Ex-Witcher 3 and RDR2 Devs Take On Mount and Blade With Chronicles: Medieval, Hitting Steam Early Access This Year

Exactly one year ago, independent Danish developer Raw Power Games announced its debut game, Chronicles: Medieval, a dynamic medieval sandbox RPG highly reminiscent of the Mount and Blade series.

Today, at Summer Game Fest 2026, the studio made of around 100 industry veterans (with credits in The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed, Hitman, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Grand Theft Auto) shared a new gameplay trailer and confirmed that PC early access is debuting this year via Steam. Ahead of the news, Wccftech was invited to a remote presentation where Raw Power Games revealed much more about their upcoming title.

First and foremost, Chronicles: Medieval is a player-driven sandbox RPG set in medieval Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries. The developer's stated objective is to build a living world of war, trade, diplomacy, politics, and ambition that functions independently of the player. Kings rise and fall, reputations can crumble overnight, and the player is explicitly described as part of the world, not the center of it. The studio framed it as a "rags to riches" experience entirely shaped by player choice.

This presentation marked the first-ever gameplay reveal of battles in Chronicles: Medieval, and also the reveal of the Holy Roman Empire as the third playable faction alongside England and France. The dev team noted that large-scale battles are one of the game's core pillars, with hundreds of soldiers clashing on dynamic battlefields.

Battle System Deep Dive

Before a battle begins, players enter a battle planning phase. Armies are deployed into battle lines (which are not to be confused with rigid formations) where each unit automatically gravitates to its preferred position based on unit type and cultural identity:

• French heavy cavalry gravitates to the vanguard, eager to charge
• English longbowmen prefer the flanks for clear lines of sight
• Holy Roman Empire forces favor a dense vanguard and main battle line, creating a wall of armored men

Players can manually reposition any unit during this phase, and a future army management UI will let players lock in preferred auto-deployments for repeat battles. Each unit operates on standing orders, essentially a rule book defining behavior without needing direct commands:

• Aggressive — seek and engage anything
• Defensive — hold ground and wait
• Adaptive — The AI decides the best approach contextually (for example, a cavalry unit facing a shield wall might autonomously switch to wedge formation)

Initial orders let players script each unit's very first action at battle start, after which units revert to their standing order. Formations are split into two tiers:

• Base formations (Line, Block, Loose) — easy to move in, serve as connective tissue between maneuvers
• Advanced formations (Shield Wall, Spear Wall, Square, Schiltron, Wedge) — each brutally effective at one thing and deliberately bad at most others. Spear Wall can barely walk; Square can't maneuver; timing and commitment matter

Once the battle actually begins, the player is dropped into third-person perspective as both a commander and a combatant. Players can swing steel alongside their troops or pull back to direct the fight, or potentially do both within the same minute. Command Mode is activated by holding Left Control, which slows time (but doesn't stop it) to allow the player to issue orders. Global commands are army-wide, like advance, hold, fall back, engage, charge, or retreat, and they are communicated via horn calls. Local commands give direct control over individual units, such as movement, target, facing, formation changes, and standing order changes.

Morale System

Morale is the core win condition, since units break before they die in Chronicles: Medieval. Each unit moves through five states individually (not army-wide):

1. Inspired — fighting above the normal baseline
2. Confident — normal baseline
3. Concerning — warning state
4. Wavering — critical warning, window to act
5. Broken — the unit routes and is permanently lost as deserters

Casualties, charges, flanks, and nearby friendly unit breaks all drag morale down. Critically, only the player can push units into the Inspired state, through personal kills, headshots, lance kills, and gruesome executions performed where nearby soldiers can see. No horn call or standing order can do it. Routing is triggered when morale breaks; the unit flees and is counted as lost/deserters. Retreating, on the other hand, is ordered by the player or automatically when army strength drops below a threshold; retreating units stay in the army. After a defeat or victory screen appears, the battle doesn't immediately end: players retain control to cover their withdrawal, chase down routing enemies, or simply stand down.

Raw Power Games also announced that renowned Danish actor Lars Mikkelsen (best known for his roles in Netflix's The Witcher series, Disney's Ahsoka series, and Netflix's Frankenstein movie) will voice Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. As Gutenberg, he'll narrate parts of the player's journey.

Following the presentation, Clemens Koch (Community Lead at Raw Power Games) and Gareth Bourn (Senior Game Designer at Raw Power Games) answered several questions from the assembled media.

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Alessio Palumbo (WCCFTECH): How long will Chronicles: Medieval stay in Early Access?

Clemens Koch: We plan to be in early access for a year.

Daniel Quesada (Hobby Consolas): What proportion of battles and story adventures is in the game?

Gareth Bourn: Battles are a huge part of the game. So put an exact number on it. It comes down to you. It’s up to you how you want to interact with the game. It’s a sandbox after all. Let’s go with 50/50. There’s plenty of things to do outside of battle and there’s plenty to do inside battle.

