Medieval Dynasty

it ends up boring because after you hire people and get things running smoothly there very little to do, also i feel that i should be able to point others to report to me on day bv day operations so i can do more,

**Edit**: I've unfortunately looked at other games made by the Devs and this is beginning to look like a pattern. Create a decent looking building/life sim in early access and then leave it unfinished, but as a "completed" game with promises of big game updates. I really hope this isn't the case because that's scummy, but this game and the Sengoku Dynasty aren't even finished and they're moving on to Viking Dynasty? C'mon. What next? Chinese Dynasty? Roman Dynasty? Greek?

**Edit 2**: The DEV response was right, the above is on the Publisher for releasing games early, and lots of the same, but there's still an issue and a pattern. I hope the Dev team gets the support to polish this game but I'll edge on the side of unlikely with the response below.

There are much older games that in a way do a lot more then this does, there's games that had better AI then this well over a decade ago. Using Bannerlord wasn't a comparison of what it should be DEVs, but that the game feels like it's missing a large section of it, or that this game barely knows what it is. The questlines are basic and flimsy while it sends you from point A to point B and back again with little reward or satisfaction; almost preventing you from seeing absolute lack of going on in the background. There is no immersion, but there is "relaxing" mundane tasks. The game's basis is just grinding, whilst allowing you to occasionally make something pretty once in a while. You're responsible for the survival of your village and leading it, but you're also the errand boy, the manager, the builder, the farmer, the lumberer, the miner, the hunter and the main trader. The village is basic.

There are games that have you building and beautifying that are a lot better and cheaper then this, so if that's your only aim, it's not going so well.

Your status is high? Why does it not represent that with your family? why can't my wife/husband wear the nice clothes I'm making in bulk? (for no reason btw, you can't give them to villagers or trade them for resources beyond just selling to a neighbouring village) Why does my child look like every other peasant in the village?

I don't have to meet the king, but why are my actions to do with the capital or outside so minimal If I'm able to influence him and do challenges for him? Why do I have the option to poison the king as a "high status peasant"? I can do challenges for the king or fail them, which reflects badly on him but with no real repercussions, it all seems so flimsy.

Now I understand I'm going into this a lot for saying the game isn't bad, but it isn't great, it isn't really even good... just barely okay; however for the full price? Not even that. The there's been some real development that went into this game but it just isn't polished or finished, it's got untied threads everywhere.

Initial Post:

First: I don't think this is a bad game per se, and I don't think people shouldn't buy it; I just can't recommend it for the price. As you play the game, and wrack up the hours in the ABSOLUTE grind to build your settlement, it begins to feel a bit empty, like there should be things available but isn't. It comes across like this was the soft gameplay that something like Bannerlord left out. It doesn't feel like a full experience, it still feels like a base game that hasn't had all of the trimmings added to it, or the trimmings of another game scooped up and presented as this.


I noticed little things at first and it just kept building with things like:

You can't kill people, or people you know were bad I.E an NPC you know is going to commit murder despite your character saying things like "I won't let you do this".

You can't make your family look like the nobles or upper class they become, there's no changes when you become the richest person in the valley, no doors open up and you can't invest in things.

The association with the outside world and the king are minimal and sometimes frustrating, I.E getting a king to die can take FOREVER, you might as well just skip years and hope he dies of old age.

The maps are too small, and the fact there are only one outside the story is questionable? I hope it's in the works but who knows.

Then there's the fact that they advertise it as a medieval game but there's lots of the medieval lifestyle they've cut out because it's either inconvenient or they're too scared to add it... example being at least add it so children will follow their parents while they're working, maybe helping out on little things. Children in medieval times would be doing a lot more for many years as a child in medieval society, the game the NPC's just standing around like bots lessen the immersion immensely.

Then bigger issues start kicking in, and you realise the whole game is just the grind to build and beautify, that's it. No more. Why Implement the ability to live for generations, if you're done before your first life is up? Why is the management so simplified? Is the whole game about grinding resources and putting down structures? that's what it feels like, there's nothing in between.

Relaxing if you don't mind grinding sure, but engaging or immersive? No.

The game is a really good implementation of first-person village management. And although there is a little rpg put in the majority of people will stop playing once they have experimented with all mechanics.

