Kingdom Come: Deliverance lays siege with a swarm of screenshots

By Adam Rosenberg January 23, 2014

Warhorse Studios is onto something with Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The team of AAA studio vets wants to create an open world RPG with shades of Skyrim, only they want to ditch fantasy in favor of a setting more grounded in reality. “Dungeons and no dragons,” as the debut trailer puts it. You’ll definitely see no dragons in this freshly released batch of screens. No dragons, no orcs, no elves, no magic. Just a bunch of dudes wearing armor, wielding swords. A few castlescapes too. In fact, it’s fair to say that Warhorse has up and gone Medieval on this here game. Just not in the way Ving Rhames meant it.

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Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…

Gaming

‘Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX’ revealed, coming to PS3 in 2014

Fans of the Kingdom Hearts series can beat back the "keep waiting for Kingdom Hearts III blues" in 2014 with the planned worldwide release of Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX. Much like the recently released Kingdom Hearts 1.5 ReMIX, the upcoming offering is actually a collection that features HD-remastered versions of multiple games. This time it's Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix and Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Final Mix, along with cutscenes pulled from the Nintendo DS title, Kingdom Hearts Re:coded.
The Final Mix version of each game, one was released on PlayStation 2 and the other for PlayStation Portable, was previously exclusive to Japan. Each adds a new difficulty mode along with an assortment of in-game content. You can find the full rundown of what's added on each game's respective wiki page.
Square Enix revealed Kingdom Hearts III during Sony's press conference at E3 2013. It amounted to just a trailer, and one that was notably light on actual gameplay, but it was enough to whip fans into a frenzy. There's no release date set yet for the third numbered game in the Square Enix JRPG-meets-Disney action-RPG series, but with 2.5 ReMIX not showing up until 2014, you can safely expect KH3 for no earlier than 2015.
Get your first look at Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX in the trailer below.

Gaming

With 38 Studios’ goods for sale, who will make Kingdoms of Amalur 2?

The saga of 38 Studios will come to a close on Oct. 23 when the SJ Corio Company holds its second and final auction of its material assets in Providence, Rhode Island. The goods going up on the block range from the mundane to the exceedingly valuable, at least by video game development standards. 38 Studios office furniture will be sold alongside its servers, graphic design, and motion capture equipment. Just who will buy up the pieces of 38’s legacy is an interesting question facing the gaming industry. While we know that Microsoft is anxious to prevent the sale of the Xbox development kits seized from 38 Studios, who else in the industry might be interested?
Epic Games’ newest studio Impossible Games certainly has a vested interest in the remnants of 38 Studios’ operation. Impossible is comprised primarily of developers from former 38 Studios subsidiary Big Huge Games, that team behind that company’s only release, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The first auction of 38 assets being held on Oct. 16 in Timonium, Maryland has a selection of gear and other games like a “video game library” that could be valuable to the team at Impossible, especially if it plans to renew work on the planned sequel to Reckoning it was making when 38 Studios was shuttered by Rhode Island.
It looks as though that won’t happen though. Whether or not Impossible’s staff attempts to repurchase lost goods from its old office, it won’t be to complete Kingdoms of Amalur 2 since Epic will not be pursuing the IP when the state of Rhode Island sells it. “We don’t buy IP, we make IP,” Epic told Digital Trends, echoing president Mark Rein’s statements following the formation of Impossible Games.
The Kingdoms of Amalur IP may simply fade into obscurity. Electronic Arts said in July that it would be interested in revisiting the series even though the first one missed sales expectations. It did not, however, commit to trying to buy the series’ rights.
Who else might be digging through the detritus? We contacted Sony to see if it was also attempting to reclaim development tools from the state just like Microsoft, but as of this writing the company hasn’t returned our inquiries. Development kits for video game consoles aren’t purchased by developers, they’re licensed to them. As Microsoft said told Polygon, “Xbox 360 development kits (XDK) are the property of Microsoft and are only licensed to authorized studios and may not be assigned or sold to any third party without the written consent of Microsoft.”

Gaming

38 Studios’ IP Kingdoms of Amalur up for auction. Will EA or Epic buy?

The disintegration of Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, the company behind this year’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and the cancelled MMO set in the same universe Project Copernicus, is coming to a close. Shut down in May with all employees shown the door, there are survivors emerging from the wreckage. Just today, Epic Games officially announced the opening of Impossible Games, a new studio made up of former staffers from Big Huge Games, the 38 Studios’ subsidiary responsible for Kingdoms of Amalur. With many of those imperiled talented people now in new positions, it’s time to wonder where the intellectual property developed over years by Schillings studio will go.
The current owner of the Kingdoms of Amalur, Project Copernicus, and other intellectual property created by 38 is the state of Rhode Island. The state was one of 38 Studios’ primary creditors and it was the inability to repay taxpayer-funded loans that forced the studio’s closure earlier this year. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Co. (BNY) and the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp. (RIEDC) were awarded all assets held by 38 Studios by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath.
Intellectual property is the only asset of worth left at 38 Studios, and this is why BNY lobbied to gain control of it. Where 38 just dismantled, said court papers followed by both BNY and the RIEDC, “all or substantially all of the intellectual property could be irretrievably lost.” Meaning that the art, game prototypes, everything developed in association with Amalur and Copernicus could be destroyed before being preserved on RIEDC/BNY controlled servers.
The IP will now be sold off to the highest bidder to recoup the $75 million lost in loans given to Schilling’s studio.
Who’s buying? Big Huge Games was said to be working on Kingdoms of Amalur 2 pre-production when 38 Studios was shut down in May. Epic’s Mike Capps said on Thursday that Impossible Games will be working on Epic-owned intellectual property when it finishes its first project, Infinity Blade: Dungeons, later this year. Epic is slowly branching out its stable of IPs with Fortnite being the latest. Provided it could get the IP for cheap, it might pick up Kingdoms of Amalur and allow Impossible Games to finish what it started.
Amalur publishing partner Electronic Arts is also a candidate. EA Labels president Frank Gibeau said in July that his company would love to see a sequel to that game. “I think it’s unfortunate how everything worked out [for 38 Studios],” said Gibeau, “At the end of the day we saw a lot of creativity and vision in the team that Curt put together. We thought the game was terrific. It reviewed well. We built a good business there and hope there’s a sequel someday. We’d love to be a partner for that.”