You May Have heard of this game over the past year or so and be wondering where the hell the PS4 version is. As it goes, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is causing more of a stir than most Kickstarter alumni, promising an authentic medieval RPG experience that does away with elves, dragons and comical arrows to knees and replaces them with weighty melee combat, sprawling countryside and horribly painful and realistic arrows to shinbones. The game has been in the kiln for a while, and while we knew that a PS4 version was planned alongside the PC release, until now there have been barely any updates on the matter. Luckily for you, we’ve completed an RPG fetch quest of our own and spoken to Daniel Vávra, the game’s director, who seems confident with how everything is going.
“Development is always difficult,” he explains. “When it’s not, you are doing something wrong! So we are solving many problems every day, but it’s our job. Overall,I am quite happy with where we are [with the game]. I think that we have good creative people who like the game they are making and it can be seen in the results.”
He’s confident that the big experiment is working out, and the game is currently in the alpha stage on PC. This aura of confidence extends to how Warhorse is building the game for multiple platforms. “One of the reasons why we chose CryEngine 3 was that it’s multi-platform and we would not need to spend too much time with porting,” he tells us. “Currently, our main goal is to get all the core features working on PC and when this is ready, optimise it for other platforms. But we already have working ports on consoles without much effort, so hopefully there will be no major problem. We have a PS4 version already. It’s slow and unstable at the moment, but we needed very little effort to make it happen. Our target is to have all platforms ready at the same time.”
One would be forgiven for taking a brief look at the trailers for Kingdom Come and seeing it as just another Western RPG, where the first-person perspective has more than a hint of Skyrim about it. What this game offers that others don’t is authenticity at every level. There are examples of this oozing out of the game’s every pore, from NPC routines that can be directly affected by you and real-time wear and tear to armour and clothing, right through to a needs system that requires you to eat and drink to stay healthy.
Combat is also designed to be realistic and something that Vávra saw as key during the game’s development. “It’s one of the most complicated and risky tasks,” he explains. “We are still iterating to get the best compromise between controls, realism and CPU efficiency.”
Whatever happens, we still won’t know for sure when Kingdom Come will charge onto PS4 even Warhorse itself doesn’t know. It seems to be in a pretty good state on PC that belies its alpha status, so we can assume that it’ll be late this year or early 2016 before a concrete PS4 release emerges. It’s one to keep an eye on, though, as Daniel Vávra and his team are hell-bent on creating an RPG experience like no other.
“I always say that this game should work as kind of a time machine are you interested in history, fencing, battles, medieval culture, architecture and good story? Then this is your chance to experience it as close to as it was as possible. And we are trying to give you as much freedom as possible, so you can really enjoy it and explore the world any way you want.”
“Development is always difficult,” he explains. “When it’s not, you are doing something wrong! So we are solving many problems every day, but it’s our job. Overall,I am quite happy with where we are [with the game]. I think that we have good creative people who like the game they are making and it can be seen in the results.”
He’s confident that the big experiment is working out, and the game is currently in the alpha stage on PC. This aura of confidence extends to how Warhorse is building the game for multiple platforms. “One of the reasons why we chose CryEngine 3 was that it’s multi-platform and we would not need to spend too much time with porting,” he tells us. “Currently, our main goal is to get all the core features working on PC and when this is ready, optimise it for other platforms. But we already have working ports on consoles without much effort, so hopefully there will be no major problem. We have a PS4 version already. It’s slow and unstable at the moment, but we needed very little effort to make it happen. Our target is to have all platforms ready at the same time.”
“DEVELOPMENT IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT. WHEN IT’S NOT, YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG”We’ve spent a couple of hours exploring the small slice of the Kingdom of Bohemia that is currently available, and it has been impressive. Even at this stage, textures, lighting and model detail are through the roof, which bodes well for beady-eyed graphics fanatics and is hopefully a good sign for how Kingdom Come will look when it finally reaches PlayStation 4.
One would be forgiven for taking a brief look at the trailers for Kingdom Come and seeing it as just another Western RPG, where the first-person perspective has more than a hint of Skyrim about it. What this game offers that others don’t is authenticity at every level. There are examples of this oozing out of the game’s every pore, from NPC routines that can be directly affected by you and real-time wear and tear to armour and clothing, right through to a needs system that requires you to eat and drink to stay healthy.
Combat is also designed to be realistic and something that Vávra saw as key during the game’s development. “It’s one of the most complicated and risky tasks,” he explains. “We are still iterating to get the best compromise between controls, realism and CPU efficiency.”
Whatever happens, we still won’t know for sure when Kingdom Come will charge onto PS4 even Warhorse itself doesn’t know. It seems to be in a pretty good state on PC that belies its alpha status, so we can assume that it’ll be late this year or early 2016 before a concrete PS4 release emerges. It’s one to keep an eye on, though, as Daniel Vávra and his team are hell-bent on creating an RPG experience like no other.
“I always say that this game should work as kind of a time machine are you interested in history, fencing, battles, medieval culture, architecture and good story? Then this is your chance to experience it as close to as it was as possible. And we are trying to give you as much freedom as possible, so you can really enjoy it and explore the world any way you want.”