Only a very small minority will play enough to actually play the next dynasty (your son/daughter) or will be interested in micro-managing a village.

The fun is there up to around 20 villagers and finishing the quest line. After that the interest drops hard.

Great to play with friends. Tried playing this single player and hated it. Co-op mode allows you to enable settings like fast builds, adjust the amount of harm animals can do to players, disable carry weight limit, and many other features that make the game customizable to your liking. It takes awhile to get into swing of building and maintaining village, but after awhile it becomes second-nature. I enjoy the crafting system. Main quest lines are usually interesting and sometimes comical. Seasonal side quests can be repetitive at times. Combat system with bandits is not well developed. Hunting system is well-developed.

It is really difficult to get village to be self-sufficient and it does require some micromanaging to keep the settlement running smoothly. Overall enjoyable but because of the amount of materials needed to build/craft, and the short season length, progress was very slow and tedious on single player mode. Highly recommend playing co-op.

I started playing this game recently with my partner, and we are hooked. If you are a fan of games like Stardew Valley, and or Sons of the Forest then you'll enjoy this game. I love the town management, and economics of the game. The survival aspects of the game are nice, but lacking in my opinion.
Where this game could use improvement is definitely in the NPC interaction and dialogue department. I can't ever really feel connected to NPCs in my town. I also feel there could be a lot more decorations, and customization options for your town. There's a good lot of them now, but I feel like basic stuff like putting furniture in your house should already be here. The last thing I'll nitpick is the lack of things to explore in the world. I've only really played the Oxbow map so maybe the classic map has more to explore, but I feel as if there is little reason to go around exploring.
It may sound like I'm dragging the game, but honestly I really enjoy it and am glad I purchased it.

I have been playing this game for years, I love management games and survival games. This is the best match up of simulation, management, farming and survival games I have ever found. I love that it was not made to be a battle or fighting game but still has aspects of fighting bandits. Its truly open to whatever you want it to be, you can play solo or multiplayer and its fully functional either way. you can choose to build up a village and bring in villagers to manage or just build a basic little farm to tend yourself, the options are almost endless here and I love that they are still developing this game years after its come out. Looking forward to see where it goes from here .
Cant recommend this game enough.

This is a great time with friends. It's also a great time solo. I love the fact that you can remove some of the tedium by reducing stamina drain costs, increasing carry weight, etc, so that if you want to get into the management sim aspects without the slog of a typical survival craft then you can do it easily.

I would recommend this game for it's normal price, it's good fun with minor bugs and a fairly flushed out gameplay loop.

This game scratches that desired of building and not over complicating things.

While the game's incremental content unlocking system is sound in theory, its execution is deeply flawed. The early game forces players into mind-numbing grinding, with extremely limited options like crafting wooden hammers repeatedly for minimal coins. After spending 20 hours grinding 3,000 coins to survive winter, discovering that village expansion requires an additional 10,000 coins for seeds demonstrates how unreasonably steep the resource requirements are. Solo players should be warned, unless you enjoy walking simulators and watching timers, the excessive grind may not be worth your time. While co-op play might speed up progression, the single-player experience is unnecessarily tedious.

This game is utter trash. Collision seems to only work on the player. But fucking Wisent clip through trees and kill you with 2 hits, even though they dont even touch you. Collision? Hit boxes? The devs dont seem to know what any of those things are, except when it comes to the player.

Oh yeah and you can not repair your equipment. Which is completely nonsene!

Would I recommend this game to other players? I don't honestly know many who would have enjoyed the experience as much as I did. I really liked this game, but I also am very interested in anything to do with medieval daily life and Medieval Dynasty has so much detail and variety that is appropriate to a medieval (eastern) European setting. I loved the variety of foods and items you could craft.

Basically, I am a chore-game enjoyer. Sometimes when I game, I just want to do some mindless activity in a pretty place while getting that dopamine hit from whatever rewards the game gives me for doing that. No combat challenge, chop wood all day: yay! But I get that a lot of gamers are not like that!

