Manage a noble family that owns a city populated by dozens of characters from different classes: peasants, slaves, soldiers, and criminals. Each citizen has their own needs and complex behaviors, which will depend on their social status and individual traits. And often, their behavior can be deadly to your family.

The game generates complex stories on a new level through unpredictable interactions in a large society made of numerous, unique individuals: things like social stratification, crime, riots, religious controversies, and struggle for the throne can all play a part in the story.

They all have their own relationships, sex drive, beliefs, health systems, and backgrounds. Family members also have unique personality traits, and family traits can be passed on to their children. They joke around, gossip, insult one another, fall in love, make friends, support each other, and sometimes even kill one another out of anger.

Initiate political intrigue with other kingdoms and religious leaders on the global map. Manage events that require intervention, such as blackmail, plague-infested refugees, natural disasters, and more.

Build and upgrade buildings to create efficient production chains. Attract migrants with low prices for various goods on local markets and high wages, or use slaves to work in hazardous industries. Trade with caravans. And don't forget the ecological balance.

Make use of seven weapon types, three different types of armor, unique combat skills, the body part damage system, and the morale of each member of your army!

Survive in the non-stop competition with other kingdoms. Create complex scenarios by setting up an aggressive society built on a slave economy and a strong professional army or a wealthy society of free and happy city dwellers with high levels of technology.

Hooded Horse and developer Long Jaunt are excited to share the upcoming development roadmap for Norland, which recently released into Steam Early Access.

Moving away from the near-daily update cadence in the weeks since release, the team has worked up a plan on where to take Norland over the next few months, up to November: 

• In the short-term, the team will focus on optimization, implementing Steam Achievements, and introducing a new feature with cemeteries.
• In September, the team plans to enhance combat features by adding crossbows and archer towers, as well as improving diplomacy on the global map. There will also be new events brought by mysterious guests!
• In October, the focus will shift to city fortifications, such as walls and gates, alongside feudal relationships, and the family tree interface.

Long-term plans include reworking global and local map generation, politics, further improvements to diplomacy, additional layers of tactics and warfare, new buildings, resources, and further roadmap updates will be dropped every few months.

Overview

Throughout this week, in addition to bug fixing, we’ve been busy planning future development, considering your feedback and our vision for the project. We’ve decided to release public roadmaps every three months, highlighting several significant features each month.

This doesn’t mean that only these features will be developed — on the contrary, this is the minimum we can promise, but we’ll likely do more. Other things may just shift in terms of timing.

Current and Upcoming Features

For example, we’re already working on Steam achievements, and next week, we’ll start on the family tree interface. However, since this interface is actually a very complex task — considering that lords can have many illegitimate children, divorce, remarry multiple times, etc. — we can’t say exactly when it will be ready (probably in a couple of months). So many features won’t appear on the roadmap, and their introduction will surprise you.

Long-Term Goals

We also prefer not to make specific predictions for a longer period. Norland is full of new mechanics, and we’ll continue developing them. Plans often change if these mechanics don’t work as intended or if we receive strong feedback from the community, like, "Oh, this is great. It urgently needs to be developed further!" Therefore, making long-term promises in developing such a project means taking on unnecessary commitments and creating overly risky expectations. We hope you understand.

I can only assure you that we have many plans — such as reworking and generating global and local maps, climate, politics, ongoing improvements to diplomacy, tactics and warfare, new buildings and resources, and more.

• August: For the remaining part of the month we want to focus mostly on optimization. However, we also want to add a new feature to further support the lives of Lords; Graves.
  Furthermore, we want to improve the battle tactics system, and will be adding a "Shoot at enemy Archers" command to your squads.
• September: Right after that, we will start enhancing the combat aspect by adding crossbows and ranged towers. We will also make several improvements to diplomacy on the global map. As for new events, we’re talking about strange and mysterious guests who will frequently visit your province. Depending on how you interact with them, they will bring interesting stories and gameplay opportunities. Work on optimisation is also ongoing.
• October: We will try to complete the city fortifications — walls and gates — and also focus on feudal relationships, particularly the mechanics of barons and usurpers. The family tree interface will likely be ready around this time as well.

Participation and Feedback

We are always eager to hear your experiences and insights! Sharing your feedback on Steam helps us continue to improve and tailor the game to what you love most. Also, we're excited to announce that we will create a separate test branch where all new features will arrive earlier than in the stable version. If you're interested, you can try out these features and share your thoughts before they are released to the wider player base.

Thank you for your participation and activity on behalf of the entire Long Jaunt team.

Stay tuned!

Key Features:

• Control your noble family by assigning tasks to all of its members.
• Witness how family members will build complex relationships between themselves through love, hatred, friendship, envy, jealousy, betrayal, and a lust for power.
• Punish criminals, take care of the citizens, and put down any bloody riots that may occur during your reign.
• Build your armies and defenses, then make decisions on whether to fight or ally with other kingdoms
• Oversee power struggles, plan out your intrigues and secretly assassinate dangerous enemies.
• Make ambiguous decisions during events on the global map.
• Absorb knowledge and technology from books, rewrite them, or create entirely new ones.
• Build the production chains, raise the population, pay wages, put prices on the domestic market, and trade with incoming caravans.
• Experience different starting conditions for a unique gaming experience every time you play.
• Navigate through a simple and accessible user interface.

The game was already committed to being localized from English into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Simplified Chinese. Hooded Horse is also working with the developer to translate the game into eight additional languages; Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese.

Norland is in development for PC, planning to release into Steam Early Access in May 16, 2024.