

The core of this is making sure that combat isn’t always at the centre of your interactions with the world. Warhorse Studios have avoided Early Access too, taking the £1.1 million they made on Kickstarter and investing it in a very traditional game development cycle – expanding the team from 20 people to a full 100 and getting ready for launch four years later.


For a small team out of Eastern Europe it’s remarkably ambitious, but in a way that has a clear end goal rather than a nebulous, difficult-to-polish sandbox that meanders for too long. On top of that is built a first-person-only combat system in a beautiful world and it all works far better than I would have thought. Far from a bold move for the Mount & Blade crown, Kingdom Come wants to be a realistic medieval Skyrim, taking you on a long adventure of side-quests, dialogue trees, and investigation. ‘This will mostly be a sandbox,’ ‘I’m not expecting a lot of story,’ ‘What is there will be too ambitious for its own good’ and, overall, ‘This is not for me’. I had made a lot of assumptions about Kingdom Come: Deliverance before sitting down to play it.