The game is part farming sim, part survival crafting and part city management. It doesn't do any of those as well as other games I have played but the combination is a great concept and it's a lot of fun for the first 10 years or so of the game. I am currently typing this review while waiting so I can sleep until next season and progress another year so my heir can be 18 and I can have a happy hunting accident and 100% this and move on to something else.

The pacing is a little uneven. The first few years I had to increase the number of days in a season (the default is 3) just so I could get in all the questing / planting / building / villager recruiting / bandit loot seeking / log chopping / clay digging in that needs to be done to get going. By the end of the game, everything runs smoothly and I ended up dropping the number of days in each season and basically just waiting for time to pass. There's not much to spend coin on at this point other than yearly taxes and by the time your heir is a teenager you have more coin than you know what to do with. It's basically just a matter of managing keeping your villagers busy while trying not to hit the resource storage cap too hard.

The building is not super varied and I think the game would benefit from more decorating options (other than drop this item and kind of drag it to where you want it to be). There are plenty of decorations but trees, plants, varied ground cover would be nice. All the houses are basically identical but you can edit in small tweaks. It would have been nice to have more and different styles and sizes of houses. Also I really wish you could do more with the houses besides plant a little nuclear family in each one. There could have been dormitory style houses, multi-generational houses, boarding tenants, and things like that.

The questing is not good. Loads of 'run all the way across the map and give x person an item so they can give you an item for y person and then you run back again'. The exception were the heir quests. They were still fetch quests but you got to bring your kid along and impart some kind of lesson to him (it's always a him) during the process.

If you're looking for medieval fighting or combat, this is not your game. A few scattered bandits and hunting wild animals is mostly all there is, but you can craft fancy elite medieval armor for that (and then mostly wear it while you put poop on your fields. There's even a crest that unlocks for that!).

The 'dares' (challenges to unlock crests) were fun and I wish there had been more of that kind of thing to do during the last decade of watching my heir grow up.

Speaking of growing, I really enjoyed how the NPCs age over time. No one has died yet in my game but I am a little worried about some of the traders I've been visiting since I got to the Valley. The animals do age out and die, and new ones are born. It's kind of cool. In addition to aging, the population of your own village changes clothing each season and even improves their own clothing as the city becomes more prosperous. Lots of color and styles and variety and it makes the game feel full. (I also really enjoyed the snippets of pop culture overheard in some of the things your villagers say -- references to Star Wars, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings, The Wickerman, Assassin's Creed, and many many more were things I caught in bits of dialogue. There are so many they don't get repeated all the time and it makes the village come alive a little.)

While I was playing, the developer dropped an awesome update that lets you craft directly from your storages (in range) and it was such a huge quality of life improvement! I was impressed to see this kind of followup 3+ years after release and I hope that future updates continue to tweak this game and bring it from pretty good to great. Adding in colors and patterns for the buildings was a nice touch (and period accurate too!).

I hope this review doesn't come across as too negative because I did really like the game. I'd love to play it co-op but I can't think of a single person in my gaming community who would actually enjoy the experience.

Fun game, love it on CO-OP as well. I wish there was more variety in the main game.

A simple but fun game that includes Realistic Hunting, Building, Village Management and Having a family. It's like "Sims Medieval" meets "The Guild 2". It's a bit grindy... but still fun. No silly micro transactions or DLC's

It's just empty. Badly optimized.
In co-op you have no way to interact with friends.
Gather, build, sell, do it all over again.
Not worth the time or the money.

Great game. Lots of different ways to play and system crossplay makes co-op even better

Great game, can put po**p on the fields. 10/10

the village management from a first person perspective is done really well and the pacing is fine, but it lacks a bit in customizations and endgame content

The grind to build up a city or be able to do "combat" is too slow to deal with. Just not my cup of tea.

Very realistic, nice, medieval life simulator. I am constantly forgetting about time. Playing as custom character in Oxbow, haven't tried the first map yet. Dialogs are quite nice. No woke bs, relaxing. Quite time expensive, since by default there are 3 days per season, and each day not sure, but feels like 40 minutes maybe. And I adjusted settings to 4 days per season and it is just enough to do everything I need before next season. But people in this game age 1 game year by 1 year ... so your child will be growing for 18 x 12 x 40 minutes ~144 hours by default, but you can sleep, skipping some time. Interesting to find some balance.
There are a lot of things to craft, several workstations, your villagers are quite smart so far in pathfinding. Game feels very polished. Playing farm simulator is fun, same like hunting or fishing. Can only recommend.
Only fun thing is, that you sometimes die so easily if your not careful about your surroundings or too close to falling tree.

