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Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Unless you’re living under a rock (read: don’t regularly check your Lifeinvader feed), you’ll know that Grand Theft Auto 6 has been delayed. Rockstar’s mega-sequel had been targeting a fall 2025 launch date, but will now release in May 2026. Turns out, this is yet another reason for me to pitch those yet unconverted on the idea of playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
I get that this sounds like a ridiculous logical leap. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Grand Theft Auto, on the surface, don’t have much in common. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is set in medieval Bohemia, while GTA is one of the few triple-A games that is set in our own, grounded world. No fantasy or sci-fi component, not the past or the future — it’s here and now.
Though GTA’s world is slightly exaggerated and satirical, it’s still the biggest game representing (a pretty realitic version of) our world.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a big game, but not a massive one, with two manageable maps. GTA 6, meanwhile, will probably let us explore the entire state of Florida. And, most importantly, GTA is about having a good time riding around in a nice car, while KCD2 is about having a bad time riding a horse.
But in order to understand why Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 had such a massive launch this year, we need to take a look at the Rockstar game that is about horseback antics: Red Dead Redemption 2.
Drawing A Line From RDR2 To KCD2
The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance launched seven months before Red Dead Redemption 2, all the way back in February 2018. It was a breakout hit for fledgling developer Warhorse Studios, but not a massive hit by industry standards. Over the course of its first six years, it sold eight million copies. Nothing to sneeze at, but in the same ballpark as, for example, Days Gone. Quite good, but not indicative of a major industry shift.
So it would be understandable if you were a bit surprised to see Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 come out of the chute with one million sales on its first day of release. In the three months since, it’s shifted two million more copies.
The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance game has been boosted by its sequel’s success, and is up to ten million copies sold.
Why did KCD2 do so much better than its predecessor? Well, you can obviously point to the fact that it’s a sequel, with all that goes along with that. If they’re good, sequels tend to sell better than originals because they have an established foundation of fans and can expand outward from that base. That wouldn’t matter if the quality wasn’t there, though, and Warhorse knows how to make games better now, in general, than it did in 2018, and how to make this specific game better, in particular. That know-how led to a raft of 10/10 reviews.
Including from TheGamer’s Sam Hallahan.
But I’d argue that players were more ready for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 because the ground had shifted significantly in the seven years between games. Much of that is thanks to Red Dead Redemption 2 selling 70 million copies and shifting the mindsets of players who only buy one or two mainstream games a year.
How Red Dead Redemption 2 Reshaped Player Expectations
Red Dead Redemption 2 was critically acclaimed upon release, but there was a solid segment of critics and players who simply rejected what it was going for. I remember Dan Ryckert, then at Giant Bomb, saying that he loved the original Red Dead Redemption, spent hundreds of hours playing it, but just thought RDR2 wasn’t fun. This wasn’t an uncommon sentiment; Red Dead Redemption 2 did a bunch of things in hyper-specific ways and you had to get on its wavelength if you had a prayer of enjoying it.
For example, basic things could be tough. I took a day off to play the game when it launched back in 2018 and spent most of the day pissed off because I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to lasso a guy. Walking was slow, and as per usual in a Rockstar game, you had to hammer the X button if you wanted to speed up. Every button did the thing you wanted to do, but also 12 other things you didn’t want to do, so you might press L2 to say howdy… but you might also shoot someone in the head.
The other side of the coin is that actions have a really nice, lived-in feeling, too. You can’t press square at a washtub to take a bath. You ride to town, head to the hotel, pay for a bath, then watch Arthur get scrubbed. Blackjack doesn’t play out on a separate screen designed for it, you play it in-world. Fast travel is localized to train stations. If you want money for the meat from deer you shot, you better be prepared to haul its carcass back to town.
Arthur Morgan Lives On In Henry Of Skalitz
That spirit lives on in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It’s a game where you need to go back to your own specific bed if you want to sleep — and you do need sleep, or else your vision will start to go blurry. It’s a game with ridiculous sword fight controls that make me feel like a jackass even when I’m taking on wild dogs and low-level guards. It’s a game where food can spoil and poison you, where you will be branded or sent to the stocks if you get caught breaking the law, and where that’s a real danger tied to misbehaving because NPCs will remember your face and what you did.
In a lot of important ways, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a spiritual descendant of Red Dead Redemption 2. Red Dead Redemption 2 wasn’t the first game to take this approach (in fact, it has a lot in common with Breath of the Wild, released the year before). And there have been plenty of games that push players in similar ways, like Elden Ring. But its sales and release date make it nearly undeniable that Red Dead Redemption 2 is the game that made this shift possible.
And if you like GTA, there’s a good chance you like Red Dead, too. So, as you wait for Rockstar’s next open-world hit to take over your life, don’t sleep on the 2024 game that might do the same thing if you give it a chance.
