“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” wrote Chaucer. But you’d trained hard with that crossbow, and let any man in bolting distance try to claim you hadn’t mastered it. You never wanted to go to war, but the crops were failing, you’d just lost your seventeenth child to medium-pox, and dark portents swirled on the horizon like curdled goat’s milk. Also, the actual goat’s milk was curdling.
In that tent, you’d communed with angels, and the righteous fury of all the heavens coursed through every fibre of your being. You’d likely die today, you knew. But you’d die knowing you did all you could to put this fair kingdom to rights. You step outside, breathe deep the morning air, and immediately eat a point blank pump-action shotgun to the torso. Then you lose both your legs to the tank shell. Then someone runs over your corpse with a dirtbike. Bloody typical.
Kingmakers made memeish waves when it was first teased last February, and while it’d be easy to write it off as just a one-note joke based on an inherently goofy power imbalance (you have guns and tanks, they have swords and horses), there does look to be a bit more occurring here. It’s a four-player co-op action game where you’ll be also able to command armies a la Mount & Blade, and build fortifications on the fly a la, uh, Fortnite I guess. I estimate the simple joys of shotgun vs pikeman will last for about forty minutes, but assuming the strategy layer holds up, I’m still very much into this.
I’m currently playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on the single-save honour mode, and Kingmakers looks to have its own honour mode of sorts, too, should you fancy it. As mentioned in this dev Q&A, you’ll be able to use a sword and shield, so it sounds like you can theoretically ignore the helicopters and grenade launchers and just get stuck in the melee. I’m not sure why you would, mind. Honour is for chumps that didn’t bring enough helicopters. Kingmakers releases in early access October 8th on Steam.
