Warhorse Studios is catching heat after a former translator and editor claimed he was let go so the company could rely on AI for future translation work. The story blew up after Max H, who says he had worked at the studio since July 2022 on Czech to English translation and editing for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and its DLC, posted his account publicly on Reddit. In the post, he said he was called into a meeting on March 27, 2026, and told his role would become “obsolete” next month as the company moved toward using AI for all translations going forward. A moderator on the subreddit later said they had verified his previous employment.
Former Warhorse Translator Says AI Replaced His Role
According to Max H’s post, he worked on dialogue, quest logs, item names, and other English localization tasks tied to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. He said the decision came without warning and described it as a betrayal by management, especially because he had already pushed back internally against the use of AI for translation. He also said he would not stay quiet about the experience, even while respecting his NDA.
[OTHER] Fired from Warhorse Studios and replaced with AI
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u/ThousandDemons in
kingdomcome
That is the part that is going to hit players the hardest. Translation is not some invisible background task that can be swapped out without consequences. It is a major part of how a game feels. When players praise a quest line, laugh at a bit of banter, or get pulled into a world because the dialogue sounds natural, that is not magic. That is people doing skilled, creative work. If this account is accurate, then Warhorse did not just cut a job. It cut a layer of humanity out of its own game.
Players Are Angry About AI Replacing Human Localization
The backlash is not just about one employee losing his job. It is about what this says about how some studios now view creative labor. Localization is one of those disciplines people only notice when it goes wrong, but when it goes right, it can completely shape a game’s identity. Good translation is not just converting words from one language into another. It is tone, rhythm, context, humor, slang, and cultural nuance.
That is why this story feels so grim. Executives keep selling AI as a productivity miracle, but players are not stupid. They know the difference between dialogue that feels alive and text that sounds like it was polished by an algorithm until all personality got sanded off. If companies start treating localization like a budget line to be erased instead of a craft worth protecting, the quality drop will not stay hidden for long.
The Warhorse AI Debate Feels Bigger Than One Studio
This controversy also lands just weeks after Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director Daniel Vávra publicly argued that AI could help developers make bigger games faster and more cheaply, including speeding up localization, animation, and worldbuilding. Dot Esports reported those comments on March 13, 2026, noting that Vávra framed AI as a way to expand output rather than replace workers. That argument already sounded naive at the time. Now it looks even worse, because the fear critics raised was exactly this: companies would absolutely use AI to cut staff the moment they felt they could get away with it.
This is why the “AI is just a tool” defense rings hollow for a lot of people. In theory, maybe that sounds fine. In reality, workers are the ones getting squeezed first. The promise is always that AI will remove boring tasks and free up humans to do more meaningful work. The pattern players keep seeing is much uglier. Human work gets devalued, management talks about efficiency, and the people who actually helped make the game good are shown the door.
Right now, the public claim comes from Max H’s Reddit post, and there does not appear to be a public statement from Warhorse Studios addressing his account as of March 28, 2026, based on the sources reviewed here.
Even without an official reply yet, the damage is already there. Once players start believing a studio is willing to replace experienced writers, editors, or translators with AI to save money, trust drops fast. That matters even more for a game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, where immersion and authenticity are a huge part of the appeal. If the studio really does lean harder on AI for future localization, players will be watching every line much more closely.
And honestly, they should. Because this is the kind of decision that saves money in a spreadsheet and quietly makes games worse everywhere else.
Warhorse Studios Is Facing the Exact Backlash It Should Have Expected
If Warhorse thought players would shrug this off because localization work happens behind the scenes, it badly misread the room. Gamers might tolerate a lot, but they have become deeply suspicious of AI being pushed into creative spaces, especially when it looks like a convenient excuse for layoffs. Stories like this cut through because they are not abstract. They show the real cost immediately.
The ugly truth is that some studios seem desperate to convince everyone that cheaper automatically means smarter. It does not. Replacing a human translator and editor with AI is not a bold leap into the future. It is a corporate shortcut. And shortcuts in creative work almost always show up on the screen sooner or later.
If Warhorse wants to keep the goodwill it earned from players, it is going to need more than silence. It is going to need answers.
