Steam Gaming: Checking Out the Medieval Dynasty Survival Sim

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Aywren

The Posse picked up Medieval Dynasty during the Steam winter sale, and after over 50 hours of playtime, I can say we are enjoying this game so much. It’s a unique blend of medieval style survival exploration with a settlement building sim. And it does all of these things very well!

Multiplayer Fun

The game just released the multiplayer feature back in December, which is what caught our eye. I’d had this on my PC GamePass to-play list for a while, but never tried it. Apparently, other Posse members already owned it on Steam, so the rest of us picked it up to see what multiplayer offered.

We’ve found a few small data issues where characters who don’t disconnect properly appear to become corrupted, which prevents the player from logging in again. However, that’s nothing that a rollback to a previous autosave can’t fix. Since I’ve been hosting, I’ve also been hard-saving often, so we’ve been able to work around that.

Aside from that issue, and a few bugs that the team has worked to fix, multiplayer gameplay has been very smooth. It’s nice how everyone shares in the creation of the settlement and running quests for the dynasty. For example, placing a building foundation allows everyone to add resources to build up that structure until it’s done. This is a feature I enjoyed in The Forest, and I’m glad to see it in this game.

Gameplay

There’s a variety of activities that you’d expect in a survival sim – farming, hunting, gathering, mining, crafting, and even light animal husbandry. The fun thing is that you can build houses and invite vagabonds from the local camps to join your dynasty. They also start with skills in these activities, so eventually, you can assign them to do the menial tasks that free up your time to do other things.

For example, if you’re tired of gathering logs and sticks for building, you can assign an NPC who has decent skills in gathering to become the town lumberjack… and they’ll do it for you! You just go to the storage building to pick up the materials they’ve gathered for you, and all that time spent gathering is saved.

You can actually do this for just about all tasks – crafting, hunting, fishing, cooking – NPCs eventually fill in for you and automate the day-to-day tasks. While they are slower than a player would be (there’s a cap to how much they can gather or produce in one day), they do level up and get better at skills.

As do you. The more you do something in the game, the better you get at that skill. You earn skill points that you can put into various skill trees that give you important perks over time. No matter what you put your time into, you’re rewarded. We have discovered, though, it’s good to dabble in a little bit of everything to unlock the skills in other trees.

Seasons

There is a season system in this game, and the world changes visually to reflect these seasons. Winter, for example, covers everything in snow. Certain crops and wild plants only grow during certain seasons, and your NPCs need more of certain resources, such as firewood, in the winter.

Each season consists of three periods of night and day (you can control how long these days last if you want). There’s also weather and heat/cold that effects your characters. We’ve got that part turned off, though, because we quickly determined it was annoying to deal with – characters lose life points very quickly when they’re swayed by heat/cold.

Customization, Families and Development

That leads to another positive – Medieval Dynasty allows you quite a lot of control over how the game plays in the base settings. The Posse is there to have a good time, so we’ve disabled a few of the more annoying things such as friendly fire, heat/cold effects, and the weight system that prevents you from carrying too much.

There’s enough challenge just discovering how to build up your settlement, keep your people happy, and paying your taxes. Oh, and did I forget to mention that your character can get married and have kids (as do the NPCs)?

Kids start as babies and grow up in real time through the seasons. So far, we’ve only played long enough to see the toddlers, but it looks like once they reach a certain age, they can apprentice with other NPCs in your town to learn a trade. I’ve also heard that (since your character ages), you may actually play your child after your character passes away (unsure of this). We do know that children inherit the skills of their parents, though, which is pretty neat!

The game is very slow-paced though, as new developments and buildings are locked behind technology trees. The only way to unlock these trees is… to keep playing and doing. For example, if you want to unlock more farming buildings (which unlocks more livestock options), you have to just farm and farm and farm.

But having our little donkey friends (eventually horses one day) is so worth it to cut down travel time between other towns. Speaking of other towns, you also earn dynasty reputation for your own settlement based on your actions and quests you complete. So, if you’re out there helping people, you get positive rep. But, if you’ve got sticky fingers and you get caught stealing, that can have a negative effect on your rep.

Eventually, we see that we can do things like set up market stalls and even a tavern in the future. It’s going to take time to earn the technology to open those buildings, but it gives us something to work towards! We’re having fun doing it, and that’s all that matters.

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