A number of "experimental" changes have been made to Manor Lords to tweak the balance, including reduced ale consumption.

Ahead of the weekend, the game's solo developer Greg Styczeń released a Steam blog post detailing a tonne of changes, which are available now for open testing.

The update fixes a number of commonly reported issues, including "None" people spawning and not working; the game being stuck at the summary screen after a victory; weak archer damage; and overly high ale consumption.

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The story of Manor Lords’ soundtrack begins, as all inspiring tales do, with hunched-over late-night doom scrolling. It was pre-covid, and Pressure Cooker Studios’ composer Daniel Caleb was flicking through reddit posts when a trailer cut through the glare. He’d never heard of Manor Lords before. It looked like a new IP, but already had a huge Reddit following. Caleb loved what he saw. At that point, Pressure Cooker mainly worked on film scores, but both Caleb and fellow composer Elben Schutte had always wanted to eventually move on to bringing their storytelling from cinema to games. Even more so than film, games were the passion. Manor Lords would be perfect for them.

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Medieval city-building strategy Manor Lords released in early access last month, and already its community has modded in DreamWorks Animation's great green ogre as a playable character. After all, what really is a new PC release without the swift implementation of a Shrek mod?

The mod in question comes from NorskPL, who states: "Shrek is lord, Shrek is life."

As you can see in the image above, this mod replaces the playable character in Manor Lords' third-person mode with that of the ogre.

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Medieval city-building strategy Manor Lords released in early access last month, and already its community has modded in DreamWorks Animation's great green ogre as a playable character. After all, what really is a new PC release without the swift implementation of a Shrek mod?

The mod in question comes from NorskPL, who states: "Shrek is lord, Shrek is life."

As you can see in the image above, this mod replaces the playable character in Manor Lords' third-person mode with that of the ogre.

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As a lover of medieval history and swords, I was attracted to Manor Lords from the very first time I heard about it. Manor Lords is a city builder strategy game that has you fostering a thriving medieval village and ushering it into a new dawn filled with trade, farming, and - of course - at least one Manor. After picking it up for myself and getting fully into the medieval ambience thanks to some tavern ambience YouTube videos, I was surprised to find that on peaceful difficulty it could actually be considered a cosy game, just like Stardew Valley and similar farming simulators. Manor Lords also has surprising similarities to Cult of the Lamb, so if you're up for something less cult-like but still with lambs involved in one way or another, look no further.

Describing Manor Lords as a city builder is an oversimplification. It's much more than just putting buildings down and making the good numbers go up - over the seasons you can transform a bundle of tents to a thriving village in a thoroughly organic manner, from putting winding roads through the houses and workshops to planning out which of your fields are going to be fallow from year to year. At peaceful difficulty, Manor Lords really is a slow living cosy medieval game, with some valuable additions that make it novel amongst the typical city builder video game genre.

Don't believe me? Watch our video to see all the reasons Manor Lords should be your next go-to cosy game, or at the very least be in consideration - with a couple of caveats.

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Medieval city-building strategy Manor Lords released in early access last month, and already its community has modded in DreamWorks Animation's great green ogre as a playable character. After all, what really is a new PC release without the swift implementation of a Shrek mod?

The mod in question comes from NorskPL, who states: "Shrek is lord, Shrek is life."

As you can see in the image above, this mod replaces the playable character in Manor Lords' third-person mode with that of the ogre.

Read more

As a lover of medieval history and swords, I was attracted to Manor Lords from the very first time I heard about it. Manor Lords is a city builder strategy game that has you fostering a thriving medieval village and ushering it into a new dawn filled with trade, farming, and - of course - at least one Manor. After picking it up for myself and getting fully into the medieval ambience thanks to some tavern ambience YouTube videos, I was surprised to find that on peaceful difficulty it could actually be considered a cosy game, just like Stardew Valley and similar farming simulators. Manor Lords also has surprising similarities to Cult of the Lamb, so if you're up for something less cult-like but still with lambs involved in one way or another, look no further.

Describing Manor Lords as a city builder is an oversimplification. It's much more than just putting buildings down and making the good numbers go up - over the seasons you can transform a bundle of tents to a thriving village in a thoroughly organic manner, from putting winding roads through the houses and workshops to planning out which of your fields are going to be fallow from year to year. At peaceful difficulty, Manor Lords really is a slow living cosy medieval game, with some valuable additions that make it novel amongst the typical city builder video game genre.

Don't believe me? Watch our video to see all the reasons Manor Lords should be your next go-to cosy game, or at the very least be in consideration - with a couple of caveats.

Read more

Harken to me, serfs! There's a big new patch for Manor Lords now available in beta testing for all players. Developer Greg Styczeń has blogged about it in depth. Yes, this is one of those update changelogs, the ones that keep on scrolling with hypnotic insistence till at last you tear your eyes away and look around and oh hell, it's night and why am I standing over this altar, holding a skewered doll?

