„You Are a Legend!” Manor Lords Dev Earns Player Respect with Promise of Careful Unreal Engine 5 Transition
The developer of Manor Lords is currently working on porting the game to Unreal Engine 5. However, he intends to introduce the most demanding features of this technology very carefully.
Grzegorz Styczen, the game's developer, intends to transition to UE5 despite developing Manor Lords on Unreal Engine 4. However, he intends to ensure that this doesn't cause problems for owners of weaker PCs.
On X, the dev commented that he is very careful about enabling any Unreal Engine 5 features that could result in performance issues because he knows that gamers want the game to run as smoothly as possible. However, he admitted that the resolution and sharpness offered by the new Virtual Shadow Maps system is impressive.
This is a UE5 function used for creating title virtual shadow maps, intended for use with very detailed object and character models. They possess a much higher resolution than the old shadow maps, while still maintaining good performance (although they are still more demanding than previous solutions).
You can see what it will look like in Manor Lords in the screenshot below:
Source photo: Grzegorz Styczen
This solution will be more demanding than previous methods, which has caused concern among some players. One of them asked if the developer could make Virtual Shadow Maps an optional feature. Grzegorz Styczen replied that not only could he do it, but that's exactly what he did. Such an answer clearly pleased another fan, who wrote to the dev, "You are a legend, sir!"
Grzegorz Styczen's approach is pleasing. Unreal Engine 5 offers impressive features, but games built on this engine often have performance issues. In the case of Manor Lords, this is even more important because most of the strategies don't require very powerful PCs (although in specific conditions, titles such as Factorio, Cities: Skylines, Anno 1800, or games from the Total War series can be demanding on our PC) and therefore many fans of this genre don't have the latest hardware.
Manor Lords was released in early access in April this year, exclusively on PC. The title can be purchased on Steam as well as on the platforms GOG.com and Epic Games Store. The game is also available as part of the PC Game Pass subscription.
