Kingmakers has spent two and a half years as one of Steam's most wishlisted question marks - a game whose pitch (drop a modern soldier with an AK-47 into a medieval English battlefield of thousands) went viral long before anyone outside a convention hall had seen it run for more than a few seconds. At today's tinyBuild Connect 2026 showcase, developer Redemption Road finally sat down and explained the whole thing.
The Gameplay Deep Dive runs through the mission structure, the lore, the weapons, abilities and resources, the switch between third-person shooting and real-time strategy, settlement building, commanding units, enemy waves, vehicles, officers, progression and upgrades, four-player co-op, and what the studio calls its road ahead. In the developers' own framing: they are here to share it all.
The premise, restated
You travel back five hundred years to medieval England to change the outcome of a bloody war and, with luck, prevent an apocalypse in your own time. The hook has always been the equipment mismatch - assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, armoured SUVs, motorbikes, attack helicopters and air strikes deployed against spearmen and cavalry - but the deep dive spends most of its runtime on the half of the game that is not about the guns.
The RTS layer is not a menu you visit
The part that has always been hardest to convey in a thirty-second clip is the switch. Kingmakers lets you move between fighting on the ground and issuing orders at any point, with no loading break and no separate mode - pull back, allocate legions of archers, swordsmen, spearmen and cavalry, throw up fortifications, delegate to your petty officers, then drop straight back into the melee you just reorganised.
Underneath that sits the engineering the studio has been quietly working on for years. Every battle runs as a full real-time simulation with thousands of soldiers active simultaneously, each one driven by multi-threaded AI handling decision-making, pathfinding and, notably, loyalty. Paired with a procedural animation system, that is what produces the specific look Kingmakers clips are known for: a genuine crowd rather than a repeating formation, reacting badly and individually to something none of them have a doctrine for.
Four-player co-op, and a playtest button that is live now
Up to four players can join a session together, either breaking down a castle's defences or holding an allied stronghold against a siege. The deep dive treats co-op as a first-class mode rather than an add-on, which fits the scale of the battles being described - a thousand-soldier assault is a lot of frontage for one player to cover.
The concrete thing to do with all of this, though, is the button. Redemption Road has added a Request Access control to the Kingmakers Steam page, and says a large wave of playtest invites is going out soon. That is the first broad public access the game has offered; the only prior hands-on was a demo booth at BiliBili World in July, where the studio gathered feedback from attendees.
Still no release date
The Steam page continues to read "Coming soon," and the deep dive did not change that. What it did change is the amount of the game that has been shown at all - after years of viral clips and a single developer message in late 2025, there is now roughly ten minutes of the actual thing on record, and a route in for players who want to try it before it ships.
Kingmakers is in development at Redemption Road for PC, published by tinyBuild.
