Sometimes, a delay hits you just like hot tar and feathers. Especially when the game was seemingly dead set to come out and looked really damn fun, like Kingmakers.
Yes, not even a whole week before the game was going to come out on early access, Redemption Road, the studio behind the massively ambitious and sixth most-wishlisted title on Steam, announced Kingmakers would get delayed so it could get some needed polish, and didn't mention a new release window.
Delays are acceptable and definitely preferable to having a company release a game that costs a lot of money and is nearly unplayable. Still, it's impossible not to find such a late notice worrisome.
Is Kingmakers vaporware?
Not everyone shares the same level of expertise in the complex development cycles of the video game industry, so it's no shame to sometimes fall for a ruse. But many are still reeling from things like The Day Before, a game that was promoted as the next big thing throughout some delays, but then turned out to be anything but. That's an extreme case, but gamers don't forget and are quick to associate things, even when there's no real connection to be made.
Kingmakers exists as a game and must already be in a somewhat playable state. It's also easy to understand how such a complex and ambitious project, one featuring battles with literal thousands of NPCs in fully destructible environments, might be a pain to get to work The problem is, the better the game looks the more people might wonder if it was fake all along, and Kingmakers looks so much better than even The Day Before's best fake promotions ever did.
Twitter users were quick to point out that when a game needs to be delayed, the devs know about it many weeks before the release, so some degree of backlash is now inevitable. Here's hoping this is but the result of the studio successfully fighting off pressure to release an unplayable game ahead of time.
How good could Kingmakers be?
Kingmaker's announcement trailer was amazing. It showed off great graphics, massive scope, and looked like one hell of a lot of fun from the get-go. But that wasn't all.
What really sold people on the trailer is how it keeps on upping the ante long after you were already sold on it. The entire premise of the game is ludicrous, but it doesn't matter, as it just looks fun enough to look the other way.
It looked almost too good, too fun, to be true, but sometimes we get games coming out of nowhere that absolutely rock our world. This is the year of Expedition 33, after all.
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