Developer Redemption Road and publisher tinyBuild have announced that ambitious upcoming action-strategy sandbox hybrid game Kingmakers has been delayed until next year.
In an announcement on Steam (which is, rather amusingly, worded as though it were an old-timey town crier decree), the two studios say that Kingmakers will now launch "nay later than the end o' Q1 2025". I suppose the originally-slated release window of 2024 was pretty much unattainable given we're in December now.
The premise of Kingmakers is a pretty novel one; it revolves around players being able to travel back in time with modern weaponry and lay waste to medieval armies in order to change the course of a war and "stave off the apocalypse".
It's not a million miles away from the premise of 2009 FPS Darkest of Days, although Kingmakers isn't an FPS; rather, it's an ambitious and sprawling mixture of action, strategy, city-building, and sandbox gameplay.
You'll engage in battles in which soldiers are "controlled by a next-gen multi-threaded AI" and animated by "a unique procedural animation system". In those battles, you'll use modern weaponry like machine guns, attack helicopters, and air strikes to "wreak absolute havoc on the battlefield".
The game will also feature base-building elements and real-time strategy gameplay; you'll be able to zoom out and issue orders to your soldiers before joining the fray yourself, watching the plan you've built be executed in real time.
Kingmakers may not be out yet, but its publisher tinyBuild clearly has faith that it's going to be a smash hit. Back in August, the studio announced that a Kingmakers movie is in production in conjunction with movie studio Story Kitchen.
We still don't have a full release date for Kingmakers yet, but given the financial straits tinyBuild appears to be in right now, it likely can't come soon enough. You can wishlist the game on Steam right now if you want to keep up with its progress.
