Kingdom Come: Deliverance Development Prognosis

Kingdom Come: Deliverance has received a fair bit of coverage here at Cliqist with 10 articles dedicated to the first-person, ‘dungeons without dragons’ RPG since it debuted on Kickstarter in January 2014. However seeing as our last look at Warhorse’s ambitious medieval-sim was almost a year ago we’re long overdue for a catch-up.

So where we? 12 months ago there were two main points of note, the first of which was the release of the Alpha 0.4 which gave users their first (limited) look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance and was pretty impressive. Skip forward to March 2016 and that was bettered by the release of the Beta on PC which added a whole host of numerous new features as well adding new locations and greatly expanding the map.

Not only that but an update to the Kingdom Come: Deliverance website included the option to pre-order the game on PC and thereby grant access to the Beta. 35,000 backers had originally pledged on Kickstarter raising $1.6 million (more than three times targeted value) and the Beta release saw those figures more than double.

However it’s not all good news. In 2015 the one cause of concern was the delay of Kingdom Come to the Summer of 2016 and, you’ve guessed it, it’s now been pushed back again to 2017. The enthusiasm and forgiving nature of backers was started to become strained at this point as it became clear it was ongoing work on the PS4 and Xbox One versions that was delaying the release of the PC version. While I can understand this from a business point of view it’s a subtle shift away from the extremely backer-friendly attitude that had defined the campaign.

Another sore point was the promised Linux version which was beginning to seem less and less likely. Again the actions of Warhorse during this time were irking some backers as they seemed to be ignoring the issue in the hope it would go away, eventually telling backers to wait for E3 for news. At that point the noticeable lack of any mention of the Linux version seemed a strong indication that Kingdom Come: Deliverance will just be coming to consoles and PC.

Still aside from these issues everything does seem to be coming together pretty well, which I’m happy to admit I’m surprised about. I often worry about overly-ambitious projects on Kickstarter but aside from the delays Kingdom Come looks great, particularly the combat where the implementation of sword-fighting.

Kudos, especially, to Warhorse for sticking to their guns and keeping the first-person perspective rather than switching to the third person and for concentrating on utilising a (relatively) modest map size that’s packed with interesting stuff to do rather than sprawling empty spaces. I tend to avoid massive RPGs that require a huge amount of time to be invested for at an estimated 30 hours game time (for Act I anyway) I’m very much looking to the final release.