Is Kingdom Under Fire 2 Really Here?
A game with an extremely small loyal fan base. A mixture of real time strategy and action created a near perfect experience for players in 2004. Giving the player the ability to control and upgrade a wide range of troops from basic infantry to destructive siege weapons, and even being able to harness the power of the mighty elemental units. While supporting a wide range of factions from humans, elves, orcs, and undead the game did not lack in unit variety.
With the original Kingdom Under Fire being released on the PC in 2001 with not much success. Then came Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders on the original Xbox. This was followed by two other games that would follow the series.
Then in 2008 a trailer for Kingdom Under Fire 2 was released. An absolutely stunning trailer that brought back many mechanics from the original games, and fine tuned them. Enhanced the graphics and created Mardi Gras levels of hype. Unfortunately the game suffered from a rough development cycle and could not gain a full release anytime soon.
Going through a massive change the game became an MMO which disappointed many fans who wanted nearly 10 years to experience this game, I being one of them. With this came many other changes with no North American or European release a majority of the fans could not even play the game without a VPN or having to suffer through a language barrier.
Of course many went through with this, because they just needed to experience a fresh new Kingdom Under Fire, and what we got was disappointing after the years of hype and changes. Almost a pay to win experience when discussing upgrading weapons and troops. An extremely grind heavy focus with a lack luster story, but enjoyable combat to say the least.
The developers of the game, Blueside, seemed to have stopped caring for this series. Updates on the website are few and sometimes have years in between them. The most recent playable version was the Russian version of the game that did not offer any english translation. Lucky enough I was in a very caring community that worked hard to assist players with translations to make the game enjoyable.
Recently, the game was shut down with the lack of player base and not being able to make enough revenue. With this news many of the fans gave up hope on ever seeing their longed favorite series die. Just recently though, an article from Gematsu announced that Kingdom Under Fire 2 will be released this 2019. Many fans were confused, even myself on how this is possible with a shut down taking place months ago. The publisher and developer Gameforge earned the rights to the game. Which is extremely promising since they have lead many successful MMOs in the past. Not only this, but they claimed the North American and European publishing rights for the game. This will mean that it will be the first time in 11 years that the game has an official Western release.
Gameforge has also released that many of the employees are fans of the series. With them stating, “The Kingdom Under Fire series is a favorite among those of us at Gameforge, so we’re very excited to partner with Blueside to continue this epic saga and finally bring it to Western markets for the very first time,” said Tomislav Perkovic, Chief Product Officer. “We are determined to help Blueside realize their vision of the ultimate MMO, launching Kingdom Under Fire II for Windows PC in North America and Europe later this year.”
With this excellent news many fans can rejoice in the fact that an amazing game series, with its flaws like everything else, will be returning full force this 2019. With the new trailer just being released by Gematsu we can only hope for a successful release of this title.
