Warhorse have revealed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, sequel to the 2018 open world action-RPG which you will likely remember for a couple of reasons: 1) its ostensibly faithful but inevitably skewed representations of race, gender and class in medieval Bohemia, which were amplified by its creative director Daniel Vávra's qualified endorsement of Gamergate, and 2) being a moderately entertaining, buggy and mucky chivalric fable in which you have to worry about keeping your sword sharp and eating food before it rots.
Going by the announcement video, the new game is the same game but with more cash to burn. It's the work of 250 people, with Jan Valta returning as composer. According to Vávra, "what we are making now is what it was supposed to be in the beginning, but we were not able to do it because we didn't have enough resources and experience."
]]>Ah who needs magic in RPGs anyway, right? Henry of Skalitz of Kingdom Come: Deliverance fame sure doesn't. If you're looking for another big RPG to tickle your tabard, Warhorse Studios' big RPG about life as a blacksmith turned soldier in medieval Europe is getting a free to play weekend.
]]>Whether or not famously difficult games should have an optional easy mode has long been a point of contention. But many already do, albeit unofficially, thanks to modders taking things into their own hands.
Take the fella who goes by "n00bplatformer", for example. He recently created an “Assist Mode” for run 'n’ gun action game Cuphead. It makes simple tweaks to some of the game’s systems, like granting players six hitpoints instead of the usual three, and boosting weapon damage an extra 50% so that boss battles don’t drag on so long.
]]>It's Thursday, and that means new free games on the Epic Store. Between now and February 20th there are two quite fight-y games up for grabs. The first is Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a rare medieval RPG that focuses more on historical stuff rather than the fantastical. Next up is Aztez, a side-scrolling brawler set in Aztec times when the only colours they had were red, white and black.
]]>I’m willing to bet that 100% of the people reading this have made no impact on medieval society. But now you’re thinking about it, aren’t you? The idea is settling into your brain, like a pre-medicine parasite bedding down in your grey matter. Don’t panic! I didn’t incept you for no reason, but instead to get you thinking about what you could make with Kingdom Come: Deliverance's just-released mod tools. The Bohemian landscape, its people, and its intrigue are now yours to manipulate, with a surprisingly large modding package from developers Warhorse Studios.
]]>Horses, that’s this week’s topic. Big galloping buddies full of teeth and flies. Brush ‘em, ride ‘em, put ‘em in your videogame. The RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, will appreciate it because this episode the pod squad are talking about their favourite saddlepals from the fantastical realms of this bewildering industry. Horses. They’re like big cats.
]]>If you believe (incorrectly) that there's no such thing as bad publicity, you may be impressed that people are still talking about publisher THQ Nordic GmbH. Their 'Ask Me Anything' Q&A session on 8chan - an infamous image-board permanently delisted from Google for hosting suspected child porn - got people chattering. Unfortunately it's the kind of chatter that has brought parent company THQ Nordic AB out of the woodwork to publicly apologise for the incident to "group employees, partners and consumers", although it's a predictably rote and half-hearted statement.
]]>"We're doing an 8chan AMA and we have no idea why," announced THQ Nordic on their Twitter account earlier this evening. If you're not aware, 8chan is an imageboard website which has been de-listed from Google search results for hosting "suspected child abuse content," and which is associated with Swatting and Gamergate.
THQ Nordic's marketing director has since apologised and claimed ignorance, but both are hard to believe.
]]>Nom Nom Nom Nom. Nom Nom. Nom. That was my impression of THQ Nordic acquiring various IPs as part of it's ongoing, unstoppable quest to presumably create some sort of bizarre Smash Bros knockoff where you can fight Sergeant Cortez from TimeSplitters as the goat from Goat Simulator. Warhorse, the team behind last year's Kingdom Come: Deliverance, is the latest studio to say hello to the inside of THQ Nordic's belly. Nom Nom Nom.
]]>While last year's Steam Awards were just a poll on the store, Valve are stepping up their game this year. Starting in a few minutes (at the time of writing) is the Steam Awards 2018 show, broadcasting live on the company's own Steam TV site. While I doubt there'll be anything as surprising as Epic's coup at the Game Awards before the holidays, there's still a chance for unexpected announcements in there, plus I'm curious just how fancy the show will be. Tune in here on Steam TV - the show starts soon. Below, a reminder of the categories and the nominees in the running.