Great game to easily put hours into.
But somehow workers feel so useless, why does one worker get like 2 wood per day when that's not even a full tree ? lol.
Same for hunters, i can have 5 hunters for 30 villagers and still need to get active myself.

Also, towns feel very dead. You get some side quests sometimes, but otherwise no NPC has a personality. They all just tell you where to find bla bla.

Overall I think it's a great concept and its sad where potential got lost.
There should be like events in the towns, something just making the world alive.
And why is there a King but no Castle you can visit?
Why the only thing you can talk to with the "Landlord" is paying taxes?
As in the story he knew your father or something like that.. There should be way more conversations available imo.

Looking forward to future updates.

A good concept done very poorly, a 4 year old game should not have this many game breaking bugs in it

This game with like a skyrim style magic system and leveling tree would go so hard, anyway great game

One of the best medieval games out there, period. Graphics, game-play, music, everything. It's impossible to get bored if you like building a village/town and managing it. But there's more to it. Survival, hunting, gathering resources, trading, quests, so much to do. Easily a few hundred hours of fun, worth every buck. Highly recommend it.

This game is overall quite fun, although there are many bugs, building villages, getting married and having children, these gameplay are very good.

The game isn't that bad, but it's core mechanic, namely settlement management, is just barely there. It's all about micromanagement and cannot be played in any other way. Practically speaking, the micromanagement IS the core mechanic. It's entirely impossible to make the village fully self-sustained, and if anyone would claim "But I have my village self-sustained" I would ask: "for how many years?"
Because in the best case, if you played this game in Excel, accurately balancing production, and your only interaction with the village would be selling final products and paying taxes, the village would still eventually starve on intermediate resource or overfill your storage with them. So you HAVE to fine tune pretty much everything again every time there's a new villager or someone raise their skill, or mood is changed, because everything will throw out your balance out of the window.
And because there's no tools to regulate the local economy whatsoever, all you can do is micromanage your settlement all the time, throw villagers from one place to another, change production rate in vain hope you get it right, buy whatever you're missing, sell excesses. You're not developing your colony, you're getting more things to micro-manage and keeping it on manual life support.
That's the core mechanic of the game, as interesting as that.

Now, if developers would read this, few things that they absolutely have to implement:

* Production limits. That's absolute must have. Imagine a landlord in real life seeing his smith making 1000th axe, while there's no sickles because all resources goes to axes, and farmers are loafing around in autumn and everyone is starving. And all the landlord could do is ask his smith nicely to produce less axes and more sickles. Just so that all resources would now go to sickle production and none to pickaxes, so now miners can't get copper and smith and farmers and miners are loafing around, and whole village is starving. What SHOULD happen is the landlord getting a biggest trunk there is and piking that smith on it and telling the next smith to make only one or two axes or sickles or pickaxes or whatever ONLY WHEN THERE'S NO LEFT.

* Seasonal workers. Those farmers do nothing for the whole year except two-four days - to sew and to harvest. Yeah, there's carrot and wheat that can be sown in winter or autumn, but this still does not add up and generally you don't sew fields just to keep your farmers busy, you do it to maximize overall productivity of the village when it's necessary. You might not need that many carrots. So what should have is an option to reassign farmers to other workplaces, so they can make things during winter or summer, instead of spitting in the sky.

* Overhaul of production system in general. Just do it like in literally every other colony management game. Throw out that abomination of +/- % of production and replace it with orders. So the use scenario is following: player opens the building, adds a production assignment and selects assignment completion options: "make n", "make until n", "make forever". The same with seasons, so assignments change with seasons. Or, alternatively, add seasons to assignment options, like "make until n when it's winter"

* Finally, and optionally, and instead of seasonal workers, a new labor system, where buildings optionally might have specifically assigned workers, but otherwise anyone can do the job, as long as there's one. For some buildings, like smithy, job assignment might be compulsory, but for others, like farms or barns - no, as they should not require skilled labor.

