Manor Lords gets its first update since January, and its creator says he is 'rethinking what went wrong to ensure it won't happen again'

Manor Lords promo art - knight on horseback looking at a medieval village in the distance, viewed from behind — (Image credit: Slavic Magic)

It isn't unusual for a game to go quiet after a popular early access launch, but Manor Lords has been quieter than most. Slavic Magic's medieval city-builder was the most exciting thing to happen in April 2024, a quietly enthralling simulation of everyday life in the Middle Ages that somehow achieved cultural critical mass, becoming Steam's most wishlisted game and selling 3 million copies in its first year of early access.

Yet while updates remained relatively consistent through last year, 2025 has been much more sporadic, with no updates in the last nine months. That's changed now, however, as Slavic Magic has finally released a new experimental beta for Manor Lords, one that brings an impressive array of new features to the city-builder.

The beta patch expands the scope of Manor Lords in several directions. It adds four new maps that can be played in two additional game modes—1v1 Duel and a four-way free-for-all called Fractured Realm. It also adds a new masonry-themed production chain that lets players fashion stone and mortar through building a quarry, stonemason and lime kiln.

Manor Lords - Launch Trailer - YouTube

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And these are just the headline features. There are a ton of minor additions, balance changes, refinements, bug-fixes and so forth. The scope of it alone would seem sufficient evidence for why it's taken so long to create. But Manor Lords' creator, Greg Styczeń, nonetheless takes a moment to apologise for the gap between updates and details the reasons behind ii.

"Sorry for taking so long this time. I am rethinking what went wrong to ensure it won't happen again", he begins. Styczeń goes on to explain that a big part of the problem was that he developed this update at the same time as building out Slavic Magic as a studio.

"I focused on expanding the developer team and tackled way too many issues at once," he explains. "I needed to align visions with the new designers, and the new programmers learning the codebase (that was basically a giant solo dev spaghetti) also led to a bunch of problems." He also says that this update involved "some major refactors", while other changes "appeared innocent but ended up being huge rabbit holes."

With this being a beta update, Styczeń recommends players back up their saves before updating to it, not least because the update is so extensive that existing saves won't be compatible with it. He also mentions that some systems are improved but not yet complete. AI players, for example, can now build much more convincing-looking towns, but "can't challenge the player yet." There's no word on when these changes will shift to the main branch of Manor Lords, but I think we can safely say it'll take less time than for the update to arrive in the first place.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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