Maurice Weber (YouTube): What’s roughly the largest possible battle you could have in the game?

Gareth Bourn: Our goal is for 2,000 characters on screen at any one time. This, of course, will scale depending on how powerful your machine is. If you’re on a potato or a space rocket, we will need to scale this accordingly, but 2,000 characters on screen is our current goal. So 1,000 versus 1,000 is the absolute maximum.

Kaito: Do units gain experience if they survive the battle?

Gareth Bourn: Yes, they have experience and progression trees, as does the player. So, you can make choices as to the path your unit takes from peasant through to sergeant. You will gain experience if you survive battles. Both you and your units will do so individually.

Ken Allsop (PCGamesN): If you die in battle, what happens next? Do you continue watching it play out?

Gareth Bourn: Yes. So, if you die in battle, as you are the commander, anybody who witnessed you die nearby will obviously be quite shocked and it will send a very negative morale event to your army and then the rest of the battle will play out without you. You will be in a spectator camera, so you can move through it. We’re currently experimenting with being able to fast-forward this. Whether that’s accessible in early access or not remains to be seen.

Andrew Stretch (Tech Raptor): Will the scale of success/failure in combat lead to different outcomes in the continued story, adventure, and campaign?

Gareth Bourn: Yes. So your morale has what we’re calling the battle loop morale and the outer loop morale. So whether you are maintaining your army correctly throughout your campaign will have a direct effect on how their morale status is when they deploy in battle. And that will come back out into the expiration map as well. So, it’s up to you to ensure you are feeding them and giving them all of the resources they need to have high morale and want to stay with you and not leave you. You must pay them. You must do all of these things. And of course, if you find yourself deep in enemy territory with lots of losses, you are going to be very much in a pickle. And that will very much change what your next action will be.

Alessio Palumbo (WCCFTECH): You probably already know it will be compared to Mount & Blade a lot. What are the biggest differences with that series in your opinion?

Gareth Bourn: Of course, I love Mount and Blade. I’ve played, I don’t know, 350 hours of it or something. And I’ve played a lot of other games similar to ours. I’ve played everything from Total War through to Stronghold, etc. I’m a big fan of the genre. And I think for me the biggest difference between Mount Blade and us is that we are based in the Hundred Years' War, whereas Caladria is obviously a fantasy setting.

This means that we’re leaning really heavily into historical authenticity, and we can draw a lot of inspiration from the nations and the kingdoms and the empires that are on our map because they were very real places with very real culture and very real preferences, things like units, what weapons they use, what armor they use. All of these things are a fantastic source for us and I think they give our game a sense of authenticity in a different way to the fantasy setting of Mount and Blade.

Clemens Koch: We also have a much deeper tactical layer in our battle gameplay.

Ken Allsop (PCGamesN): Can you control your units from range on the battlefield, or are there limits based on where your character is?

Gareth Bourn: Yes, there are limits based on where your character is. As would be true in a medieval battle, shouting across the field, "Hey, please do this". No one is going to hear, no one is going to be able to respond to you. You do have to be within a certain distance of your units to give them commands during a battle. This distance is hard to define without playing the game and feeling it for yourself, but yes, the answer is yes.

Alessio Palumbo (WCCFTECH): Are you planning to support mods?

Clemens Koch: Absolutely.

Gareth Bourn: Very much so. We love modders. Modding is one of our core pillars. It’s baked into everything we do. Every time I or any other designer designs a system or a feature, we’re thinking about modding from the very beginning. How can we make this accessible? How can we ensure that this tool can be used by anyone? I spent a lot of time on this. It’s very challenging and it’s something I relish. I’m really excited for people to get their hands on our tools and the modding capabilities of our game in the release version 1.0. So everything from our map generator — it’s kind of a black box, it’s kind of magic. You can click a few buttons and generate a battlefield. And this will be available to modders, so they can create maps including maps of a quality matching ours. So what ships our maps can ship your maps. And I’m very excited for everybody to get their hands on all of these things, through to the castle tool, through to being able to change AI strategy through data-driven tools, all of these things. It’s baked into everything.

Clemens Koch: We also cooperate with seasoned modders to help us build all these things and with their inputs and stuff. So we have had modding in mind since day one.

Kaito: How long have you been working on the project, and what has been the biggest technical or design challenge for Raw Power Games so far?

Clemens Koch: We started in 2022, so some time ago. We started a small team four years ago and now we are around 100 working very focused on building an amazing game.

Gareth Bourn: I have been working on this game for two years. For me personally, I am also in charge of sieges. So, I’m doing battles and sieges. And a big part of the challenge of this type of game is that it’s both an RTS-style game and a third-person game. And sieges in third person with the ability to also build your own castles is a very interesting design space and the problem space is large and difficult. But I’ve conquered it and I’m very excited to bring that to people in a later release of the game. That’s my biggest personal challenge.

Thank you for your time.

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