“The Manor Lords” Strategy From A Lone Developer Blew Up Steam

On April 26, Manor Lords was released into early access – at first glance, the most ordinary medieval city-building strategy, which suddenly became a hit. Even before its release, more than 3 million users added it to their wishlists, making it the most anticipated game of April. And just two hours after its release, it reached 140 thousand simultaneous online people and a day later received more than 90% of very positive ratings from players out of 8 thousand reviews.

Manor Lords invites you to play as a medieval lord and develop your starting village into a large, bustling city. The game is based on Franconian painting and architecture of the late 14th century. The project claims to be historically accurate.

At launch, Manor Lords includes freedom to build without breaking the map into cells, medieval combat, resource management, a small selection of modes and scenarios, and support for 19 languages.

The graphics deserve special praise: everything looks as nice and realistic as possible. The local nature is in no way inferior to the best modern RPG games. The author created his architectural masterpieces using photogrammetry, based on images of real European medieval buildings, and the animation of people was created using motion capture. And you can take a closer look at all this by walking around your settlement listening to atmospheric music with a third-person view.

Manor Lords is currently only available on PC on Steam, Epic Games Store and GoG for 1,124. However, there are rumors that after leaving early access it may be released on Xbox, but it has already appeared on PC Game Pass.