Henry from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 surrounded by characters from other seemingly niche, but successful games like Dragon's Dogma 2, Baldur's Gate 3, and Elden Ring.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 had a powerful opening salvo, debuting to nearly 160,000 concurrent players on Steam, before growing to 256,206 concurrents over the weekend. That performance makes it one of the best performances by a single-player game in Steam history.

And yet, if you look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s mechanics, you don’t see the makings of a populist hit. It’s a game where if you don’t get enough sleep, your character’s eyes start drooping, periodically blacking out the screen, until you take a nap. It’s a game where you need to carry a torch around at night or guards will yell at you. It’s a game where you need to be constantly mindful of which direction your sword is facing in combat or you’ll quickly get killed. It is not a game that dumbs things down in the interest of widespread appeal. And yet, it’s a gigantic hit. What does that mean?

Player Tastes Are Changing

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s success is especially interesting in the wake of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s failure. One is constantly challenging you and the other is constantly catering to you. One is extremely specific in its writing and the other is extremely generic. One has mechanics you will absolutely need to turn to Google (or TheGamer’s guides! Hint hint!) in order to understand and the other is a cookie cutter action game with some light roleplay.

For a long time, it seemed like games like The Veilguard were the future of RPGs. Or, more accurately, that everything was becoming an RPG. In the wake of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare making experience points crucial to the long-tail multiplayer experience, that key part of the RPG genre’s DNA had been spliced into gaming as a whole. Shooters, sports games, action games, puzzle games — they all were made with an eye toward continual progression. At the same time, classic RPG series and developers were embracing mainstream action gameplay. Fallout became an FPS, Final Fantasy became an action RPG, and BioWare shifted toward action combat with Mass Effect and the post-Origins Dragon Age games.

The result was that as action games became more RPG-like, RPGs became more like action games. They met in the middle. God of War began its life as a stylish action game, Final Fantasy began as a turn-based RPG. But in the early 2020s we got a God of War game and a Final Fantasy game that basically played the same as each other.

Surprise! RPG Fans Want RPGs

If you’ve been an RPG fan for a long time, there’s a good chance this annoys you. If you got into the genre because you liked strategic combat, playing a character, spending way too long pondering stat allocation, and making tough ethical choices, many modern RPGs don’t have a lot to offer you. And the mainstream genre’s drift left the door open for RPGs that were willing to get in the weeds.

The Shadow of the Erdtree cover art from Elden Ring.

In the 2020s, four of the biggest PC launches have belonged to Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon’s Dogma 2, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. All four are games that go deep on mechanics and ask a lot of their players. They also all give the player a great degree of freedom in how they define their character, either through dialogue choices, playstyle, or both.

These elements give these games staying power, and staying power is, increasingly, what game developers need. When development cycles can take five-plus years, putting out a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 — that can still pull in more than 100,000 concurrents in its third year of release — is a much needed lifeline. Games can either keep players on the hook with the steady drip of live-service design, or provide so much depth that players keep coming back for more. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 did the latter and, like the best RPGs in recent years, it’s reaping dividends.