Medieval Dynasty Roadmap Update #1 released October 28, 2020, and with it came a few new items and some much-needed quality-of-life improvements. Most notably for me is that developer Render Cube saw fit to add the option to increase the length of seasons. If you are familiar at all with the way seasons were initially structured, each one only lasts three in-game days, and each day only lasts about, I don’t know, a real-life hour or so?
That means that when you first start the game, by midday of the second day, Spring was already almost over. By the time you get your bearings — if you are duly plugging away at following the in-game tutorial mission — you won’t have even learned all of the basic elements before the first in-game year has come and gone.
It’s even more ponderous, since farming is a viable option in Medieval Dynasty, meaning you’d have to plant all of your crops in the first day, tend to them the second, and then harvest them the third. And you’d have to accomplish all this while meeting the other basic survival requirements and any other tasks or objectives you might want to toy around with.
Crazy, right? I thought so. And apparently enough of the player base thought so that Render Cube was forced to address it.
So when I read the patch notes for update v0.2.0.0, and I saw that seasonal length can now be adjusted as the player sees fit, I was anxious to fire up the game and kick the proverbial tires.
Yet when I loaded my save file and ventured into the gameplay settings, there was no such option to be found. I even backed out of the game to the main menu, thinking that perhaps it was a main settings option. Except, no, nothing, nada.
I ventured into the game’s update log on Steam, and even though it was a bit murky, the game was currently on hotfix v0.2.0.2. The patch notes did appear to make mention of the Roadmap Update #1, but it didn’t definitively show the game having ever specifically been in v0.2.0.0. This was quite complexing.
After about 20 minutes of diving through reddit and Steam forums, I finally found the smoking gun: In order to take advantage of the new settings, including the ability to adjust season length between 1 and 30 days (and also to turn off the survival requirements and eliminate carry weight), I would need to start a new game. And this, needless to say, was a bit of a bummer.
I had just logged my tenth hour in Medieval Dynasty, having done a ton of the tedious introductions to various systems, hunted about a dozen animals, wooed at least one damsel, built a couple of annexes to my house, and chopped down a couple dozen trees. And now, in order to utilize the one feature I thought would put this already excellent little game over the top, I’d need to turn my back on all of that progress and endure the opening slog all over again.
It’s all tall order, but what choice do I have? After all, medieval life was never easy, so why should a simulation of medieval life make it so?
