I’d fully missed the quiet announcement of King’s Bounty II last year so today I am surprised by: 1) its existence; 2) how serious it looks; 3) how much it looks like a modern RPG with an over-the-shoulder camera. King’s Bounty is a tactical turn-based strat-o-RPG of the genre you might know best from Heroes Of Might & Magic (though KB predates HOMM), with wee magicmen running around the tiles of a world map. King’s Bounty 2 still looks traditional in its battles, shuffling armies around hex grids, but the overworld is now a full-on world we wander through on foot with a view hovering over the hero’s shoulder. Huh! Weird! Come see in this new video dev diary.



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Weird, no? It’s always been part-RPG, of course, but the shift from doing that in the same top-down view as battles to a more modern free-roaming way makes it look quite different.

KB2 also looks weird to me because I know the series as big blasts of daft japes, krakens, cute pet dragons, moody husbands, wacky drama, zombie wives, and fights inside belts from 1C’s noughties games like King’s Bounty: The Legend and Armored Princess. KB2 is all very serious-looking. But this is only the first of 1C’s new KB2 video diary doodads, so maybe a future one will go “…and here are all the monsters you can romance!”

It does look nice to have actual 3D battlefields where elevation matters, mind. The regular game world being the same place battles go down, rather than separate maps, is nice too.

King’s Bounty 2 is due out on Steam later this year, sometime from July to September.

That lad really does look like a Hawke from Dragon Age 2, doesn’t he?