Warhorse Studios announced Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, the sequel to an ambitious and intriguing 2018 medieval RPG that had plenty of technical flaws and also became a lightning rod for controversy over its director’s comments about race and historical accuracy. The development team is promising the next game, which will release later in 2024, will be much bigger and feature “a wide range of ethnicities” this time around.
Coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II will once again put players in the boots of Henry of Skalitz as his quest for revenge over the killing of his family sows chaos in 15th century Bohemia in central Europe. A new trailer shows the game’s larger scope and grim realism in action:
Think The Witcher 3 if it were in first-person and prioritized the emergent gameplay of Grand Theft Auto, but with an emphasis on simulating the day-to-day experience of the historical period. The story will take players to the metropolitan city of Kuttenberg and focus on a conflict with an invading king.
“What we are making now is what [Kingdom Come: Deliverance] was supposed to be in the beginning, but we were not able to do it because we didn’t have enough resources and experience,” creative director Daniel Vávra said in an extended gameplay reveal. The studio has promised Deliverance II will be “twice the size” of the first game with many more immersive systems.
Here’s some of what the game will feature, based on the trailers and an interview with IGN:
- Reputation system where NPCs react to players’ habits
- Crossbows and early firearms
- Blacksmithing minigame
- Chat mode for giving quick responses to NPCs
- Overhauled combat to be more approachable but still realistic and crunchy
Chief among the additions to Deliverance II will be more diversity. “Naturally, in a place like this, people can expect a wide range of ethnicities and different characters that Henry will meet on his journey,” Warhorse Studios spokesperson Tobias Stolz-Zwilling told IGN. Back during the lead-up to the first game, Vávra insisted there wouldn’t be any Black people in it.
“Would you please explain to me what’s racist about telling the truth?” he tweeted back in 2015. “There were no black people in medieval Bohemia. Period.” Vávra’s deployment of historical accuracy to defend the fictional RPG’s lack of people of color and his frequent embrace of pro-Gamergate rhetoric made it hard to separate the first Deliverance from some of the online reactionaries who rallied around it. The studio seems to be taking a somewhat different approach this time around, though it didn’t go into much detail.
“We are trying to depict a realistic, immersive, and believable medieval world that is being reconstructed to the best of our knowledge,” Stolz-Zwilling told IGN. “And naturally to achieve that we are not only having our own in-house historian, but we are very closely working together with universities, historians, museums, reenactors, and a group of experts from different ethnicities or religious beliefs that we are actively incorporating into development as external advisors.”
While the first game was crowdfunded, Warhorse Studios was acquired by Koch Media in 2019, itself now owned by Embracer and renamed Plaion. Stolz-Zwilling said the deep cuts, cancellations, and closures at the parent company haven’t impacted Deliverance II’s development.
