Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 5 - Virtual Skeletons

*****slaproof-vest said:

plus it's not irrelevant at all cause if the unfinished, unpolished and terribly buggy political system remains the same in bannerlord, we are screwed....

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Danik said:

The warband SP do indeed seem broken in comparison to the quality of multiplayer part of the game, imo. The AI stupidity in combat and diplomacy might have a central role in that.

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Cookie Eating Huskarl said:

*****slaproof-vest said:

many big companies in their big titles as you ve seen explicitely in a ridiculous degree explains every system, foe, weapon etc of their game, make a dozen of trailers for them, even make funny names for them etc.. taleworlds works just the oppoisite. i think the balance is somewhere between. create hype with a clever way when needed.

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Which big companies seem to have a trend of either not delivering at all or only delivering a very underwhelming version of what they claim. See Creative Assembly for an example of the worst offender in the industry. Taleworlds work the opposite because they seem to have the right idea of showing only what has been done to a satisfactory level. They're not sharing what they think they will do but haven't done or could potentially find out later down the line to be horrible to implement (again see Creative Assembly). Also, Taleworlds is a small studio. I would prefer that they do not spend their time and money elsewhere to create hype content just to rouse us up unlike many of the AAA developers/publishers. The original M&B created hype by releasing a gameplay video of a system that was novel for its time. I assume Bannerlord will do something similar and I'll be lining up to throw my wallet at them yet again.

*****slaproof-vest said:

as for the "all their features". yeah but not no features either. what proof do they gave till now that they differentiate from warband? -as many blame them that they don't- what is their proof to beat that claim...?

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Again another mistake with the industry. The M&B players don't want features tacked on to say that the game is different than warband. As far as I am concerned, they can keep the level of work to that of a small studio as long as they either fix up the AI, or make most of the engine softcoded so it can be remedied at the expense of modders. We already seen that they are putting in effort into the graphical departments like making the animations less stiff and more natural. Again, they are only showing what they have deliberated on and what they have already made headways into.

Even if the only difference in the end compared to warband is "The engine Bannerlord runs on is basically open source-esque", I can already see that the general crowd in TW would be celebrating that for a long time to come. Jagged Alliance 2 survived for 15 years after access to the source codes was made available. Imagine what a game like Bannerlord can do in the same position.

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Cookie Eating Huskarl said:

The game will still be a commercial success even without those people buying it. They say that now, but they will be the first people to scoop it up once the preorder has a discount to it because they had a taste of Warband. Other games with similar gameplay such as chivalry and WoTR cames no where close to the complexity and freedom offered by the single player portion of this 'simple' game that Warband is. We'll still line up to throw our money at it. The only way I can see M&B losing out is if someone made what essentially is M&B with enhanced AI, a functioning siege with multiple approaches, diplomacy, a modding platform with the combined fluidity of Dark Messiah's combat system tacked onto M&B's strike and parry system.

It doesn't matter if you're the most dedicated fan either way, you're suggesting that Bannerlord be the most perfect incarnation of M&B from what I've seen in the last page. Read my post again for why Taleworlds should never ever consider overstretching. Consider that most AAA games that we still consider **** shovelware are made by 300-500 strong dev teams who are given a 1.5-3 year development cycle. Now consider that most of those AAA games don't even approach Warband's level despite the flaws Warband has. Now consider that Taleworlds is a 50 man development team. So a leap in logic dictates that if Taleworlds was in charge of an AAA **** shovelware, it'll still take them 4.5-9 years of development to complete that same AAA game that most of us wouldn't play again after the first 20 hours or so. Now consider that they are in fact developing Bannerlord from scratch, new engine and all (unlike the AAAs). Suddenly, not having anything to show after 2 years seems to be pretty normal for me. Seems to me it's more of an instant gratification issue with the people demanding new blogs and such. Why can't they do something else until there is a Bannerlord on the shelf if the wait is so excruciating for them.

Me personally, have been waiting for Bannerlord since the first M&B came out because as nice as Warband was, MP wasn't my thing due to my horridly unstable internet. Should we now proceed to measure dicks?

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