Manor Lords continues to go from strength to strength. The medieval strategy game and city builder hybrid has been out in early access for almost a year now, and each update added is even more game-changing than the last. For developer Grzegorz ‘Greg’ Styczeń, these massive updates are a very conscious choice. So if you’ve been periodically coming back to Manor Lords with every huge update, that system is going to continue going forward.
The communications director at Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, Joe Robinson, recently sat down with VideoGamer to talk about the city building game. Robinson says that Styczeń thinks every Manor Lords patch needs to be considerable in scale, and that this approach impacts how often we get each update.
“It’s not like Greg [Styczeń] is not one for hotfixes,” Robinson explains. “Sometimes you see people release kind of rapid-fire hotfixes, but Greg tends to like to collect everything and then kind of fix everything all at once. That’s why all his patches are quite meaty and they come with very large changelogs. But everything does get logged and noted and fixes do come eventually if it’s fixable.”
Styczeń’s “philosophy was always just to kind of polish as much as possible. He was very hesitant to introduce big new features before early access launched,” Robinson adds in the interview. “He had some ideas: you can see in terms of the policy screen and region specializations. And then there’s the castle planner, which is a very work-in-progress feature. It’s very obviously a work-in-progress feature. But those are the kind of seeds of areas that he wants to push into when he’s confident that the base is as polished and as secure as it can be.”
We’ve been documenting Styczeń’s huge Manor Lords updates since launch, and the patches are still coming in 2025. Earlier this month a colossal Manor Lords update gave virtually every corner of the game some love. I’m talking new maps, bridges, structural upgrades, and a slate of intuitive changes to make play even easier than before.
If you want more than just Manor Lords, we’ve also got the best strategy games and medieval games you need to add to that backlog.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.