2025 Case Study: How We Localized Manor Lords for Hooded Horse
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- 2025 Case Study: How We Localized Manor Lords for Hooded Horse
Client: Hooded Horse
Game: Manor Lords
Genre: Medieval, Strategy, City Builder
Manor Lords gained an extensive following prior to its release, becoming the most Wishlisted game on Steam. The Publisher Hooded Horse wanted to leverage this player excitement to new regions by expanding their localization coverage
The Problem
For an extensive period before release, Manor Lords was the most Wishlisted title on Steam, ahead of many AAA titles and established developers.
The developer decided to leverage the momentum of player interest to expand accessibility into new regions with new localized languages. This required a full localization of the entire game into several additional languages without compromising quality. This would allow new players to have the same fun, immersion, and overall experience as the existing player base enjoyed in their already localized languages.
What the Client Needed
- Localization into 9 languages.
- Localization QA of all new localized content.
- Regular updates about the project, smooth communication.
- Qualified linguists with experience on historical games.
- Perfect consistency across all localized languages.
- Communication in the Q&A sheet.
Our Solution
From our experience localizing other strategy titles, we knew that linguists with a deep understanding of historical strategy games would provide the best localization for Manor Lords’ players.
We then built the linguist team from our extensive pool of freelancers, focusing on onboarding linguists with experience in the genre. All linguists had experience and training with the required CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) tools, so only required basic support for onboarding.
Consistency across all localized versions was paramount for Manor Lords’ localization. To guarantee consistency we employed a number of steps.
All linguists were provided with time to familiarize fully with the title, understanding every aspect and system of the game. This allowed for early Q&A between linguists and the development team, highlighting concerns before they impacted progress.
Extensive QA was also conducted on all deliveries, guaranteeing quality and providing an on-going quality check.
Project Managers were also instrumental in ensuring consistency. Regular check-ups with every member of the linguist team provided verified progress and quality checks. Additionally, as the project involved handling multiple localization files simultaneously, all with ongoing updates and changes, PMs were critical in maintaining consistency and quality across the team. The PMs were able to coordinate linguists through changes, ensuring all languages were kept up to speed with the latest updates.
Finally, PMs ensured LQA progressed on schedule and that subsequent bug reports were clear and understandable to the development team, allowing for the rapid implementation of fixes.
Results
During quality checks performed by a third party, we received excellent reviews for almost all languages. Any languages with observed issues were further analyzed.
Manor Lords went on to achieve notable success, recieving 87% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing. We continued to provide localizations of future updates for the client.