Hot on the heels of having recently celebrated five million sales of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, developer Warhorse Studio is now getting ready to celebrate the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The studio has announced a livestream to celebrate the anniversary of the original’s release. This livestream will take place on February 13th at 7:30 AM PST/4:30 PM CET, and will feature global PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, and lead designer Krokop Jirsa.
No real details have been revealed about the core subject of the livestream, aside from it simply being a celebration of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. However, the announcement has led many to believe that Warhorse Studio might finally confirm that it is bringing the open-world RPG to modern consoles. A Reddit thread discussing this announcement has noted that the Xbox store listing for Kingdom Come: Deliverance already has the logo for the current-gen Xbox Series X/S. This, they believe, means that a shadow-drop of the original is happening soon.
Rumors about Kingdom Come: Deliverance coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S have been going on for quite some time now, especially since Warhorse Studio has wrapped up all of the work on its post-launch expansions for the sequel.
Just last month, a PlayStation Store listing for the title was spotted indicating that it has been “Updated for PlayStation 5”. These updates seemingly include 4K support, high-resolution textures, and smoother frame rates. Unfortunately, the listing didn’t indicate whether it would be a free upgrade for those who already own the title, or if it would be a paid one.
For its part, Warhorse Studios has largely stayed quiet about its plans for the future. Following the release of the Mysteria Ecclesiae DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 back in November, however, Jirsa had said that the studio has been working on “something new on the horizon”. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t reveal any more details.
Jirsa had also previously spoken about the development of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and how the studio had to stand its ground against negative feedback from playtests. He noted that a major complaint was the feeling of weakness among the players, which was an intentional design decision.
“We had playtests where some players started a game, did something wrong, immediately got arrested, and gave negative feedback,” he said. “We had the strength to say, ‘Yes, that’s what we want.’” Jirsa went on to note that players feeling weak was an intentional design decision, since it would further improve the sense of accomplishments when they got stronger. “We want the player at the beginning to feel extremely weak,” he explained, “because then the validation of gaining strength feels earned.”
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The first game, on the other hand, is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Current-gen console players can check out the older open-world RPG thanks to backwards compatibility support. However, a port to modern consoles would likely help quite a bit with smoothing out performance issues faced by the older consoles.
