For RPG fans, 2024 has been an incredible year, to put it mildly. Regardless of which style of RPG you prefer, these last dozen months have had plenty on offer for everyone, and the majority of it has been excellent. Whether 2025 will continue that trend remains to be seen, but even so, a handful of titles are officially confirmed for the year that suggest there’s going to be no shortage of great RPGs to play in the near-future- and in that list of games, few grab attention the way Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 does.
The wait for a sequel to Kingdom Come: Deliverance has obviously been a long one. The first game in the series, releasing in 2018, may have had its fair share of rough edges, but it developed a sizeable fan following over time, having sold over 8 million units by November. That there would be a sequel at some point was never really in doubt, given that success, and now that that sequel is within touching distance, for fans of the original, the prospect of an iterative sequel that promises to build on its predecessor’s solid foundations while sanding off its rough edges is looking like an increasingly exciting one.
That, in fact, is exactly how Warhorse Studios is describing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The studio says the upcoming open world action RPG is meant to be an evolution of established ideas, rather than something that reinvents the wheel. A more polished and fleshed out take on the first game’s formula that eliminates most of its jank and expands on its best ideas was exactly what many had been hoping Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 would be, and sure enough, that’s what Warhorse Studios is planning.
That, of course, will mean that the game will offer a familiar experience in a number of ways- including some that not many would have expected. For instance, Henry returning as the protagonist and the game being a direct follow-up wasn’t something everyone expected, though Warhorse Studios’ reasoning is easy enough to understand. With Henry set to return, the studio is promising a story that raises the stakes while also building on established narrative arcs and worldbuilding foundations. The result, according to the developer, is a more epic and sweeping story. Deliverance 2 is being billed as the story of how Henry continues his climb up the medieval social ladder from blacksmith to hero to beyond, his personal journey becoming increasingly tied to the larger politics of Central Bohemia, with the developer saying that the game will wrap up his tale. Those are all grand promises, if nothing else. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 also boasts over five hours of cinematics, according to Warhorse, so clearly, the game’s placing plenty of emphasis on storytelling.
And of course, player choice is going to have a big role to play in the storytelling department as well. Choice and consequence mechanics can be a difficult thing to pull off, but Warhorse Studios is promising a greater emphasis being placed on branching stories in the sequel. Quests will be more reactive, the story will throw players in situations where they’re required to make tough decisions more frequently, and the different choices you make over the course of your story will also have an impact on how everything culminates, with the game confirmed to feature multiple endings. Again, implementing meaningful player choice mechanics is much easier said than done, so it remains to be seen how well Deliverance 2 does here, but the promises made by the developer are certainly encouraging.
As important as all of that is, however, arguably nothing about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is going to be a bigger sell than its promise of an authentic open world setting that prioritizes immersion and realism above all else. Obviously, massive open worlds are a dime a dozen these days, and medieval European settings (or settings adjacent to that aesthetic) have been a thing in games for as long as anyone can remember. What is far less common are games that choose to eschew all forms of fantasy elements and cut down on gamified abstractions as much as possible, and that promise is exactly what makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 such a compelling prospect- potentially. Especially for all the virtual tourism buffs out there – of which there’s no shortage in gaming circles – the game’s promise of a highly detailed recreation of 15th century Bohemia is one of its biggest selling points.
On top of a continued devotion to diegetic realism, Deliverance 2 is also looking to heighten its sense of immersion with the introduction of a new reputation system. Depending on player actions and the way you choose to play, Henry will develop different reputations among the denizens of the world, which, as you may imagine, will impact the way they will behave around him and react to his actions, and will, in turn, also impact the decisions that Henry himself will make. I’m curious to know how much this will impact the main story, but even if it doesn’t do that much but is still implemented well enough, it should, at the very least, help ground you in the game’s world, which, in a game such as this one, is supremely important.
And yes, on top of all that, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is promising to be a huge, sprawling experience. No longer crowd-funded and being developed on a larger budget and with a greater pool of resources all around, Deliverance 2 is looking like a much bigger and more expansive game than its predecessor. Warhorse Studios says the game is going to be anywhere between 80-100 hours long, with a world twice as large as the first game (across two separate maps, no less, one of which also includes the large, dense city of Kuttenburg), while presumably, there will also be no shortage of side content on offer. Bang for your buck? Sure sounds like it.
Of course, Deliverance 2 is also going to have to make marked improvements in several key areas. The first game’s more eccentric tendencies were a big part of its identity, but some of them actively took away from the experience, like the survival mechanics or the saving system, so hopefully Deliverance 2 will be much smarter about how it implements those systems. We’re also hoping for a significantly more technically stable and polished experience, because as anyone who played it will remember, the first game was a huge mess from a technical perspective when it originally launched.
With enough quality of life changes and coats of polish, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 can be the game that its predecessor showed the promise to be, but didn’t quite have the means to fulfil. The iterative improvements that the sequel is making are sounding encouraging, and that, combined with the inherently strong appeal of a sweeping open world action RPG that prioritizes realism, immersion, player freedom, and player choice can make for a special game. Whether all of those elements can come together cohesively and strike the exact right balance remains to be seen, but for now, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 certainly has our attention, at the very least.
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