Update: Show's over, and honestly I'm a bit underwhelmed, even starting with low expectations. No surprises, no human faces, no pageantry. Barely any time to breathe, even. The show began immediately with the awards and hammered through them in under twenty minutes. At least each of the winning studios recorded a little award acceptance clip - that was nice. You can see a recording of the show on the Steam Awards page here.
]]>Ho ho ho! John still hasn't returned after Christmas, missing presumed drowned in egg nog, so I'm filling in today. Valve have already blarbed about 2018's best-selling games so we're back on the weekly charts. Last week's top ten was largely familiar, though catching the tail end of the Steam Winter Sale has introduced a few surprises.
]]>OK, look, it isn't a Red Dead Redemption 2 edition, because Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't out for PC yet. But if I keep typing Red Dead Redemption 2 into this Google is going to be SO TRICKED and the clicks will pour in and Graham will give me a promotion!
]]>Daddy: Hey Toby, can I get your help with some work please?
Toby: OK, but they might be disappointed I'm a cat.
This week on Steam Charts, my three-year-old son tells us all about the top ten grossing games on Steam.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>If you fancy playing an RPG as a sleepwalker who can find themself in different places when they wake up, then must find their way navigating by the sun before they starve to death, Kingdom Come: Deliverance now has you covered. Developers Warhorse Studios today patched in a 'Hardcore Mode' making the medieval RPG more like a survival game, hiding UI elements like the health bar and compass while making existence tougher. Most interesting to me is Hardcore Mode mandating players pick two negative perks, ranging from a tapeworm to the aforementioned somnambulism.
Oh, and a new trailer gives a look at the upcoming village-building paid DLC.
]]>John is elsewhere this week, squeezed into Brendan's luggage for a flight to San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference, so I'm here for the regular rundown of last week's top-selling games on Steam. This week, the letters R, A, and S are well-represented with strong showings from both Mars and rats.
]]>Greetings, readers. John, your regular guide to this hollow summary of ceaseless material consumption, is missing. We presume he has angered the company overlords with some sort of ill-judged diatribe against corporate consolidation, and has subsequently been reassigned to another media outlet, possibly The Re-education Supplement, or Gulag's Weekly. Well, you won't find any such insubordination from me. I have only the purest intentions of telling you the top ten best sellers on Steam this week, with a secondary goal of reinforcing the cold emptiness of our predominant mercantile culture. Let's buy some games!
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an atypical roleplaying game even putting the lack of supernatural creatures aside. There's a greater focus on simulation, and a much steeper learning curve – getting into it is not easy or overly intuitive, especially compared to the majority of games that tend to lead you by the hand. Explanations for Kingdom Come's various systems are particularly hard to come by, so if you'd rather not bash your head (and indeed your lockpicks) against every secured door you see, then take a seat, pour yourself a Saviour Schnapps, and have a gander at our guide to the game. This article was updated on March 9th 2018 with another million side quests and things.
]]>The Middle Ages was no picnic. No wonder that, in so many RPGs, you tend to nick everything that hasn't been nailed down – anything to give you an edge over the harsh environment. Every true hero naturally includes lockpicking and maybe even pickpocketing as part of their repertoire – you don't save the world without first breaking a few locks. (Also, heads.) Despite its more grounded world and its more mundane protagonist, when it comes to stealing, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is really no different.
As you might expect, the game's most valuable items are usually stored behind locked doors or in secure chests, with complex locking mechanisms barring your way. That's why the Lockpicking skill is one of the most essential in the game. It doesn't matter if you want to get equipment, food or other treasures – they can all be locked away from prying eyes.
Therefore, this article reveals everything you need to know about lockpicking. We'll start with the lockpick itself, the most vital tool of every master thief. Then we'll introduce you to the skill and its various upgrades. After that, some advice on how to overcome locks more easily, and how not to get caught while doing so.
]]>Kingdom Come Deliverance: The Good Thief
This will likely be the first side quest you come across, unless you flee from Rattay immediately after waking up there. Once you've finished the intro and gathered your things, go and talk to Miller Peshek, who will give you this multi-part quest.
It seems you've racked up quite the debt by lying unconscious in his mill the past two weeks, which doesn't exactly seem fair, but then it is the Middle Ages. Peshek wants you to repay the money he's had to spend on herbalist appointments and whatnot, and if you want to be debt-free in 1403, you should get Peshek off your back ASAP. Unfortunately, the actions the miller requires of you are not exactly... savoury.
]]>Authenticity. Accuracy. Realism. If you’ve been following the debates around Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you'll have seen these words a lot, as well as others, like representation, racism and diversity. In the wake its release, there’s been a lot of talk about whether or not Warhorse Studios had been able to make good on their ambitions to deliver an RPG grounded in historical reality. It’s a natural question, but perhaps a better one might be: does the promise of historical accuracy make sense in the first place?
