King’s Bounty 2’s August launch is steadily approaching and, after getting our first good look at how it plays last year, we learned a bunch of new details regarding the upcoming turn-based strategy game late last month.
In a new hands-off press demo, developer 1C Entertainment highlighted one of King’s Bounty 2’s early starts, which sees the protagonist entering a conspirator’s house to investigate an assassination attempt. After dealing with a pack of nasty undead, the protagonist ends up uncovering some helpful evidence.
At this point, the player can choose between handing it over to either the Assassin’s Guild or the Captain of the City Guard. This choice changes “a lot of events in the game dramatically,” according to 1C Entertainment CEO Nikolay Baryshnikov, making certain quest lines available while stopping you from accessing others during that playthrough.
King's Bounty 2 Quests
Both main and side quests can be completed in a number of ways, and it will be impossible to see all the potential outcomes when playing King’s Bounty 2 for the first time. In addition, your character class can also grant access to specific decisions.
Your choices also tie into more than the quests you get along the way. At one point, the local mages asked for help with their undead issue. You can actually aid either party, and picking the undead lets you recruit the units in their roster.
Choices also affect the character talents you receive, which are spread across four Ideals. Giving the aforementioned evidence to the Captain of the City Guard grants you Order Ideal points that you can spend on its associated talents. Every creature in the game follows a certain Ideal and points can be spread across all of them.
That being said, playing as an Order-inclined good character, will render you unable to take decisions suited for Anarchy characters. Ideals also apply to the units in your army. Baryshnikov explained that a character focusing on the Anarchy Ideal will want to recruit more bandit units. Recruiting Order-aligned knights as an Anarchy character is still possible, but gives them low Morale, reducing their effectiveness in battle.
It definitely sounds like King’s Bounty 2 will lean heavily into making choices matter. Not only does developer 1C Entertainment’s approach give your decisions more weight, but it also fuels replayability, as players may be tempted to start a second playthrough and see what stories and units they missed out on.
King’s Bounty 2 launches on August 24 and is headed to PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. The developer has yet to share a release date Xbox Series X/S and PS5 versions.
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