When you think of top tier RPG makers in gaming your mind likely goes to the Bethesda’s, CD Projekt Red’s and BioWare’s of the world, but with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 coming February 11th 2025, you might soon be adding Warhorse Studios to that legendary grouping.
When Warhorse was founded back in 2011 by Dan Vávra who previously worked with 2K Czech and Martin Klima who previously worked with Bohemia Interactive. Their vision was clear. They wanted to build an RPG with an open world, strong storytelling and perhaps most importantly, a realistic design. Thus Warhorse and their debut game Kingdom Come Deliverance was born.
When Kingdom Come Deliverance launched on February 13th 2018 it certainly lived up to its billing. While critics were rather mixed on it, fans of the genre seemed to appreciate it for what it was. They weren’t trying to compete with the likes of Skyrim and others in the genre, but carve out their own niche within the genre by providing gamers with such realism embedded in a gorgeous world with characters you could connect to.
Despite its bugs at launch the game garnered a considerable amount of buzz within the gaming community and eventually ended up selling a massive 6 million units in it’s lifetime. With Kingdom Come Deliverance, Warhorse was on the map.
A Sequel For The Ages
Now in 2024 Warhorse is gearing up for it’s much anticipated follow up, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. A studios second game, much less a sequel to a successful debut game, is often a tricky and difficult thing to create. With a debut game the pressure is on to create something gamers will like. With a second game comes an even bigger pressure, expectations.
When you sell 6 million copies of a debut game you’ve certainly set the bar high. A lot of times the sequel can make or break a studio even more so than the first. Warhorse has put a big emphasis on the sequel being bigger in every way. Bigger map, bigger story arcs, bigger cities. Even the studio itself has essentially doubled in size. With that comes a much bigger budget and a bigger need to do well.
From what we’ve seen of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 would make it appear that Warehorse is succeeding in handling that pressure. Deliverance 2 has looked gorgeous everytime we’ve seen a glimpse of it using its modified CryEngine and you can get a sense of the scale of the game when it is shown off.
Fortunately with the success of the first game Warhorse has been able to bring their true vision of what they wanted to create to the sequel. While they are extremely proud of the first game they were unable to deliver exactly what they had wanted due to limited funds. With Deliverance 2 that is no longer the case and they may simply focus on creating the best game.
They’ve consulted with historians, universities and museums to ensure the game is a realistic, immersive and believable medieval world. They’ve also been able to add facial capture to their motion capture capabilities to give characters a more detailed, realistic look.
They’ve also added a new element to the gameplay. The one critique I commonly saw from gamers was that the combat felt too stiff. With the added experience of the team plus the introductions of some early world firearms such as a crossbow Warhorse looks to be evolving the combat in a big way.
All of this, combined with what they already did great with the first game seems to be setting up Warhorse with an RPG that could launch them into a whole new stratosphere. Whether it all comes together or not time will tell, but if I were a betting man, I’d bet on yes.