The game’s problems (and there are many) aren’t a symptom of a list of inaccuracies that could be fixed, but are rooted in the shaky, dangerous foundations on which those claims were built.
]]>Some Monday mornings, as I plonk myself down at my desk at 6.50am and load the RSS feed for the Steam Charts, I think to myself: you know what? There are so many other things I'd like to write about today. Anyway, here are the top ten games on Steam from the last week.
]]>A lot of people have tried to argue over the years that it's simply impossible to collate the top ten selling games on Steam from the last week, and then write a small comment accompanying each, beneath a screenshot. But today, for the first time, we hope to prove those people wrong.
]]>As the charting games on Steam once more congeal into a single amorphous lump, quickly dive in to catch the last appearance of Subnautica, and probably Slay The Spire too. Next week it'll just be GTA: Counter-Strike - Witcher Battlegrounds.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance deliberately doesn't allow you to save the game whenever you feel like it, insisting that you either buy or brew a bottle of something called Saviour Schnapps first. It's a heady beverage that saves your game even as it gets you drunk, and by the sounds of things it doesn't seem too easy a beverage to come by. While the game does autosave on occasion, it doesn't do so when you exit out, so it's understandable that one of the very first Kingdom Come mods is one that does away with this punishing save restriction.
]]>“Elder Scrolls without the magic,” is the elevator pitch for Warhorse's historical RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but magic is a relative term - it all depends on what you're used to. The game's stringent recreation of alchemy may seem downright paranormal, for example, if you're used to the streamlined, fire-and-forget approach of a game like Skyrim.
Given how many dungeons, dragons and mages RPGs tend to contain, Kingdom Come's strictly historical approach often seems more fantastical and mysterious than its peers. That mostly helped me to make my way through this open world RPG with a spring in my step, even when bugs and crashes threatened to spoil the experience, and the story fell flat and the sidequests became repetitive.
]]>Some websites will fob you off with scant details about your favourite best-selling games, but not RPS. Here you will find gaming's most insightful commentary on the leading games of the modern age.
]]>BAM. A sound captures your headphones and holds you hostage. It's the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We've been lying in wait for the past three weeks, consolidating our strength and preparing to kidnap you by the ear canals. "Listen up, 2018!" we shout out from atop this metaphor. "We have a list of demands and we're not releasing this poor listener until you've delivered! Or until the one hour playtime is up, whichever comes first!"
]]>As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework that exploded in the many midnights of New Year's celebrations was stuffed with games and they were still raining down across the world this morning. We cannot stop them, we cannot contain them, but we can attempt to understand them.
Hundreds of them will be worth our time and attention, but we've selected a few of the ones that excite us most as we prepare for another year of splendid PC gaming. There's something for everyone, from Aunt Maude, the military genius, to merry Ian Rogue, the man who hates permadeath and procedural generation with a passion.
]]>What do you mean there's a whole month of 2017 left? Well, the disembodied mouths of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, are tired of waiting. This week the team look at some of the most exciting upcoming games of 2018. Adam is looking forward to smashing big robots with other, bigger robots in Battletech. Matt wants to make trousers from dinosaur skin in Monster Hunter World. And Brendan forgot all about how much he's excited by surreal isometric detective game No Truce With The Furies.
We've also got some chat about Viking strategy game Northgard and yet more love for FTL follow-up Into The Breach. Plus, our Patch Adam quiz is back!
]]>The enormous open world is attractive and enticing, but it's Kingdom Come: Deliverance's skill trees that made me a believer in this historical RPG. Rather than providing mild improvements to sword-handling or stamina, the things you learn are traits that change the way your character interacts with the world and the people in it. It all suggests I'll be creating a person with knowledge and foibles as I play rather than tweaking a sheet of stats.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the historical RPG set in the 14th century, will feature rather a lot of brawling with grunting, armoured men, so Warhorse Studios has put together a detailed video on how the game’s combat system works. The studio is going for realism, basing the fighting techniques on medieval martial arts, so it looks a bit more involved than simply swinging your sword and hoping for the best -- my favoured combat style.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site], the swish-lookin' real-world medieval RPG from Warhose Studios, will arrive on February 13th, 2018. It's the tale of a lowly blacksmith's son in 14th century Bohemia (the Czech Republic, for younguns) who gets caught up in a civil war after his village is massacred. Here, a new trailer celebrating today's announcement gives a look at how that story kicks off:
]]>Ever since I read Edwin's early thoughts on medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site], in which he slung turds at a man who was singing a song he didn't like, I've been intrigued.
