22-year-old castle sim Stronghold is getting a definitive remaster

If you have fond memories of filling your walls with archers and defending against overwhelming odds, or perhaps of baking hundreds of loaves of bread despite constant raids on your village from four particularly annoying Mongolians, you'll be pleased to learn that Stronghold, the classic castle sim from 2001, is being remastered.

While there was an HD version of Stronghold released in 2013 complete with cloud saves, higher resolutions, embiggened unit caps, and other tweaks, this will be a more dramatic update. Stronghold: Definitive Edition is adding a 14-mission narrative campaign in which players "march across the devastated English hinterland in search of Sir Longarm's captured kin," as well as a 10-mission Castle Trail based around famous castles of history including Warwick, Dunnottar, and Marksburg. 

The original game's military and economic campaigns return as well, so there'll be no getting away from that one objective to bake 300 loaves of bread, which your peasants will immediately eat unless you remember to tell them not to because hot damn do peasants love eating bread.

Stronghold: Definitive Edition will also have visuals that have been "rebuilt using the source artwork", as well remastered music, and new audio that some of the original voice actors returned for. It'll have multiplayer via Steam, as well as Steam Workshop support for sharing maps.

Developers Firefly Studios add that, "In addition to a host of technical enhancements and player-requested quality of life improvements, Stronghold: Definitive Edition will allow fans old and new to customise their experience with individual settings for many of their preferred game features and controls." It'll be out on November 7 via Steam, my liege. 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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