Time-twisting medieval shooter Kingmakers has been delayed, days before launch

One of the most-wanted games on Steam, medieval shooter Kingmakers has been delayed at the last minute by developer Redemption Road. Long scheduled to launch on Wednesday October 8, the grand-scale fusion injects the modern cars and weapons of GTA into massive medieval battlefields, and that premise has seen it soar to become the sixth most-wishlisted upcoming PC game on the Valve store. That planned date has just been canned, with no replacement given in its place, leaving the future of Kingmakers uncertain, but the developer is preparing a "half-hour-long deep dive" to reassure any worried fans.

"After much contemplation, we realize that the scheduled Kingmakers launch on October 8 will no longer be possible," Redemption Road writes. "We want to apologize to all the fans who are eagerly anticipating this game. We are sorry for letting you down." It explains that the decision to postpone was made to ensure that Kingmakers delivers without making cuts or compromises to get it out earlier. The trailers have whipped up a firestorm of speculation around whether it'll be one of the best action games in years, or all show and no substance, so the studio is eager to deliver from day one of its early-access release.

"Why is Kingmakers being delayed? In short, it's an incredibly ambitious, uncompromising game, and we don't want to cut any planned features for the sake of getting it out of the door earlier," the team explains. "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 out to push the Unreal Engine 4 codebase to its absolute limits, while still providing true 60fps to midrange PCs, without the need for fake frames," the indie dev says. "We are an 80% engineering team, who got into this business to push technological barriers. We currently have tens of thousands of soldiers, each with AI and pathfinding that rivals what you'd expect from a triple-A third-person shooter."

"When you walk away from a battle, it continues to play out. Nothing is faked," Redemption Road continues. "We have giant six-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. When you drive a car into a tree, you're ejected through the windshield, the tree breaks from its stump, and then rolls over whatever hapless soldiers are along its path."

The developer reiterates that it's working at colossal scale: "Every mission has a massive map that each player on the server is free to explore, with or without their own personal army of thousands. We set out to do all of this, with full drop-in, drop-out four-player multiplayer, and we have. We just need a bit more time on content polish before we feel good about charging money for it."

"So that is what we are doing now. 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. Thank you so much for all of your love and support. We hope we are doing everything we can to earn it."

Some players raise concern around why this delay was announced so close to the planned Kingmakers release date, and ask why it hasn't been given a new time frame. To reassure worried users that this isn't a Day Before-style situation, Redemption Road promises that a half-hour gameplay deep dive will be shown "very soon, with a comprehensive overview of everything we've been working on."

As we wait for that, you can enjoy the best medieval games on PC right now, and check in on the latest Kingmakers system requirements.

Are you happy to wait any length of time for Kingmakers, or has the delay made you look to other games instead? Drop by the PCGamesN community Discord server and tell us what you've been playing.