Hey everyone,
It's been quite a journey so far, but it won't stop on April 26th. During development, the core tester group was around 130+ people. Given the popularity of the game, I'm pretty sure there is going to be a wave of feedback that I will need to address after the early access launch.
I wanted to address a few things for everyone who intends on buying the game on April 26th...
What this game is not.
-Manor Lords is not a Total War competitor. It's a citybuilder with battles. Yes, battles are there, but not as huge or as frequent as some of you might expect. The majority of gameplay is focused on citybuilding and management.
-It's not a Empire Management style Grand Strategy game either. The map has regions, but you won't be able to conquer the whole Europe, nor have marriages or anything like that. The game is designed to play at a much smaller scale.
-It's not an RPG either. If you played KCD or Mount&Blade, ML is a different type of game. There is a visit mode in Manor Lords which allows you to walk around your town, but it's an experimental, cosmetic bonus feature, the game is really meant to be played from the "bird's eye" perspective, like a strategy game (almost always) should. There won't be any first person gameplay.
-It's not a competitive, fast paced RTS like Age of Empires or Starcraft. A lot of the game mechanics focus on aesthetics of your town and resources take some time to be transported around the map. This results mostly in a more of a relaxed experience, with high intensity moments spicing up atmospheric citybuilding rather than the game being at high intensity all the time.
This will be an early access release.
Yes, it must be disappointing, but I think it's the right choice. It's my first serious game and not only some stuff is still unfinished, but I bet you guys will ask me to change some things you don't necessarily like. But I want to pursue an open development strategy of a back and forth between me and you, I think it worked great for the game so far (I'm comparing to times where there wasn't even a testing group and I was developing in a bubble).
The publisher and I recently shared the game with content creators all over the world. Feel free to check out numerous streams and let's plays out there before buying to make sure this is the game for you!
That said, the reception has been super positive so far for which I’m very grateful. I think the game should find a way into the hearts of players who expected Manor Lords to be what it is, a realistic, organic, authentic city builder with real time battles.
Roadmap
I do not plan on releasing a roadmap yet. I've made a mistake once or twice before, of promising and working on a feature only to find out that the testers didn't care as much as I did and that they actually wanted something else. So even if I have a plan, I want to adopt the philosophy of "listen, verify, implement". This way I expect the first month of patches to be just bug fixes and polish. During that time, together with Hooded Horse, we’ll be collecting your feedback and then prioritizing work based on what we hear.
I'm still considering whether to keep the testing of future patches closed or open, my current idea is to have an open pre_release beta branch so that everyone who owns the game can check and test the most recent pre-release unstable version of the game and contribute if they want to. And keeping the main branch as the previous most stable version. Though let me know, maybe you'd prefer me to keep the unstable versions to a closed testing group?
As always, thanks for following and all the support. I’ll certainly keep the updates more frequent here once the early access officially starts.
Have a good one!
Greg