When research historian Joanna Nowak comes running down the halls of game developer Warhorse Studios in Prague, her co-workers have reason to be worried. Something in their game probably needs to change. As Warhorse’s in-house historical consultant, it’s Nowak’s job to ensure that the studio’s new medieval role-playing title, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, is as historically accurate as possible. The game is set in Bohemia — the modern-day Czech Republic — in 1403, and it painstakingly re-creates period-specific details, from armor and swords to the layout of the towns players can explore.

The realism of those details depends on the expertise of Nowak, who previously studied art history and architecture preservation before joining the studio. She spends her days digging into reference materials, whether it’s digital databases or old history books, and calling up experts at museums or galleries. She also fields plenty of very specific questions from the rest of the 120-person team, covering everything from how characters should dress to what kinds of flowers you’ll find in the fields.

When she really starts moving, it means she’s found something, like new research that changes the way in-game characters should fight, or details about how the inside of a monastery should look. Sometimes she realizes an artist has crafted something without her feedback, and it needs to be changed right away. “Mostly they’re scared if I’m coming very quickly,” Nowak says of her co-workers.

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Several pages from the in-game codex.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance launches February 13th on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. At a glance, it looks like a typical fantasy RPG, something along the lines of The Witcher or Skyrim, with a large world to explore and the freedom to tackle quests in a variety of ways. The key difference is Kingdom Come’s devotion to re-creating the feeling of living in medieval times as accurately as possible, while still being fun to play. It started out as a much smaller project. In 2014, the studio raised more than £1.1 million (about $1.5 million) on Kickstarter to fund development, and when Nowak first started working on the game, there were only 25 people at the studio. (Since then, close to 100 people have been added to the project.)

“Nobody really knew what I would be doing.”

While in-house historical consultants are common in film and television — Ubisoft has also hired historians to work on the Assassin’s Creed franchise — they’re still fairly rare in the game world. Prior to seeing Warhorse’s job listing, Nowak didn’t even know a job like this existed. Initially, this made her specific duties at Warhorse a little unclear — for both her and studio. “When we started, I think nobody really knew what I would be doing,” she explains. “They wanted me for a little trial to see how this would work.”

At first, her focus was on the accuracy of the story, but eventually, Nowak began consulting on just about every aspect of the project. She helped the translators create dialogue that felt true to the time period but was still comprehensible to modern players. She worked with artists to ensure accurate clothing designs and building layouts and helped the animators design realistic fighting techniques. Sometimes, complying with history meant making difficult changes.

The studio was in the thick of development when she joined the team, and it had already created a number of in-game objects, including churches for the towns. But Nowak noticed right away that all the churches had benches inside, something that wasn’t true of medieval times. Given the time and effort that goes into modeling a realistic 3D object like a wooden bench, the art team fought to keep them, but after some intense debate, the churches are now all bench-free.

At times, she has to pick her battles and balance accuracy against creating a game experience that will be enjoyable for players. At one point, an artist wanted to create a particularly elaborate but inaccurate outfit for a character so that they would be easily noticed by players. Nowak acquiesced because it made sense for the in-game quest, making it easier for players to spot the character and follow along the path the developers intended.

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Models and sketches based on real-world buildings.

She notes that if the game were 100 percent accurate, it wouldn’t be much fun to play; players would die of disease and sword fights would be boring slogs. “[The game] would be too boring or too difficult,” she says. “And the idea of the designers is not to give you exactly what was in 1403. Rather, we focus on making an accurate feeling of medieval times. You can find a weapon [in the game] that was maybe a little too old or too new, but it gives you the feeling that it’s the Middle Ages.”

“I started to doubt myself and my skills.”

The game’s attention to detail is still remarkable, and it has inspired a number of in-game features that differentiate Kingdom Come from other RPGs. Where most role-playing games only allow characters to equip a few pieces of armor, Kingdom Come gives you 14 different slots for armor and clothing, so that you can dress in multiple layers, as soldiers did at the time. The first-person combat is built around real-world fighting techniques, with just a handful of weak points that you have to hit with well-timed blows. After a battle, you’ll need to bandage wounds to prevent fatal blood loss. All the townsfolk you come across will have real jobs, like farmer or monk, and if you’re low on cash, you can barter with the local blacksmith for a better deal on a new sword. Outside of the gameplay itself, Kingdom Come features a codex with hundreds of pages of historical detail for players who want to delve further into the setting.

That’s a lot of ground for one person to fact-check, and Nowak often found herself on the receiving end of questions that were impossible to answer. Animators would ask her how people walked in the 15th century, or on which knee a knight would kneel. “At some point, I started to doubt myself and my skills,” Nowak explains. “Because people were starting to ask me about so many different things, and sometimes I couldn’t even find information from other specialists, or there was information that was contradictory. There really wasn’t a clear answer, [but] people would say, ‘Oh, there must be an answer!’” Eventually, she says, “I learned to make decisions” about elements of the game she was unsure about, making the most accurate choices possible based on her research.

It’s a lot of time and effort for details a large number of players probably won’t notice. But for Nowak, it’s an opportunity to get people interested in history in a way that’s more immersive than what books or documentaries can offer. “I truly believe that people will be much more interested in not just Czech history, but history in general, and want to dig into it more after they play,” she says. “Because they will feel it. This is something different from what they were told [in school]. It’s like a modern, interactive museum.”