Next Kingdom Come Targets 2027 But Won't Be KCD 3

April 2027 to March 2028. That's the launch window Warhorse Studios is targeting for its next Kingdom Come game, according to communications director Tobias Stolz-Zwilling during a recent community livestream. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 only launched in February 2025, which makes this turnaround absurdly fast by Warhorse's own standards. The first game took seven years. Now we're looking at potentially two to three.

What's more interesting than the timeline is the naming. Stolz-Zwilling confirmed the project is an open-world RPG set in the Kingdom Come universe, but he specifically stopped short of calling it Kingdom Come: Deliverance 3. He referred to it as a "new Kingdom Come adventure," which is vague enough to mean almost anything. A new protagonist? A different time period? A smaller-scale spinoff? Warhorse isn't saying yet, and I think the deliberate avoidance of the number 3 tells us more than the studio probably intended.

A Spinoff or Something Bigger?

If this were a straightforward sequel continuing Henry's story, there'd be no reason to dance around the name. The fact that Warhorse is being cagey suggests a shift in scope or perspective. One possibility: this is a smaller project designed to keep the franchise alive while the bulk of the studio pivots to its newly announced Lord of the Rings RPG. Stolz-Zwilling described the LOTR project as "an absolute passion project" with a "living world" and "strong narrative focus" during the same stream, and it's clearly where a lot of the studio's creative energy is headed.

Prokop Jirsa, who served as lead designer on KCD 2, will be creative director on the new Kingdom Come title. That's a meaningful signal; it's not a B-team project being handed to junior staff. But Warhorse is now developing two open-world RPGs simultaneously for the first time in its history, and the studio has roughly 300 people. Splitting that workforce across two ambitious projects is a real test for a team that, until very recently, was a one-game-at-a-time operation.

Stolz-Zwilling addressed the Kingdom Come faithful directly: "Do not forget that Kingdom Come: Deliverance always was and still is and always will be an absolute passion project here in the studio." Embracer Group CEO Phil Rogers apparently backed the timeline, saying that if everything goes right, the game could ship in the next fiscal year. I like the confidence, but "if everything goes right" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Here's what I find exciting about all of this: Warhorse refusing to slap a 3 on the box suggests they're willing to take a creative risk with a franchise that just had its biggest commercial success. Most studios in that position play it safe and ship a direct sequel. If Warhorse is exploring a new corner of its medieval Bohemia setting with a fresh protagonist or a different narrative structure, that's a bolder move than simply continuing where KCD 2 left off. The 2027-2028 window is aggressive given the studio's track record, and the simultaneous LOTR development adds pressure, but KCD 2 proved Warhorse can deliver. Jirsa leading the project with a team that just shipped a well-received RPG gives this a real foundation to build on.