The Wilderness, Self-Reliance and Community in Medieval Dynasty

In the 2021 RPG Medieval Dynasty, the player builds and manages a medieval settlement. In the original game, the playable protagonist is Racimir. He is an eighteen-year-old refugee at the beginning of the game, who arrives in the Valley with very little after his parents are killed in an unnamed war.

Medieval Dynasty is a game of survival, and the player must initially ensure that Racimir has sufficient food and warmth. However, Racimir’s home for one eventually becomes a bustling settlement, and the player’s responsibility increases too. Once villagers are recruited, they can be assigned roles which keep the settlement running, including cook and farmer. These are performed with varying degrees of efficiency based on the NPC’s stats. Racimir can get married, and as the seasons and years pass his descendants carry on his “dynasty” after his death.

The game takes places in the eleventh-century. Though the Valley is not situated anywhere in particular, its landscape resembles Eastern Europe. However, the game forgoes the strict social hierarchy of medieval Europe and instead depicts a world where a person with nothing can become a ruler through tenacity and mastery of the wilds.

The Valley has a king. He is never encountered, only spoken about. In the game, the player doesn’t encounter any members of the nobility. Taxes must be paid to the castellan each spring. Aside from that, rules are limited. People can build and establish settlements wherever they like. Rather than being a restrictive medieval society, the wide, open landscape of the Valley offers freedom and opportunities for self-reliance and social mobility. There are many dangers, however. The presence of groups of bandits – a staple of many medieval games – implies a lawlessness, the negative of individualism without community spirit.

Unlike other popular medieval settlement builders, which take a top-down approach where the player inhabits an omniscient creator figure, Medieval Dynasty can be played using a first-person viewpoint. This allows players to see the world from Racimir’s perspective, and engage first-hand with the landscapes, its realistic beauty and its hardships, to collect resources and build the new settlement.

The inclusion of an individual protagonist is significant, as it is a game where a person can become a trustworthy leader through self-reliance and mastery of the wilderness and its resources. Throughout the game, however, it is important for the player to ensure that the villagers are satisfied. If their needs are neglected, they will abandon the settlement.

Although there are other games in the Dynasty series which take the same mechanic to different scenarios, from a modern-day farm to feudal Japan – the vast landscape of the rural Middle Ages gives players the ideal landscape for a survival game of self-reliance, where they can become leaders away from the mandates of the rest of society.