Just five days before it was set to launch into early access on Steam, the medieval-modern combat sim Kingmakers has been delayed—and, somewhat worryingly, it doesn’t have a new release target.
The delay message focuses primarily on developer Redemption Road’s technical ambitions, which are very high: The studio says it “set out to push the Unreal Engine 4 codebase to its absolute limits, while still providing 60fps to midrange PCs, without the need for fake frames.”
After describing Kingmaker’s mix of massive scale and granular physics and reactivity, all of it built around “full drop-in/drop-out four-player multiplayer support,” Redemption Road said it needs “a bit more time on content polish before we feel good about charging money for it.”
“So that is what we’re doing now,” the studio wrote. “We’re making sure everyone who buys the game is enthralled and feels like their money was well spent. We want this to be the case whether you have a top-of-the-line rig or a PC that’s seen better days.”
The delay message makes no mention of a new release target, nor does the Steam page, which now says only that Kingmakers is “coming soon.” That feels a little odd for a game that was due to launch in less than a week—typically you can at least spitball how many more weeks or months you’ll need when you’re this close to the finish line—and it’s sparked a certain amount of blowback from some followers, who have accused the game of being a scam of some sort and even made comparisons to infamous survival game flameout The Day Before.
Regardless of what’s going on here, I don’t think it’s reasonable to call the game a “scam” when there’s been no crowdfunding, preorders, or other exchange of legal tender for lofty promises. It sucks that we have to wait (especially when the game was so close to release) and Kingmakers may ultimately not live up to its promise, but at this point that’s really all it is: disappointing and kind of weird.