Warhorse Studios and Deep Silver have now put up a new trailer featuring a lot of good-looking environments and townsfolk going about their daily routines (as well as teasing a bit of non-specific news for next Friday).
]]>I would say "Sound the Brian Blessed warning alarm!" but goodness me, the man is his own warning alarm. Surely you'll hear him long before you meet him in Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site]. Yup, Brian Blessed (aka Blesso, the Blesser, Bless Up, the Blessinator, and BeeBee) has lent his voice and face to a character in the open-world medieval RPG. In a new dev video about the cast and motion-capture, Brible seems quite enthusiastic about how the real-world setting makes Deliverance educational.
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site] is about the ring of steel on steel, the august machinery of feudal politics and the intricacies of village society. It's also about throwing turds at houses, as I discovered during a hands-off showing of the game's prologue area. The house in question belongs to a man who has been singing the virtues of the German-backed Hungarian invasion of Bohemia at a nearby tavern. As proud Bohemians, it's up to Mr Protagonist and his fellow yokels to defend the country's honour by, in this case, carpet-bombing a small piece of it with dung.
]]>This is a grown man being kicked in the chest while wearing a full suit of armour. The folks behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site], the medieval RPG that is replacing magic, goblins and fantasy with realistic combat and rotting food, have released a development diary showing off the armour system while playing dress-up. It's extensive. While most games of its ilk would be satisfied with offering helmets, chest plates, boots and gloves, here there will be four layers of armour, with a grand total of 16 slots for all the wearable bits, including a coif, which is something I just had to look up.
(It's a head thing.)
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site], you may recall, is Warhorse Studios' heartily-crowdfunded medieval RPG that drops fantasy in favour of realism. It's a novel idea - stripping the genre of orcs, magic and dragons; instead focusing on meticulous combat, stat-building and consequence-bearing dialogue - and its CryEngine-powered getup has so far impressed in both its astute sword fighting sequences and moments of reflection.
Originally scheduled to release in late 2015, then this summer, it now won't be ready until sometime in 2017, Warhorse have now announced.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site] is a crowd-funding success story about hitting knights with swords in first person. It's aiming to be a realistic RPG, where levelling up and getting loot will help you out, but there will be no magic, no goblins and your skill with a sword will determine your fate more than your stat line. That combat has been detailed in a recent developer diary, which digs deep on not only the strive for realism but the serious challenges encountered on that path.
]]>This looks like people actually fighting. Like, properly clobbering each other with swords and boots and such. Whatever else successfully Kickstarted (and its own subsequent campaign, which combined has brough in well over $2m) medial RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance [official site] ends up doing well or poorly, it's gone to town on solid-looking, crunchy animation.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance makes medieval life look so pleasant in its latest trailer. Developers Warhorse have built something beautiful in CryEngine, and are showing off its fields, ponds, meadows, sheep, villages, and taverns in little slices of life. How splendid. They don't show any of the warfare the open-world not-fantasy RPG's actually built around, though. Still, just imagine men with swords hitting each other in the background of these tranquil scenes. Soldiers march between the pines. The fisherman stares intently at his rod, hoping the two blokes duking it out ignore him. A severed head flies past the praying lady's window, briefly obscuring the moon.
]]>But not on a version of the delightful mobile game Space Team. Sometimes my headlines get away from me, take on lives of their own, and begin pulling nefarious pranks on innocent passersby. I apologize. I blame the public schooling system. But anyway, the two members of Kickstarter's Might As Well Be Triple-A contingent, Star Citizen and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, are joining forces to sensually swap technology and probably tell each other all kinds of deeply personal secrets. I hope Star Citizen gets space horses. (Which, when couched in the previous metaphor, sounds like some kind of infectious disease. Clarification: I do not hope that Star Citizen gets the fictitious disease Space Horses.)
]]>"While we don't have dragons, we have chickens," has just become my favourite developer quote of all time. For a brief moment I was imagining a world-dominating chicken that people would live in terror of. The giant beak, the angry peck, the awkward, flappy attempt at flight... terrifying. But context is important, and in this case that quote is about Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game that doesn't have dragons because it wants to be a reasonably realistic portrayal of medieval life. That means it doesn't have giant chooks, either. The chicken example is just a way of introducing the game's AI, which promises to have day and night cycles for the animals as well as the humans. Why not join Felix Baumgartner below the cut to find out more?
