The rumours were true: Kingdom Come 2 studio is working on an RPG set in Tolkien's Middle-earth
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Eru Iluvatar be praised!
We've all been quite keen to know what Warhorse Studios is working on in the wake of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Sure, the studio could just pack it all in—it won PC Gamer's 2025 GOTY and thereby won all of videogames—but it didn't seem likely. When I chatted with Prokop Jirsa, one of the studio's two new creative directors, he kept resolutely schtum about its future.
But now we know the broad strokes. In a post on X, Warhorse came out and confirmed that—obviously—it's working on another Kingdom Come game, but it's also working on something else: an open-world RPG set in JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Which, allow me to be among the first to say: hell yeah. As I've extensively documented, I've been on a bit of a Tolkien kick recently, and the notion of a game crammed with Warhorse's trademark zeal for details and systems-driven gameplay sounds fantastic. Warhorse isn't sharing any details just yet—I have to imagine the game is in very, very early stages—but I'm hoping it takes a similar tack as Kingdom Come, putting you in the shoes of a relatively humble schmuck in the thick of great events, rather than just making you Aragorn and calling it a day. Also, no sexy Shelob, if possible. I am however open to sexy Ungoliant.
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If you're wired into the videogame rumour-mill, this news might not be much of a surprise. There have been murmurs that Warhorse is working on a "Lord of the Rings" game for a little while now. Though it's worth noting the studio called its project a "Middle-earth" game and not a "Lord of the Rings" thing (though it did use an LOTR hashtag), which to my mind opens up the possibility we might get to see less familiar territory than the final struggle against Sauron.
Me personally? I wouldn't mind a game set in Beleriand during the tumult of the First Age, when Melkor/Morgoth was up to his old tricks, but I could also see Warhorse following in the footsteps of Return to Moria and giving us a Fourth-Age adventure. All of which is frenzied speculation on my part and almost certainly wrong.
I'm afraid those are all the details you're getting for the moment. Warhorse says "We’re excited to tell you more when the time is right," and I'm gonna go ahead and guess that time is a ways off. It's also worth mentioning there are a few dark clouds in the air. The matter of the translator who said he was fired from Warhorse and replaced by AI certainly has me worried about the state of the studio's English-language games going forward, but I'll just have to wait and see.
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