Medieval Dynasty

"Gdzie telewizji nie ma, radia nie ma, zasięgu brak"

Cool Kids of Death - A Moze Tak

 

I've been in the mood to try out several titles built around old-timey village life themes and thought Medieval Dynasty would serve, along with The Guild, as a quaint but ultimately negative point of reference, an easily dismissed amateurish attempt at something better. After all, the market's littered with dime-a-dozen asset flips. But damned if it hasn't insisted on earning my appreciation. Don't expect too expansive an array of content. Mostly it does a few basics very well. If you wanted an FPS Banished, it's worth a look.

Best daub 'em wattles afore win'r, a-yawp

If you've played such games before, the core elements are straightforward enough: pick up basic resources, make some tools, gather better stuff, build, get wood for sheep, keep advancing through the tech tree, form babby, keep building up your settlement. Classic stuff. But its resource and time management mechanics are uncommonly fine-tuned and its various elements' progression flows more smoothly into each other than you normally see.

 

Setting out in The Oxbow map I sought a spot not too far from NPC villages (foreseeing frequent trade runs) and knew I'd need water/fish but also wanted someplace with a nice view, and settled just west of Piastovia - by dumb luck, almost on top of one of the map's few caves. This has yielded me quite a bit more cash than I'd otherwise have gotten early on (bronze hammers and sickles is how humble Werwolfe pays the bourgeoisie's onerous bills) with the only inconveniently spaced resource being clay. Thus, as I round out my third year I've hit a pretty good balance.

I can finally devote some time and geld to more frivolous exploration and decoration, but until now it's been a scramble to get a working community up and running. From doing everything yourself at the start you gradually begin delegating more and more to the villagers you recruit. Build them a house and then you find you have to feed them, recruit a hunter and you realize everyone needs water, plant some fields then scramble to make tools fer da hoein' an' fertilizin'. I almost started losing villagers recently because I ran out of buckets of all things. I was never stuck, never overwhelmed yet never at a loss for more options going forward. In between all of that you need to find time to run fetch quests for reputation to raise your population limit and make a bit of spare cash to buy recipes.

 

Oh, and mind the wolves.

 

The other half of the game is a first-person-slasher array of kill and fetch quests, slightly more interesting than usual due to the solid resource / inventory / travel time interplay making you plan out your trips. Unfortunately the FPS combat is both twitchy and sluggish somehow, with lightning-fast enemies aggroing on you from behind brush and lauching themselves at you in pinball maneuvers. Combined with poor pathing, massive damage/health ratios and nearly absent attack animations or hit confirmation, combat ends up feeling both annoying and unsatisfying. Suddenly there's something at your feet and your health bar dissappears. (Though I did luck out again. First bandit I killed was a crossbowman out in the open so I could rush him with my stone axe. Then his crossbow got me a kill on a mook with a helm and iron sword, which has gotten me through the next couple of years in style.)

 

Aside from the combat, the interface has some odd quirks. The radial menu for building/crafting is pretty good, but I don't see any point to keeping the clock running while it's open, since you'll frequently find yourself opening it to check costs. And on the downright weird side, in order to even load a game, you're forced to cycle through two extra confirmation screens, including one asking whether you want to play your game in single or multiplayer... every... single... time! Why? I've gone over this repeatedly: the early-2000s dream that multiplayer competitiveness will maintain your single-player game's popularity and sales has long ended, largely because we've all noticed the world's full of subhuman garbage. And if the only point of pretending to have a multiplayer mode is so Epic Games can mine my data, fuck'em! At least keep the multiplayer button from being too intrusive.

 

Aside from all that, the skill trees are also mostly just there to exist, and though you can customize a fair bit (I switched from 3-day seasons to 4, then later to 5) that doesn't extend to mob and resource respawn rates, which default to nigh-instantaneous for animals and daily or seasonal for even the more valuable stuff like metal ores, which respawn faster than trees! But in one aspect in particular, despite its otherwise unexpectedly solid effort, Render Cube nonetheless shows its amateurish side: writing.

Can you not at least slap an "OOC" in front of such lines?

Only a couple of dialogues so far have been written in-character. The rest read like forum troll banter or some middle-schoolers reveling in making "a game" not bothering with consistency or immersion and "going meta" for a cheap feeling of superiority. Pity, because otherwise the world itself is or could've been one of the best village life sims around, and despite some fumbling due attention was paid to quality-of-life mechanics often absent from such games, like auto-using stored resources from a nearby shed without making endless twenty-pace trips back and forth from your construction site.

 

Medieval Dynasty could've been great, but even with its flaws it's still pretty decent.