Manor Lords is still "moving forward," even as the city builder's creator takes a well-deserved minibreak amid its Unreal Engine 5 move

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Early access progress

A screenshot of some sheep in a field in Manor Lords.
(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

Manor Lords is still chugging towards its early access finish line, but the game's sort-of-solo developer is taking a much-deserved break while making the transition to Unreal Engine 5.

Manor Lords was and still is one of the year's biggest surprises. The medieval strategy game had a record-breaking early access launch when it outperformed other genre juggernauts and has since sold over two million copies. But after pushing out a hefty major update that both added new stuff and fixed old stuff, Manor Lords creator Greg Styczeń admitted he felt "really stressed."

Thankfully, that whirlwind launch seems to have cooled down a little. Styczeń recently tweeted a serene screenshot from the game's landscape alongside a short update on the game's progress. "Sorry for the delay in news lately, [I'm] still working on the UE5 port here and also resting a bit with the family, but things are definitely moving forward," he wrote.

The move to a fancier engine should sort out some "annoying" issues left in the game, while giving the developers the "ability to simultaneously work on console ports without hitting blocks from obsolete console SDKs." Elsewhere in the comments of the post above, Styczeń explained that the engine transition is also partly for big fixing and support purposes.

When asked about whether market stalls would be tweaked in the further future, the developer basically said no: "I'll finesse the marketplace but I'm not going to change it. The system was designed so that the town evolves naturally from the center to its outskirts, I really wanted mechanics creating a natural town development with the outskirts being less developed and more rural."

Manor Lords publisher shouts out benefit of letting developers cook as its bug-themed RTS and Soviet city-builder launch to rave reviews after up to 8 years in early access.

Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.