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Steam hit Manor Lords shifted 1m copies in its first 24 hours, publisher Hooded Horse has said.

The medieval city builder/strategy hybrid was always likely to do well, being one of Steam's most-wishlisted games. Last Friday, on the night of its release, the game had more than 156,000 people playing. Last night, it hit a new peak of 173,178.

Writing on social media platform X, Hooded Horse claimed this was the highest ever concurrent player count for any Steam game in the city building genre (or similar). And now, its developer Greg Styczeń has offered a quick rundown of what's next.

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Manor Lords developer Greg Styczeń wants your help deciding what he should do about the game's global market supply mechanic.

Addressing the game's considerable fanbase on the official Discord, Styczeń asked for feedback on whether the mechanic – introduced after critics and content creators noted the trade system was "too OP" – should stay or go.

"When press and content creators got the build two weeks ago, they often said that the trade is OP and that it's too cheesy/exploity to just sell one type of good and make your town rich that way," Styczeń said.

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This week, everyone's been talking about early access releases again. Why? The headline moment was No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios defending a bumpy early access release by saying, "It's already pretty clear that going with EA is one of the best decisions we could've made." And then unexpectedly it added: Dark Souls 1 could have been better had it had an early access release too - an odd addendum and I'm not sure I agree with it, but OK. The other thing this week was mega-Wishlisted game Manor Lords arriving in early access in, again, an unfinished state. Neither of these things is remarkable. We know how early access releases go by now - we've had them for the past 10 years (god is it really that long?). We know games aren't finished when they arrive, though there's still a part of us that sees a game being sold for full-price-like money and expects a full-price-like experience from it. So around Manor Lords and No Rest for the Wicked, a familiar discussion has resurfaced, of when are - and when aren't - early access releases a good thing?

There are some well-worn arguments here you will have heard before, and undeniably the open development model - which came in at around the same time as the 'take back control from the publishers' crowdfunding movement in 2012-ish - has notable benefits. It's hard to argue against the added income a game makes by launching into early access, with which a developer can finish making a game, without cutting corners. And it's hard to argue against having a huge and readily available QA team to playtest a game and new features, and offer feedback on them. You no longer need to guess what your audience likes: you simply can let them play it and see what they think. A lot of games that go through early access come out better on the other end, and some have been enormous successes, like Baldur's Gate 3 and Hades and Slay the Spire. It's no wonder each of the companies behind those particular games are set on using early access again.

Indeed, when I think about what I played of Manor Lords, early access seems like a great place for it. To my mind, it has some pacing issues and tuning kinks, and bugs - all of which I expected. It's also still without some of the important pieces it needs to be a full experience, and all of that, early access can help with. I actually hope that with the money it earns, a few more developers will join the Manor Lords team. It's been a solo project for several years but some extra people now will help push it down that final stretch. Who knows? Maybe the game will make so much money - there are 3m people with it on their Steam Wishlist after all - Manor Lords will be able to achieve things previously thought out of reach. That's what happened with Baldur's Gate 3, remember - the scope of the game increased because of its early access success.

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Over the past while a few games have had post-launch patches, the exemplars being Starfield and Stardew valley, which have post-launch patches of different kinds and for different reasons. We take some time on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast to talk about this patch of patches, and what it was like in the good ol' days, where a broken game came out and stayed broken, gosh darn it!

Nate isn't here today, which means I can make fun of him for owning fish, or whatever it is he does, but in his stead James steps up with an RGB lighting-themed game where I have to guess what accessories people stuck lights on to turn into gamer accessories. This is because Razer stuck RGB lights on a pandemic mask and are in trouble over it now. Naughty Razer. Plus, we talk about the games we're playing right now, and dish you up some juicy recommendations at the end of the show.

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Medieval city builder Manor Lords was Steam's most-wishlisted game prior to release, and has now managed the feat of transmuting that anticipation into broad enthusiasm and very healthy sales. Not too shabby, considering that it's mostly the work of just one person, Grzegorz Styczeń of Slavic Magic, who has hopefully found time to sleep now and then between fielding bug reports and preparing the game's first patches.

Styczeń understandably doesn't have much time for interviews right now - those troublesome archers aren't going to balance themselves - but yesterday I spoke to Tim Bender, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, about how Styczeń is getting on. The answer, apparently, is: pretty good, because Styczeń has a healthy approach to early access development in keeping players close, without quite handing them the wheel.

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I don't have a lot of interest in VR these days, but I do have an interest in the beautifully realised miniature doings of your villagers in Manor Lords, the city builder that is currently rather popular on noted purveyor of ye finest interactive entertainments Steam - and which now has unofficial VR support care of Flat2VR and Praydog's UEVR.

