Medieval times have always fascinated game developers and players, but recent titles like Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Crusader Kings 3 have breathed new life into the period. Now, Chronicles: Medieval, the first title from Raw Power Games, hopes to explore the era in a new way by giving players their own medieval story to craft. It’s a massively ambitious open-world sandbox where players can do everything from become a merchant to command massive armies.
“When we were thinking of a sandbox game, a breathing world and the player forging their own story, medieval times just felt like a good setting,” senior game designer Andrzej Zawadzki tells Inverse, “Not only is it rich in terms of events, characters, and things to explore, but because of how diverse it was and how and how much the period changed over time.”
With Chronicles: Medieval revealed at Summer Game Fest, Inverse had the chance to talk to Zawadzki and senior community manager Clements Koch about Raw Power’s medieval ambitions.
Raw Power has over 100 developers, many of whom have worked on franchises like The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto. When ideas for Chronicles began to form, Zawadzki says the team was heavily inspired by other medieval games, like Crusader Kings 3, Mount & Blade, and Battle Brothers. Those titles all bring something unique to the setting, and now Chronicles hopes to provide something different too: an experience that truly molds itself around the player’s choices.
It’s a bit difficult to parse what kind of game Chronicles will be, but sandbox is the most apt description. Essentially, it’s an open world players can run around in as they see fit, while a complex simulation runs in the background. NPCs will have their own schedules, factions will pursue their own agendas, and events can happen without the player’s input. But players can “stir the pot,” creating a delicate balancing act of emergent chaos and a dynamic world that feels responsive. Zawadskzi describes an example where part of the world has been hit by bandit raids, creating lawlessness.
“Maybe all the merchants and traders aren’t happy with it, so they won’t send caravans there. But that is a cause for the black market to grow, and you can start finding different wares you couldn’t before,” Zawadzki says. “We’re thinking about how we can make these choices and player actions forged into something persistent that is affecting the world. And not a purely good or bad thing, but something different that players just weren’t expecting.”
Despite the sandbox focus, Zawadzki clarifies that Chronicles will still have a central narrative and quests to pursue. “There’s a lot of narrative happening in the background, or events that are happening because the world is living,” Zawadzki says. “Maybe there’s a conflict starting, or maybe there’s a plague. We want to make sure that this is also the story of the world itself. There will be quests you can follow, but it’s not like we are trying to make a story with sandbox elements on the side. It’s more of you being in the world and following certain steps. If you want to be a knight, do this. If you want to be a bandit, do this.”
Any game based on real-world history has to balance factual accuracy with gameplay, with the Middle Ages in particular inspiring passionate opinions among players. When you start Chronicles, you’ll be able to choose from several time frames that have been tuned in terms of both visuals and world design. At the same time, Zawadzki says they’re thinking differently about historical accuracy.
“We want to utilize the period the best, but we also want to make sure we hit more of a modern audience, and use certain things that happen during that time to create really interesting experiences,” Zawadzki says. “For combat specifically, we want to make sure we capture the grittiness and heaviness of it, where essentially every hit, whether with a sword or a mace, is different.”
Zawadzki also points to the challenge of balancing accuracy with wanting to let players make Chronicles their own experience.
“We all know the medieval times weren’t the most diverse and easy for certain groups, and that’s not really something we want to follow because we feel it excludes groups of people,” Zawadzki says. “It needs to feel good for players, and there are different kinds of players, so we want them to be welcome in our world.”
Beyond that concern, one of Chronicles’ most interesting aspects is how Raw Power wants to visually debunk some of the misconceptions often seen in other media.
“The medieval times are frequently portrayed as dark, gray, and muddy. And it was actually quite the opposite,” says senior community manager Clements Koch. “It was very colorful. Knights painted their armor to look more flashy, and there were all these kinds of nuances to it. It’s more than just grey and brown, it was colorful and beautiful to look at.”
That vibrance will, ideally, enhance the core ideal at the heart of Chronicles, a sense of freedom that extends to the game’s very creation. Raw Power plans to enter early access in 2026, with mod support not only available from day one, but encouraged. Integrating players into the early access experience has been one of Chronicles’ core pillars since the start, in the hopes that it will help the sandbox world achieve its full potential.
“Modding is a crucial part of the entire package,” Zawadzki says. “There’s always something creative and fresh the modding community adds — they take things that seem impossible and just do it.”
A true medieval sandbox is certainly a tantalizing proposition, but it’s going to be a long and painstaking road to get there. While Chronicles is still a ways away, Zawadzki and the team already have big plans they hope to pull off.
“It’s a big and ambitious project, but I think we have something truly unique combining the sandbox and dynamics world,” Zawadzki says. “We want to make sure the world feels less like a canvas and you just enter it and bounce left to right, but more of something you can affect. We’re painting the world from inside of it.”
