Chronicles: Medieval aims to challenge Mount and Blade’s dominance in the medieval sandbox space when it launches into early access later this year, and developer Raw Power Games has shed more light on the four pillars guiding the title’s development in its very first dev diary.
In depicting “a world of war, trade, diplomacy, politics, and ambition,” our characters don’t start off as powerful knights in shining armor ready to save the day.
Chronicles: Medieval’s First Dev Diary Lays Out the Four Pillars Guiding Its Development
That’s because Chronicles: Medieval’s world “functions and breathes regardless of what you do, where kings fall and rise, where besiegement and caravan attacks can affect the price and availability of grain, where a reputation built over years can unravel in an afternoon,” Lead Producer Sam Millen explains. “You are not the centre of that world. You are a part of it, and what you do within it is all up to you,” he stresses.
After painting a fairly grim but grounded picture, Millen goes on to note that, as part of the team’s pursuit for a dynamic sandbox in which to live out our medieval fantasies – the first pillar guiding the title’s development –, it aims to build its world based on “interlocking systems that feel like they follow real logic,” rather than “scripted sequences pretending to be emergent, but actual cause and effect running through everything.”
Whether it’s the price of specific resources or the loyalties of characters, gaining understanding of how Chronicles: Medieval’s world works should allow us to “manipulate or exploit these events to [our] own benefit.”
The second pillar revolves around tactical battles, which play a major role in our characters’ rise to power and need to be “large, brutal, and spectacular,” according to Millen.
“Both the battlefield itself, the composition of your army and how you deploy it will matter. We want battles where decisions outweigh sheer numbers, where a smaller force can win by correctly using what advantages they might have, and a larger one can fall due to poor judgment or impatience.”
Mod support is another key area the developer is focusing on, planning to give modders “the same or very similar tools which we use to create content for Chronicles: Medieval,” while having been “working closely with a group of experienced modders from the very beginning, because it’s important to us to build things right.”
Finally, the fourth pillar guiding Chronicles: Medieval’s development is co-op play. If the title’s initial early access version will only allow for co-op custom battles that support up to four players, in addition to its single-player campaign, the developer’s “long-term ambition for the 1.0 release is to introduce co-op campaign play, allowing players to invite their friends to play together.”
Millen does, however, note that “dedicated servers with match-making, server browsers, and large PvP battles are not our focus for Chronicles: Medieval.”
The developer diary linked above delves even deeper into the design principles behind the upcoming medieval sandbox. Sadly, it doesn’t reveal a release date, but we do know that Chronicles: Medieval is currently aiming for a 2026 Steam Early Access launch.
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