Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Finally Has Multiplayer, And It Looks Pretty Fun

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was built as a single-player RPG, but modders have now done the obvious thing and stuffed a bunch of other people into medieval Bohemia.

Kingdoms Connected, a fan-made multiplayer mod for KCD2, entered open beta on September 24. It lets players join dedicated servers, see and interact with one another in the game world, fight, ride horses, explore, and generally cause problems together. Servers can currently support up to a whopping 512 players.

This isn’t a traditional co-op conversion of Henry’s campaign and is instead meant to be a sandbox experience similar to games like Red Dead Redemption 2 Online. Kingdoms Connected strips away the story and uses KCD2’s world as the foundation for multiplayer servers and custom game modes. With the massive player count, you can have cities, regions, and wars fully populated and run by players.

Out of the box, the server software includes free roam and a duel arena, while its scripting tools are designed to let communities create things like roleplay servers, economies, factions, custom quests, shops and other game modes. Both the Kuttenberg and Trosky regions can be used.

While the mod is still in beta, the basic foundation seems quite promising. Players, horses and combat are synchronized, along with the world’s time and weather, and there’s built-in proximity voice chat. Proximity voice chat will probably be the biggest draw as you can imagine walking into random taverns with an argument or discussion going on inside.

The developers have also been stress-testing it with much larger groups. A recent Reddit post showed 100 simultaneous players on a Kingdoms Connected server, which drew a pretty enthusiastic response from the KCD community.

One commenter called the project “insanely ambitious, really impressive,” while another immediately wanted to know whether PvP worked. It does.

The mod is still very much in beta, though. The developers warn players to expect bugs, missing features and frequent updates, and the ecosystem of custom servers and game modes is only just beginning to form. However, having this much this early is a pretty promising sign.

KCD2 already has the sort of world grounded in almost brutal realism that seems perfectly designed for this. Taverns, castles, forests, duels and deeply serious men getting angry about minor crimes all become considerably funnier when the person responsible is another player.

Kingdoms Connected might end up being the first major step towards an online coop experience which has the potential to reach the heights of RDR2 Online. The results so far are incredibly suggest we can be pretty optimistic.