Manor Lords reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in the best way

I should have enjoyed the beach. I was on vacation, far from my gaming PC and close to soothing, rolling waves. But instead my thoughts continued to stray to a whole of the land surrounded by the 14th-century Germany. There are few games that have nestled in my brain Landlords.

The medieval ‘urban builder with battles’, such as the developer Slavic magic Describes it, is complicated and challenging, with many moving pieces and mutual dependencies. It is sometimes extremely frustrating. That gives satisfaction, just like with a puzzle box that consists of several steps: you sort out countless small solutions until they are all built up to the satisfactory click that ultimately opens the lid.

Landlords Is not the complexity, the attention to detail, or even the satisfaction that you get when you plant and see a city blooming. I think it’s Greg.

A man named Greg

Landlords is a passion project. Greg Styczeń, bekend onder de naam Slavic Magic, heeft zeven jaar aan het ontwerp gewerkt. En er is iets grappigs aan het hele ontwikkelteam achter een succesvolle game die alleen uit deze ene gast bestaat, genaamd Greg.

But it’s not like you see Greg’s hand in every pixel: there are no jokes or Easter eggs, and even the graphics are based on historically accurate scans rather than showing an individual style. In plaats daarvan is het passiegedeelte van het project te vinden in de manier waarop het spel werkt.

Landlords‘Villages and towns rush. There is always activity. People and livestock cart goods between buildings, structures are built from the ground up as you watch the progress, vendors call from the market, and farmland is plowed, sown, and harvested depending on the season. And you can just watch it all happen, either zoomed out and looking from above like some, well, lord, or zoomed in down to ground level, following the people (or sheep) as they go about their daily tasks.

And Greg did all that.

Two brothers and some unfortunate dwarfs

Stardew Valley Has a similar story: it has been developed by one person in four years and more than 30 million copies have now been sold. So does Queu. Even Minecraft. And a game called Dwarf Fort.

I was aware of it Dwarf Fort een tijdje gespeeld en heb het in de loop der jaren zelfs een paar keer geprobeerd (en mislukte). Toen, in 2022, kreeg ik COVID-19 en ik kreeg er een klap van op mijn kont. After a few months of downtime I finally decided that I was going to sort it out.

Image: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games

En ik werd verliefd op die belachelijke, ASCII-grafische, supercharged spreadsheet van een spel. It was still astonishing and user -unfriendly, but it slowly started to become logical. Well, most of it – I still don’t really understand armies (and I even wrote a whole guide on them).

Dwarf Fort is another passion project created by a single-digit development team. That number is two: the Tarn and Zach Adams brothers. Dwarf Fort is in ontwikkeling sinds 2006 en bevindt zich technisch gezien nog steeds in alpha, zelfs vanaf versie 50.12. And it projects the same sense of unique vision and the kind of attention to detail that you only get from someone who really cares about what he or she makes.

Dwarf Fort – en, bij uitbreiding, de broers Adams – overleefden bijna twintig jaar uitsluitend dankzij vrijwillige donaties. The base game with its ASCII interface is still free, even if the updated, graphical version is sold on Steam and itch.io. When it was launched on Steam in 2022, Dwarf Fort was the bestseller of the day, with 160,000 people picking it up. By the end of the first year, 800,000 copies had been sold.

Landlords followed the approach of Adams. The development was supported by a Patreon, long before any demos or trailers ever came out. The in-development videos that Slavic Magic shared showed off the detail and obsessive care that went into the game. And people noticed it.

In the weeks prior to Mansion’ Early Access launched, it became the most anticipated game ever on Steam, with over 3 million people wishlisting it. About a week later, it sold over 1 million copies and during its first weekend set the record for the number of concurrent players for any city sim game.

Rule about all this

There’s something that happens in every game Landlords I’ve played. I build my pleasant city where everyone is fed, dressed, warm and happy. I can even ward off a few bandits from time to time. But when I try to expand into a neighboring region, I realize that I didn’t actually build the titular mansion for myself. It just doesn’t occur to me – admittedly, I tend to focus on the city building parts rather than all-out warfare. That it keeps happening makes me think there’s something in my brain that just rejects feudalism (weird boast).

Image: Slavic magic/hooded horse via polygon

Landlords speelt zich af in een ruwweg historisch correcte 14e eeuw, en dat betekent dat het zich ergens tussen een pre- en een proto-kapitalistische samenleving bevindt. Even Mansion’ Marketplaces don’t involve money – at least not that you see in-game. Instead, they are just a place where goods are distributed to the families who need them. It’s downright collectivist If you think about it.

That breaks in between Mansion’ regions do. Trading requires wealth: nice houses and surplus goods. Even if you manage two regions, you still need a fully functional city in every region, because they do not freely share their goods. As a lord of the country house, my two cities cannot simply persuade to a kind of utilitarian redistribution of yarn – it is more of an exchange system that works best when every city specializes in something that the other does. t have (yarn in exchange for firewood for example).

And that’s on me – the villagers in it Landlords Already know what they are looking for. I can’t decide for them to all just make firewood from now on and I trust that the next city will send them enough vegetables in return to survive the winter. It’s actually an interesting friction between me and the game. I learned the basics – building a city – but when I tried to convert my knowledge into a wider practice, I discovered new gaps and things that I did not fully understand. These frustrations are where the game – Greg – corrects me and tells me more about the world.

Dwarf Fort gaat helemaal over het vinden van die hiaten in je kennis. Sure, strongholds will fall if you run out of food, but they will fail just as dramatically as, say, your brewer’s favorite duck gets stuck in a tree for so long that it becomes despondent and stops working and all the other dwarves go crazy. due to lack of drink.

The (un) official motto of Dwarf Fort is “losing is fun!” For that game, it’s because it’s fun to see how one small mistake leads to complete societal collapse. Voor elk ander spel is het echter net zo waar. My failures and mistakes are a way in which a game can say: ‘You almost have it, but how it really works is …’ I may not always learn the lesson the first (or third) time, but in the end I will be there Coming out with a better understanding of the world and the story that the game tells.

Customized fun

The success of Landlords And the other similar passion project games appeal to an audience that is looking for what they want and need a game, while making accessible and advertised games easier to pass by.

At the same time, and more generally, there has been a shift from aggregation to curation. You can see it on sites as a substit (Nazis aside) and the (re) rise of newsletters – places where the information we consume is filtered by a single voice instead of flattened and spread en masse. (Hey, unrelated, did you know Polygon has a newsletter?)

And you can see it in these games – games that are deeply themselves with their own well-developed voices, whether that means focusing on historical accuracy, hugging peasants, or dwarven strongholds collapsing in tragic and hilarious ways. These games find a wide audience not because they are so silly that they are acceptable to everyone, but because they are so patiently and painstakingly crafted and, frankly, nerdy that you can’t help but appreciate them.

I always come back to it Landlords niet omdat het een perfect spel is, maar omdat het spelen ervan voelt als een diep gesprek over iemands interesses. It is because this is Greg’s game. Or the game of Tarn. Or Eric’s game. They didn’t make these passion projects for me – or for anyone, really – they made them for themselves. And that is exactly what makes them so fascinating.