Redemption Road Games has delayed its medieval shooter Kingmakers because it needs more time to deliver on its "incredibly ambitious" and technically demanding premise. The game was previously scheduled to launch on Steam on October 8, and currently does not have a new release date.
Kingmakers lead coder Ian Fisch shared a detailed explanation for the game's delay on Steam, at once hyping up what indeed sounds like a genuinely innovative game while also admitting that the developers simply need more time to stick the landing.
"It's an incredibly ambitious, uncompromising game, and we don't want to cut any planned features, for the sake of getting it out the door earlier. Our goal, from the start, has been to create something that's nothing like anything else on the market, in terms of gameplay, scale, scope, and interactivity.
"With Kingmakers, we set to push the Unreal Engine 4 codebase to its absolute limits, while still providing true 60 FPS to midrange PCs, without the need for fake frames," the update reads. "We are an 80% engineering team, who got into this business to push technological barriers."
Even from a purely conceptual perspective, Kingmakers is a pretty wild idea. Basically, a massive war happened 500 years ago that changed the course of history in catastrophic ways. Your job is to go back in time equipped with a modern arsenal of weapons including assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, armored SUVs, air strikes, and more, and teach medieval denizens the power of 21st century metal.
Battles take place in a fully real-time simulation with up many thousands of soldiers fighting at the same time, trained by what Redemption calls "next-gen multi-threaded AI."
"We currently have tens of thousands of soldiers, each with AI and pathfinding that rivals what you'd expect from a AAA third persons shooter," the developer says.
"When you walk away from a battle, it continues to play out. Nothing is faked. We have giant 6 story castles where every room can be entered and every wall, floor, and ceiling destroyed. When you build a Lumbermill, it's a real place that can be entered, or, in an enemy invasion, turned into a combat arena."
Redemption says it set out to do all of this with support for "full drop-in/drop-out 4 player multiplayer," and while it feels it's been successful, it needs "a bit more time on content polish" to feel good about "charging money for it."
In the meantime, get up close and personal with the best FPS games to play right now.
