is clearly space – and appetite – for slower, nastier, historically grounded experiences like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

In other words, the genre is splitting, not shrinking. One branch is chasing sharp, curated emotional journeys. The other is digging deeper into simulation and historical specificity.

On that axis, Expedition 33 may have won the awards battle. But Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is very much still in the war.

And if you ask its fans, it already won the only award that really matters: the one they hand out with their time.