King's Bounty 2 release delayed to August

King's Bounty 2 was previously scheduled for a March release, but has now been delayed to August 24. Denis Maltzev, producer on King's Bounty 2, said in a press release, "We are currently at a stage where the game is complete and playable, but we need more time to finish playtesting, fixing, polishing, and postponing launch will give us the precious months to balancing phase, much needed for such important project for us, with its ambitious, open world, its complex narrative, deep Turn-Based Tactical and RPG mechanics."

The original King's Bounty was a 1990 turn-based strategy game by Jon Van Caneghem, who built on its formula in the Heroes of Might & Magic series. It was revived and rebooted by 1C Entertainment, who published King's Bounty: The Legend, developed by Katauri Interactive, in 2008. Several sequels and standalone expansions (or expandalones as normal people definitely call them) followed, though Katauri Interactive left after the well-received King's Bounty: Crossworlds in 2010, and subsequent games were developed by 1C.

King's Bounty 2 will be the first to significantly alter the format, exchanging mass battles for a smaller-scale fights with more obstacles and elevation, and the top-down overworld map for a third-person perspective. It's more of an RPG, with a story that apparently "blends beloved genre tropes with a gritty realism". Seems like there might be less opportunities to marry a demon, zombie, or frog than there was in the earlier, more whimsical, King's Bounty games.

King's Bounty 2 will be available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.