]]>Kingdom Come's crowd-funding effort is still sparking away on the grind-stone of Kickstarter, honing the edge that it'll need to slice through the metal, meat, and bone of... wait, I've accidentally moved from a metaphor into an actual description. It's because I just watched a video detailing the medieval RPG's sword-fighting system, and it looks nicely balanced. They've taken three basic attacks to six zones on the body, meaning you have 18 basic attacks that leads into a deadly dance of parrying, angled slashes. Will it crack the Holy Grail of FPS melee combat?
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance contains the opposite of 'infinite dragons', which is to say that it contains 'no dragons'. Not one. Instead, the Kickstarter project from the super-group made up of Mafia and ARMA developers contains lots and lots of people, all fighting, living and exploring in a believable fashion. Nathan has shared his impressions of an early demo and the latest development video shows that Warhorse don't need a world full of orcs and elves to give their characters variety. Customisation is the key, and clothing, body types, faces and hair will all be constructed and altered using what the developers claim is the greatest character customisation tool ever invented. It certainly looks impressive, as can be seen in the video below, and I admire any game that allows me to wash the blood out of my clothes.
]]>Warhorse pitched an ambitious project. Kingdom Come: Deliverance wants to be Skyrim meets The Witcher, but without all the pretend stuff like dragons. NO DRAGONS?! you cry in fear and rage. No, but it's okay, because there are just so many swords. This ultro-historical epic comes from a Czech team of super-developers, they behind things like Mafia and ARMA, and they say things like, "Combat is calculated entirely with inverse kinematics, so it’s not even animated."
It's working. So far Deliverance has made well over half a million pounds, and they only asked for £300,000. What are people doing?! They've gone mad! But give give give we all are, and there's now a new video explaining more about the game's world.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance didn't quite win me over during a recent demo, but it certainly got me galloping toward its corner. Evidently, I'm not the only one, given that it's already made enough money to buy its own kingdom. It's preposterous with a capital Osterous, and I doubt it'll be slowing down any time soon. But maybe you're still on the fence. And that's fine. I respect your most-annoying-person-in-the-ice-cream-line-like discernment. But I must say, Warhorse sure seems to be on the right track, and its approach to modding is no different.
]]>Nathan's excitement over Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a realistic open-world medieval RPG, has translated to Kickstarter success. The project is now funded, defeating the dragon (£300,000 funding target) with a swinging blow after only three days. With 27 days still remaining, they might be able to buy their own castle.
]]>Kingdom Come: Deliverance has kind of a silly name, but it's one heck of an intriguing prospect. The hyper-detailed historical RPG heralds from a small army of developers who once steered the creation of Mafia and Arma, among many others. Despite coming from a relatively small team by triple-A standards, the game's production values are through the roof, and the dev team really wants it all: Skyrim-like exploration, a Mount and Blade-style world, entirely procedural combat, and choice reactivity inspired by The Witcher. Can Warhorse pull it off? I checked out an early build of the game and talked extensively with project director Daniel Vávra to find out if they're on the right track.
]]>If Mafia-director-led team Warhorse has its way, Kingdom Come: Deliverance will be gigantic. Like, hundreds of hours gigantic, when it's all said and done. But this is a smaller team designing a colossal open world full of stories, NPCs, and - yes - warhorses. It was never going to be easy. So Warhorse is doing two things to stave off the monetary death siege banging down its doors: 1) slicing the main plot up into three episodic acts and, yes, 2) going to Kickstarter. But even a successful £300,000 crowdfunding drive won't be enough to pull this cart over the figurative mountain. A mysterious outside benefactor will handle the rest, apparently. I spoke with director Daniel Vávra about how that will affect the game, if players will still influence development, and whether hacking such a cohesive world into pieces will hurt the final product.
]]>A hyper-detailed historical RPG from the main folks behind Mafia? Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Ahem. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a nonlinear role-player set in the dying days of the Holy Roman Empire, and it features precisely zero monsters, magic, or mythical overtones. Instead, the focus is on accuracy, and who better to head up that effort than the former director of Mafia and Mafia II? Developer Warhorse is made up of vets from 2K Czech and Arma powerhouse Bohemia, so expect obsessive attention to detail. Sadly (and somewhat paradoxically) insubstantial teaser trailer below.
]]>
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "שחרורו של Assassin's Creed Shadows נדחה למרץ כאשר מועצת המנהלים של Ubisoft שוקל מכירת חברה")
