Norland Combines City Building With Storytelling
Norland, developed by Long Jaunt, has just announced their newest game, Norland. Norland is a medieval kingdom sim that looks to generate complex stories. The game is inspired by great works such as Rimworld, Crusader Kings, and Caesar.
Your role is to manage a noble family that owns a city populated by dozens of characters from different classes: peasants, slaves, soldiers, and criminals. Each citizen has its 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.
It sounds like they are looking to build a complex generator to allow for stories to naturally play out. Citizens are unique with a bunch of features to seperate each other. A few of those features include: relationships, sex drive, beliefs, health systems, and backgrounds.
Family members build relationships. They joke around, gossip, insult one another, fall in love, make friends, support each other, and sometimes even kill one another out of anger. That sounds like some dangerous family relationships. Perhaps they should see a therapist.
Of course, you are the leader of this town. That means you also have to worry about politcal turmoil. Blackmail, staing in good graces of religous leaders, infested reguges, and nautral disasters. Sounds like there plenty to keep you busy.
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 the 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.
Norland seems interesting. I like the idea of a character focused medieval kingdom sim. This is one I’ll defiently keep an eye on.
Source: Press Release