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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was my favourite game of 2025 - and one that arrived on PC more finely polished than a period-appropriate breastplate. Given the seven-year gap between the two games in the series, I was expecting a similar wait to Henry's next outing - but according to publishers Embracer Group, the next KCD title is only a couple of years away.
That's according to the publisher's recent investor presentation, which sited the next Kingdom Come release window within "fiscal year 2027/2028". That's a period of April '27 to March '28, which would put the game just 18 months away if it's not delayed - and potentially right in the Project Helix / PS6 launch window.
This rapid release rate suggests that the game (potentially named "Kingdom Come Salvation", according to trademark filings) may not be a full mainline sequel - or at the very least, that the game would make good use of the existing tech and content pipelines that developers Warhorse Studios implemented for KCD2. That game famously eschewed the likes of Unreal Engine for CryEngine, choosing to really maximise the possibilities of what we'd consider "current-gen" rendering rather than pushing hard into next-generation techs like virtualised geometry, path tracing and so on.
With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to imagine what technical innovations would be achievable within a roughly three year development window, and what a future KCD title would most benefit from in terms of its tech.
Looking back at the second game, there's very little here that arrived underbaked - the game's bustling open world ran without heavy CPU requirements, traversal hitches or shader compilation stutter, and the SVOGI-based ray-traced indirect lighting produced exceptional results in both cities and natural environments. That said, the prospect of a cross-gen release on more powerful PCs, plus PS6 and Project Helix, does open the door to improvements.
For example, plant physics and animations in KCD2 run at a decimated frame-rate (eg 30fps when the rest of the world is at 60fps) and sometimes with improper animation pacing. This makes sense for performance reasons, but an "ultra" plant setting would make sense for faster PCs. Similarly, water interactions don't look as fluid (ha) as the rest of the game, and more advanced animation and rendering techniques would add a lot to the Bohemian lakes and streams. Reflections and lighting precision could also scale further than they do in KCD2, with optional RT reflections or per-pixel RTGI to take advantage of the improved RT acceleration built into modern PC hardware and next-gen consoles.
What would be on your personal Kingdom Come Salvation tech wishlist? A CryEngine Nanite equivalent to banish pop-in? Better support for modern upscalers and frame generation? More modern procedural animation systems? Let me know in the comments below.