The development team is promising the next game, which will release later in 2024, will be much bigger and feature “a wide range of ethnicities” this time around.

Chief among the additions to Deliverance II will be more diversity. “Naturally, in a place like this, people can expect a wide range of ethnicities and different characters that Henry will meet on his journey,” Warhorse Studios spokesperson Tobias Stolz-Zwilling told IGN. Back during the lead-up to the first game, Vávra insisted there wouldn’t be any Black people in it.

“Would you please explain to me what’s racist about telling the truth?” he tweeted back in 2015. “There were no black people in medieval Bohemia. Period.” Vávra’s deployment of historical accuracy to defend the fictional RPG’s lack of people of color and his frequent embrace of pro-Gamergate rhetoric made it hard to separate the first Deliverance from some of the online reactionaries who rallied around it. The studio seems to be taking a somewhat different approach this time around, though it didn’t go into much detail.

“We are trying to depict a realistic, immersive, and believable medieval world that is being reconstructed to the best of our knowledge,” Stolz-Zwilling told IGN. “And naturally to achieve that we are not only having our own in-house historian, but we are very closely working together with universities, historians, museums, reenactors, and a group of experts from different ethnicities or religious beliefs that we are actively incorporating into development as external advisors.”

It would be hilarious if they were just different White ethnicities. However, this is definitely enough to make anyone knowledgeable about DEI concerned.