Warhorse says that the new Middle-earth RPG 'will be a living world' with a 'strong narrative focus' and says new Kingdom Come game could arrive 'next fiscal year'
https://www.techradar.com/gaming/warhorse-promises-that-middle-earth-rpg-is-a-passion-project-that-will-be-a-living-world-with-a-strong-narrative-focusOpen linkView original on piefed.social190
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I mean, if any studio can make a living RPG world it would be Warhorse. All I can say is "don't fuck it up!"
Originally Bethesda Game Studio was the one, but their last decent game was Skyrim. They seem to know that themselves too, as they keep finding reasons to re-release Skyrim.
Yeah.
Can you imagine a “Starfield: Special Edition” re-release in a few years?
I’d say the notion is satire… but their leadership’s ego is so titanic it might not be.
Starfield was ambitious and failed. I give them credit for trying. But, that said, I'm not buying the game.
Ambitious for Bethesda maybe
I don’t think it was a sales failure, was it? Not a short term one.
Ambitious, but in all the wrong ways. They made a pretty vast world, but it was lifeless and stale. Everything was static and there was no reason to engage with it. The scale didn't add anything, so the ambition was misplaced.
If the ambition were to add a more simulation based living universe, rather than a wide lifeless one, there could have been something to it, even if it fell short. I honestly don't see what they wanted to accomplish though. It's like they haven't learned anything from other space games of the past several decades, or even their own games. Hell, their original space sim they were working on decades ago sounds more alive than Starfield was.
There are many kinds of 'ambitious'. Starfield was wear slightly more colorful(But not too colorful) tie than standard style ambitious.
Sounds like Polymarket is back on the menu, boys
I would not bet against it, that’s for sure.
My bet is on j before Starfield 2. BGS will really, actually think “hey, let’s remind everyone how great Starfield 1 was!”
I played Starfield on launch. I Cyberpunked & glitched into walls. I GTA III'd through pavement and fell into another dimension where Morrowind was the height of gaming.
I woke up, and an angry rotund child with a bowl-cut was glaring at me.
I asked "is this 1995"?
"No" , he replied "I'm allowed to eat as much Mt. Dew as I want".
No indeed, he began going into detail about "grinding", and I had flashbacks to Diablo II.
So I lifted my left buttock and let out a loud toot.
The spectre left in a hurry, yelling something about "souls like"
Todd: We are excited to announce 'Skyrim: Buy This Instead of Kingdom Come Edition'
Everyone but Todd: This is horse armor
Warhorse: buys, restores & preserves castle because it was featured in a game
Bethesda: asks customers to pre-order the 7th remake of Skyrim
Buying a castle is "cheap", but maintaining and preserving can eat up money very fast. So let's hope that they didn't bite more then they can chew!
I wasn't sure if I remembered correctly, so I looked it up. They were donating $1 USD from each purchase of the game, towards the castle. It appears to have ended April, 26, 2026. Nevertheless, a noble deed.
Thank you for looking it up!
You are most very welcome, web-traveler!
Even considering they stopped development of KCD II shortly after it got released, that's quite a short development cycle. What I am wondering is how much of that is those cunts in deep silver pushing and not Warhorse.
I dunno. I saw a dev video where the project leads, Henry’s VA, and other team members all seemed excited about the development expansion.
…Maybe they’ve just done the hard part already?
KCDI had issues, but they knocked KCDII out of the park. CryEngine is utterly fabulous for that niche; they don’t need to change a thing, mechanically or visually, nor worry about maintaining a whole game engine; that’s offloaded to Crytek.
Maybe they’ve really got all the tooling and workflow perfected for their “Very medieval RPG” template, and hence can make another banger without so much R&D and fuss.
It can definitely use an improvement, that improvement being a fishing mini-game
That mini game would have to manually tie each hook and lure onto the line.
Only until you get the required perk points to automatically make ten of them while you sleep.
At risk of going Fallout 4…
How about medieval homebuilding?
Build a little hut? Store stuff. Have chickens. Fish in a pond out back, kiddo running around.
If it’s done even half as meticulously as KCDII, I personally know people that would play the hell out of content like that. That’s the premise of a whole lot of Skyrim modding.
The forge DLC is kind of that. You can improve and modify your personal forge in kuttenberg.
Henry: takes off armor & clothes to swim in lake
Todd Howard: covers Henry's mouth as he uses a rebreather to drown him
but where does henry put the armor & clothes, hmm? Where does henry put them??
In your ass? 🤷🏻
Warhorse buying and restoring the actual castle from KCD is the most on-brand thing a studio has ever done. That's a team that genuinely gives a shit about what they're making. The Middle-earth RPG being described as a "living world" is doing a lot of heavy lifting though ... every studio says that. But if anyone can actually deliver it after KCD2, it's probably them. And yeah, Bethesda announcing Skyrim again in 3, 2, 1...
*begins grinding random herbs into paste, rolls fake dice to win the last bits of a hooker's money. Buys more herbs. Repeat.
Isn't next fiscal year in July?
Companies can define what their fiscal year is to be whatever basically (unless the country they're based in is super particular about accounting practices), just as long as it's four quarters. I've worked in places where the calendar year lines up with their fiscal, a March fiscal year, and an October fiscal year.
Next fiscal year after the next fiscal year coming.
Companies often arbitrarily pick. In the US retailers often start the year in like April so they can get all their holiday season earnings in the same fiscal year
Yes. What they're basically saying is it is due for release between now and the end of June 2027.
So it's like a Chinese new year thing? By that I mean not January.
Countries have different fiscal years! In New Zealand for example, the new fiscal year begins in April, and in Australia it begins in July.
The next Kingdom come? I had not have time yet to play the first two...
Isn't this the company that replaced staff with AI, or am I misremembering that? I love me some LOTR, but not sure I can support such actions. If I'm wrong, someone chime in so I can change my mind lol
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/kingdom-come-2-dev-uses-ai-but-not-for-final-game-assets/1100-6539741/
Long story short they fired a guy and at the time were replacing him with a different translator.
They've said they use ai in initial development as their artists etc like it.
They went on to say it would be unprofessional to comment on internal hr issues.
Seems more like a disgruntled employee from my read.
Thanks for clarifying! I was hoping it was being overblown at the time, but my news feeds just went silent on it and I hadn't had the thought to go look at what happen.
Yeah i was following it because I haven't bought kcdc2 yet because I'm still trying to beat the first one in preparation for it.
I didn't want to support ai bullshit but their stance on it seemed fair to me