An all round fun game to play . Beautiful to look at and plenty to do in the early days setting up and keeping people happy etc. Will play more often to see how it unfolds in later stage game play but I doubt it will disappoint, especially for those with limited gaming time or have more than one game on the go

The game is great, and I would recommend it to everyone. Im still learning to play the game but its just great

Wow. This game not only looks amazing...its got wonderful crafting and survival and building mechanics...fun quests....great interaction with NPC's. A truly hidden gem. Better than most AAA games of this caliber in my opinion. Did I say it looks amazing?

Fun city builder. Management is somewhat challenging without becoming overly complex. Autumn update was a nice addition, adding complexity to the challenge of bandits. Main area for improvement is in the regular/season quests. Need to expand the variety of quests available. For example, a quest to track down a band of marauding bandits in the area could be cool. And ties in with the features already available in-game. Also, given the game can be played to see your children grow into craftspeople, the skill progression could be adjusted to advance to 18+ years, rather than maxing out around 10 years.

I keep coming back to it because no other game quite does what it does. What you do feels a bit like Stardew Valley and/or Manor Lords from a peasant's perspective. It's really fun and satisfying to go from doing all tasks yourself to setting up your village to produce and largely run by itself via and NPC task and item management system that overall feels good and works well. It makes some often boring things pretty interesting like the farming, crafting, and cooking systems.
Survival aspects are present but overall light outside of the very early game making this largely a cozy experience aside from accidentally running into the occasional bear or bandits, but honestly you'll rarely die unless you purposefully seek danger out and engage, and combat isn't super developed though hunting feels decent. Super grindy at some stages of the game if played on base settings, but in vanilla you can adjust some of those factors (bulk crafting for the playable character and tech advancement) and honestly most of the grind actually feels satisfying and relaxing anyway and less like an annoying gate keeping method.

Overall 7/10 and worth it (certainly on sale) in current state which does feel like a completed sandbox game. Definite room for improvement in a few areas, but I wouldn't review if I didn't also love it and see potential for it to grow to be amazing. Devs, things that would make it >7 are: more reason to keep playing after getting all building unlocks aside from just making a pretty virtual village (honestly I burn out a little en route to unlocking the mine due to lack of something to work towards as a result of gaining it). Cosmetics are fine, but cosmetics with a purpose (like the villager happiness system in place) is so much better and is what makes other games with unique building and crafting like Stardew Valley and Valheim gems in my opinion. Maybe adding larger quests or world events for the late game at least as an option--war and a sudden steep tax increase / grain demand, bandit raids on villages, or even just some peaceful goal to work towards like building an expensive achievement buidling (cathedral, library, whatever). More uses for money in the late game!! At some point I lose interest in all games like this primarily because there are no meaningful goals or challenges left. Add more things to do with the great systems in place instead of just more hollow cosmetics in future updates.

The only downside I can find so far is that the dialogue is ROUGH to get through - does not feel immersive whatsoever, BUT, I also find that it makes this a good/accessible game for those who enjoy using games to learn a new language or people who have a bad habit of skipping through dialogue, as simple words and phrasing still jump out and give you the gyst of what you should be reading rather than having to decipher lore-friendly wording which may not convey the quest intentions as readily and clearly.
Zero complaints about the gameplay itself, and I don't consider myself to be hoity toity about dialogue as I don't recall ever previously thinking to myself that dialogue in a game was not good, but it was one of the first things I noticed and it did hit me like a ton of bricks.... 26 hours in now and I've adjusted and accepted this is how it is, so, overall not bad at all

Hits the scratch that not many games hit. Developers are updating the game quite often and adding more things which is nice.

i advise playing in hard mode and set the days to 30 per season and learn the game that way its alot more fun

Fun game, although in my view, lacking in content. The world feels empty, as everyone is holed up in their towns. Besides the occasional bandit, you'll never really see another human outside of settlements. The building system is nice enough, with some customization. Game lacks a bit of a goal, a lot of it just seems to be building for the sake of building. If your goal would simply be to continue your dynasty, why not just marry and have children, without this whole city-building aspect. But a game with a lot of potential, I put 50 hours in it in no time, but felt like progress was a bit too slow.

