Recently, an all-new title named Kingmakers was revealed, with the initial showcase lifting the lid on a medieval action-RTS game with some extremely unique elements. In Kingmakers, players are charged with time-travelling back to medieval England and altering the course of history, making use of vast armies, stalwart castles, and attack helicopters. That’s not a typo.
Kingmakers looks fantastic at first blush, boasting intense battles and the ability to build an empire and change the world around you. It’s being developed by Redemption Road, and I recently caught up with the game’s creators to take a deep dive into the project and get the full gist of what’s going on.
We Need To Go Back!
Kingmakers generated a lot of hype following the drop of the first trailer just days ago. At first glance, it’s a bizarre game that fuses gun-toting, explosive combat with horseback cavalry charges and sword fights on open fields beneath towering castles. In the trailer, we saw snipers picking off battle commanders from hundreds of years ago and saw attack helicopters performing strafing runs against legions of shield-wielding, olde-worlde warriors.
But it’s not a satirical game by any means. I recently sat down with Ian and Paul Fisch from Redemption Road to talk about Kingmakers.
I was very interested to learn about the origins of the game, given that it’s such a huge step away from the developer’s first game.
IF: One of our internal pitches was “What if you could bring back modern weapons to medieval England?”. We all loved the idea but realized that if we were gonna do this, we had to do it right. We couldn’t have just a few dozen soldiers on the field. That wouldn’t be historically accurate nor would it do the concept justice. We needed to have thousands of soldiers on the field. We also weren’t willing to sacrifice any of the high-fidelity animations, physics, and hit reactions, that you’d expect from a AAA shooter like The Last of Us 2.’
Paul Fisch then revealed that, once upon a time, an idea was pitched to move Kingmakers to a Roman setting, after being inspired by the story of Rome Sweet Rome. Ultimately, keeping the game in a medieval setting was determined to be ‘more iconic’. It was also said that Army of Darkness was a big inspiration for the scale of the action in Kingmakers.
Kingmakers – which Paul revealed has been in development for several years – will have a meaningful campaign that’ll feature more than ‘quick jump-in random battles’. There’s a desire to have ‘many alternate futures that can be created by the players’ actions in the past.’
The Depth of Kingmakers
I asked Ian Fisch how deep Kingmakers would run. It turns out there’s a mission to create a far-reaching and immersive campaign that players will want to enjoy for hours on end.
IF: We’re trying to create the ultimate medieval fantasy. That means building up an empire, taking castles, conquering territory, etc. It’s not just a string of random battles, but an immersive campaign, where you build up settlements, capture enemy outposts, train and promote soldiers, etc.
Together, Ian and Paul dished about the game’s technology. I learned that Kingmakers has a solid foundation with advanced animation systems, AI pathfinding, and online multiplayer mechanics. With ‘thousands of soldiers’ being on screen at once, a huge part of the development cycle has been ensuring that the game remains stable at all times.
Presently, Ian and Paul are focusing on cooperative gameplay, but they exclusively revealed that they want to have player-vs-player combat in Kingmakers at some point in the future.
PF: We are certainly interested in PvP and internally pitch ideas about it to each other at least once a month. At one point there was even a rough playable with PvP mechanics. It is absolutely something we are looking at in the future.
Kingmakers is in development now and is planned for release in 2024 – it can be wishlisted on Steam now.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that a playable prototype of TimeSplitters 4 has been found