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Manor Lords developer Slavic Magic, aka Greg Styczeń, has laid out the broad strokes of the game's first proper patch in early access. This follows a boisterous opening weekend that has seen the new city builder top purchase charts on Steam, causing Valve's mighty servers to crumble under the strain like overloaded oxen.

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“Given the opportunity, players will become a merciless egg baron and sit chuckling on a throne of shells while medieval Europe cowers beneath their imperious yolk,” is what I assume Soren Jonson once said, and it looks like Manor Lords is proving this timeless adage right once more. Despite shifting over a million units and hitting the highest concurrent player count of any ‘city builder’ on Steam, creator Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń is already looking to the future of how the building game handles trade.

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Historical strategy sim Manor Lords - which budding feudal despot Nic Reuben has deemed "a sturdy and immersive builder that feels incomplete yet alive with promise" - is now available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG. It was Steam's most wishlisted game before launch, and it's so popular right now that Steam's servers are struggling to keep up: there's an official developer post on the game's Steam forum warning that "the store is overwhelmed from all the people buying, it may take a couple tries for a bit while things calm down".

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While playing Manor Lords for review, I kept making mental notes to spend time watching the individual routes its villagers and beasts take each day. It’s one of those interestingly granular games that actually becomes more so by remaining a bit mysterious in ways I’m sure will annoy some, so I reasoned some people-watching would be illuminating. And by people, I mean oxen.

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Manor Lords has surpassed 3m wishlists on Steam ahead of its release later this week.

The medieval city-building strategy game has been top of the most wishlisted games on Steam for some time, but has continued to build in popularity to pass yet another a major milestone.

After the demo released in 2022, the game received 500k wishlists, which jumped to 2m wishlists after its 26th April release date was announced. Seven days ahead of its launch, it hit 2.5m wishlists - and now it's added another 500k on top of that.

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While Manor Lords may at first glance seem similar to the Total War series, its developer has said the upcoming strategy game should not be seen as a competitor.

Writing on Steam, Manor Lords developer Greg laid out a list of things the game is not. Top of this list are the very plain to see words: Manor Lords is not a Total War competitor.

Rather, developer Slavic Magic said its upcoming game is a "city builder with battles".

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While Manor Lords may at first glance seem similar to the Total War series, its developer has said the upcoming strategy game should not be seen as a competitor.

Writing on Steam, Manor Lords developer Greg laid out a list of things the game is not. Top of this list are the very plain to see words: Manor Lords is not a Total War competitor.

Rather, developer Slavic Magic said its upcoming game is a "city builder with battles".

Read more

Xbox has announced the next wave of games coming to Game Pass in late April.

It begins today with the release of Harold Halibut across cloud, PC and Xbox Series X/S. "A visually arresting, warm-hearted tale of a gofer searching for his purpose, Harold Halibut flounders amongst endless fetch-quests and waffle," reads our Eurogamer Harold Halibut review.

Then later in the month the subscription service will receive the likes of Manor Lords on PC (26th April), and the day one releases Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (23rd April) and Another Crab's Treasure (25th April).

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Slavic Magic, the sole creator behind anticipated (sub genres forthcoming) strategy game Manor Lords, has written a transparent and refreshingly to-the-point blog post on Steam addressing both expectations and future updates. Specifically, Slavic Magic aka Greg Manor Lords has taken time to outline exactly what his game - currently the most wishlisted on Steam, ahead of Hades 2 - isn’t.

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I remain the least qualified person alive to appraise Manor Lords an actual strategy game – my village stewardship is proving inept, even by medieval posho standards – but I have delayed economic and social ruin long enough to know it runs well on the Steam Deck. Just as it’s smooth low-end performer on desktops, Manor Lords can easily keep its head above 30fps in handheld mode, and that’s usually more like 40-45fps with the right visual settings.

Still, there’s scope for it to become a much more Deck-friendly game, if not by its April 26th release date then hopefully at least during its early access phase. Faster performance would be nice, sure, but what this citybuilder-meets-RTS-battler really needs for optimal portability is a more refined set of controls.

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My most recent experiences with performance-testing strategy games have been defined by miserable sluggishness and dental drama, so it’s been a relief to find that citybuilding/RTS hybrid Manor Lords is set to launch in a relatively fine state. As an early access game, no less.

Having dug into the latest build’s GPU performance and graphics settings, I have found a few loose strands of technical flax that Manor Lords could do with snipping away. Yet it’s generally in good shape, both for early access and a solo developer project, successfully balancing strong visuals with relatively light hardware demands that should help it run on older PCs (or handhelds like the Steam Deck). Several hours in, the ugliest things I’ve seen are my road layouts.

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