This is a decent game. I like it. I’m over five years into it and everything is running smoothly. My settlement and the game. I just wish there were a few events and a little action to break up the grind.

Ok i think ive played enough hours to write a review.

I love this game, fighting, farming, building and more building is what i love in this game. I dont play with anyone TBH and to start i was dead most of the time which really got on my nerves but then watched a you tube video and realised that i could change most if not all the settings to allow easier game play for people like myself who enjoy casual. I played wow for years and got tired of the constant grind of dailys etc it missed that aspect of home! this game is home and look forward in any maps or DLC.

110/110

Love this game. It has easy game play dynamics to learn. I play solo and totally enjoy being returned to a time long ago. If building a village, surrounded with detailed scenery, unique music, some quests, with a few bandits to spice things up, then I would give this game a try.

over 700 hours. i love this game. the developers have been great. first person village building, town management, hunting, farming, bandit fighting. It's a slow game (it is a dynasty game). There are many customization options to speed up things if you want. i wish all games were as well thought out as this one.

I went into it not expecting a lot but then built a whole town and ruled like angry gods with my friends, it's pretty fun, although some of the mechanics are a bit tedious like degradation and realistic elements, there are options to turn off all of those and play how you want to, which was a great choice on the dev's part, plenty of quality of life features in the game which make it a lot more enjoyable to play!

Some menus in the game like the management menu (where you assign your townsfolk to work) are confusing to figure out, like I accidentally unassigned everyone in my town from their jobs purely by pressing F a few times while trying to give them work to do. Besides that I think the game is very enjoyable!

Price tag is reasonable in my opinion.

If you're looking to relax, maybe have a drink and just take it easy, there's some chores to be done here. I find it satisfyingly Zen but it sure isn't for everyone. Hunting predators can get pretty intense but otherwise it's low key management and chopping of trees.

Sometimes it's nice to take a break from everything else and watch the seasons change in your own personal medieval hamlet. Chop down some trees. Sow some rye fields. Avoid wolves. Build a kitchen. Hunt some deer. I find this game quite relaxing. The developers have continued to add content since launch and the game keeps getting better. If you want something slow paced with low stakes then I strongly recommend this game.

Absolutely amazing and addicting solo & with friends. I really love the unique concepts to this simulator with the generational game play and amazing detail to the changing seasons. The graphics are beautiful and the game play is relaxing yet rewarding. Highly recommend upping the length of your seasons to 5-7 days to fully appreciate them :) only downside is I want the option to place decorational trees for my village added to the game >:(

I love this game!!! hoping to see where the devs take it the co op is pretty amazing too. solo it would be nice to be a male or woman but being a shirtless man half the game without shoes was pretty funny

I Love this game. it is so relaxing. there is lots of stuff to keep you busy for a long time. The story line is great and captivating. the graphics and scenery is beautiful. I wish there was more games like this. well worth the money.

All around good game. Well worth the time.

This game is very fun if you like in-depth, long play games. Very nice visually, good mechanics. Building is easy and well thought out.

With the so-called Autumn Update, the game is now much closer to a finished state

Great game. It reminds me of the classic Settlers games, except here you are in first persion being the one to collect the ressources and build things yourself, and then you can have villagers move in and help with the different tasks. Then like in the Settlers games you can go around and watch the villages do different tasks like fishing, cooking food, cutting trees, animals going around, chickens laying eggs and so on. But the game also has hunting, dangerous animals like bears, wolves, boors and there are bandits as well to watch out for.

So a lot of fun to be had and I still feel I have only just begun over more han 100 hours :)

I like this game. I do not like the constant crashes that seem to be happening at an increasingly frequent rate.

I started a new game after spending about 10 hours in my original save because I thought maybe I had too many things going on that was causing it to crash. My game crashed, again, before I could get to the part of the tutorial where you throw your spear at the target.

I wish this issue had started before the 2 hour return limit ran out because I would love to not have wasted $35 on a game that doesn't work.

A great mix of survival base building game and base management thats surprisingly rare. The downside is progress is slow till you can get villagers and get them working, since building up without npc worker help can be tedious with how much there is to do