Manor Lords next update will switch over to Unreal Engine 5 and, more importantly, add fishing ponds

I’m calling it now. When, in a “few weeks” according to the developer, fishing ponds come to strategy builder Manor Lords, it will take approximately 45 minutes for some enterprising medieval fintech tinkerer to utterly bork the entire economy, and it will be glorious. What will begin as brave new world of lean protein and previously unseen Omega 3 levels will soon devolve into hordes of beleaguered oxen hauling overburdened carts full of rotting fish carcasses, as hyperinflation looms.

I have beheld the idyllic lake, as shared by Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń on Twizzler, and I see only financial ruin rippling upon its tranquil surface, like a really fucked up lillypad.

Ok, so it’ll probably be fine. As you may have heard recently, updating Manor Lords for the sake of it goes against both Styczeń and publisher Hooded Horse’s vision for the game. Not every game needs to be "some live-service boom or bust," said Hoody Horsey’s CEO Tim Bender recently, after the game was criticised by Long Dark studio Hinterlands CEO Raphael van Lierop for a lack of updates. We can safely surmise that Styczeń has deeply considered the impact of throwing fish at his game’s serfs, then.

You may have also noticed how shiny the above lake looks, too, which is likely down to the upcoming engine change slated to also arrive in the upcoming patch. The migration to Unreal Engine 5, hopes Styczeń, will sort out some lingering memory corruption issues, like flickering roads and crashes, via Games Radar.

The initial hype around Manor Lords - that wot led it to sell 2 million copies - has understandably leveled out a bit, but it’s undeniably heartening to hear that Slavic Magic aren’t under pressure to crank out new mecha-ox or hay-based battle passes. “Dev uses early access to work on game at their own pace and player base plays a bit here and there, then and moves on to other games when they’ve had their fill” shouldn’t be an unusual state of affairs in anything but a profoundly sick industry, but them's the no-brakes, I guess.

"Sustainability is something we think about a lot," Bender told our Edwin a few months back, "but usually we think about it in relation to developers. So we're in an interesting situation - we never took money from, like, venture capitalists, or private equity, or international conglomerates, or anything that would put pressure on us. In fact, we even wrote into our bylaws that we can prioritise other things over profits, like artistic integrity and fair treatment.”