Warhorse Drops Two Bombs: LOTR RPG, New Kingdom Come

Rumours that had been swirling since late 2025 landed all at once yesterday. Warhorse Studios confirmed on X that it's developing not one but two new projects: an open-world RPG set in Middle-earth, and what it's calling "a new Kingdom Come adventure." No trailers, no screenshots, no release windows for the LOTR game. Just a single tweet and an image that sent two very different fanbases into overdrive simultaneously.

The fact that Warhorse is the studio attached to a Lord of the Rings RPG is what makes this interesting rather than exhausting. Middle-earth games have been in a rough stretch. Tales of the Shire flopped. Return to Moria came and went. Gollum was a disaster so total it became a punchline. You have to go back to Shadow of War in 2017 for something that even qualifies as decent, and that game launched buried under microtransactions. Warhorse, by contrast, built its reputation on the opposite philosophy: dense, reactive worlds where your clothing affects NPC dialogue and you forge your own swords. If any studio has the temperament to treat Tolkien's world with the obsessive care it demands, it's probably this one.

I'm excited about this pairing. Kingdom Come: Deliverance proved Warhorse could build a world that felt lived-in down to the mud on your boots, and that was a world without magic, without dragons, without any of the spectacle a fantasy setting provides. Turning that attention to detail loose on Middle-earth is a prospect that, frankly, none of the recent LOTR games have offered. The studio specifically called it an "open-world Middle-earth RPG" rather than a Lord of the Rings RPG, which suggests the game won't retread Frodo's journey. Given that parent company Embracer acquired the rights to Middle-earth back in 2022 and has since spun out a subsidiary called Fellowship Entertainment to manage the IP, Warhorse theoretically has access to the full breadth of Tolkien's timeline.

The Kingdom Come Question

The second announcement is almost as intriguing for what it doesn't say. Warhorse called it "a new Kingdom Come adventure," not Kingdom Come: Deliverance 3, not an RPG. Embracer CEO Phil Rogers shed a sliver of light on this during a video presentation accompanying the company's fiscal year report, confirming it is indeed a game and that Embracer hopes to get it into players' hands during its next fiscal year, which runs April 2027 through March 2028. That's a potentially tight window, and the choice of "adventure" over "RPG" has me wondering whether this is a smaller-scale spinoff rather than a full sequel. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's Brushes with Death DLC leaned into horror elements, and I wouldn't hate seeing Warhorse explore that direction further in a standalone project.

One wrinkle across both projects: studio co-founder Daniel Vávra, who directed the previous Kingdom Come games, has stepped away from active game development to work on a Kingdom Come movie. Given that he co-owns the studio, he'll likely still have influence, but it's unclear who's leading either of these projects day to day. Vávra has also been a polarising figure, publicly railing against what he considers "woke" games even after Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 won an award from Gayming Magazine for a same-sex relationship storyline. For a Lord of the Rings adaptation, where questions about representation in Tolkien's world have been debated for years across every medium, the creative leadership and its priorities will matter.

The timing of the announcement is also notable. Just last week, Amazon cancelled its in-development Lord of the Rings MMO while vaguely teasing that it was exploring a different "game experience" set in Tolkien's world. Warhorse's project appears to be separate from whatever Amazon is cooking, but the sudden confirmation right after Amazon's news feels like it wasn't entirely coincidental. Two competing Middle-earth game projects from different corners of the industry would be a first.

Warhorse running two simultaneous projects of this scale is ambitious for a studio that, until recently, was a one-game-at-a-time operation. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 only launched last year. If the new Kingdom Come adventure really does ship by early 2028, it would suggest that project has been in development for a while already, possibly as a parallel effort during Deliverance 2's later stages. The Middle-earth RPG is almost certainly further out. We know almost nothing about it beyond the fact that it exists, and Warhorse said it will share more "when the time is right." Given the studio's track record of meticulous world-building, I'd rather they take their time than rush out another forgettable Middle-earth game into a graveyard that's already full of them.