Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 11 - Some Context

Owen Wulfson said:

argon45 said:

Covert village to castle eh? I don't understand why you add that sort of thing in game. I think, that is definitly not good. We can see on mainmap a lot of castle to similar each other and each village will be lost. Very good!

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Spoiler

Actually no, you don't convert a village into a castle. As I understand it, a village has four plots of land connected to it. One of those plots can have a castle constructed on it. The village is still a village but now there is a castle connected to it which the townspeople can run to for safety - thus saving more lives than if they had just hid in their homes. This is balanced against the fact that villages have limited plots of land and having a village using every plot for economic purposes would maximize your profits.

However, if they decide to let us convert a village to a city then that would have a similar effect to your proposal. I'm sure our modders would be happy to put in such a feature if the devs do not.

Either way, villages have become a lot more useful in this installment that is for certain. Still, I would like to know if we could raze structures and upgrades on plots of land already built by npc lords and re-purpose said plots.

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I understand what you're meaning but its not the same. It is a good thing the townspeople can run to for safety a castle but with that "convert" thing, there is no difference between castles and villages; they're the same, if you can attack the village, you must siege that castle; there is no Castle of xxx, just Poloria both village and castle...

I think it's more like building walls around the village rather than completely converting the location into something else entirely.

Took long enough.

I'm so hyped for this q.q

As far as I can understand, the swing-through-multiple-people feature won't be that popular among the veterans. I'm not really a fan of this idea either, but something can be done about it. The developers may choose to turn it in to a "dead" feature, not enabled in game by default, but pretty much existent for the modders to use it (think about the module.ini tweaks; e.g.: "enable_swing_through_multiple_agents = 0(default)/1"). Just my 2 cents here.

Considering how relatively physics-based the combat in Warband is already, I assume any successive hits would be significantly reduced in their damage potential, and that y'all are assuming the worst (and being no-fun-allowed asshats).

KuroiNekouPL said:

Though that is balanced by the power of larger, stronger weapons to hit more than one foe with a single swing!

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I'm seriously disappointed. This is NOT the right way to go. Mount&Blade was supposed to be as realistic as possible while still keeping it fun. This is a step into the fantasy world direction.

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While not seriously disappointed, I'm wary of this feature. I saw it requested quite often a couple of years ago and always felt it a bit unrealistic.


Other than that, everything is great news. Good to have confirmation that the AI can use siege weaponry just as the player does. I find the village building an exciting prospect, and again it is great to think that the AI will be playing by the same rules and having to manage its villages in the same way as the player.

I could see from the video that the singleplayer AI was improved and that they kept intelligent distances now, and this sentence in the blog makes me even more hungry for my first taste of the game ''Looters in the game don't pose too much of an obstacle for experienced, high level players with good equipment but by spreading out and trying to surround their opponents, it can still be dangerous to face multiple enemies at once''- trying to surround an opponent rather than crowding behind each other, excellent!

The UI does indeed look good, I like a lot about it, notably the troop pictures beside each troop type. It was good to hear about hotkeys and so forth; on that note, having being playing Warband SP recently I am hoping that when upgrading ones character weapons points (if we still have weapon points in the character screen) that there will be a way of increasing the weapon points in faster chunks, perhaps by holding Ctrl or Alt at the same time as clicking the left mouse button (rather than increasing just one weapon point at a time). This is a small detail of course but sometimes there are loads of weapon points to allocate and it can be tedious clicking away 50 times!

The taverns, as I and others noted in the main BL thread, look great. The music, animations and the board game provide a nice atmosphere, and a reason to stay in the taverns a while and feel part of the world. Now we know that there is a different game for each culture too- and apparently all, despite being based on real historical games, are fictional games created for Bannerlord!- a nice touch. The crafting was a nice surprise, and now I find we can change the length of the blade too and that the timing of the animation can be affected by the weapon's characteristics; this is a really good feature.

The replay feature was another surprise, something which many games could benefit from, but perhaps few as much as M&B with its great action. I was pleased to see in the blog that:

''Any battle, single or multiplayer is saved directly and can be re-watched from any angle as well as slowed down''

How many times have I wanted to watch an interesting skirmish with a few horse archers again, or a large battle where it was hard to appreciate all the action? Now it will be very easy to recap them, great feature  . Just as long as it isn't like the replay feature in Rome Total War 2, which just saves minimal information and plays out something that you never did in the game! 

Finally, the weather- one of the features I had hoped to see in the game. The bit I like most about it right now is that the snow cover will advance over the map in winter. I hope that this is taken even further and that rivers will freeze over, perhaps even that floods or droughts can occur in summer. In any case, it is great that armies will be affected by the seasons.

WOW, just wow. It looks awesome. But there is something I want to mention. It is about last battle scene in the video, first the warrior atack to someone, after that he changes his target, and atack the next nearest warrior and all other warriors do same. Well this would make game more realistic of course but If they will keep changing target, it will actually be less unrealistic. Hope you understand what I am saying.

Imnotwhatiam said:

I guess we can all agree that we definitely need more information about the most important part of the game revealed at gamesco.

BOARD GAMES!

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Each of the game's six cultures has their own boardgame, originally designed but inspired by real historical games

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looking forward to the one based on Monopoly

i wonder if how much we can develop the castles in villiges.  Like for the first slot  we get a  very small castle with troop limitation of 250.  Use another slot for castle and you get a bigger castle.....

Madhal said:

i wonder if how much we can develop the castles in villiges.  Like for the first slot  we get a  very small castle with troop limitation of 250.  Use another slot for castle and you get a bigger castle.....

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That is not troop limitation; its build time. But in the video, castles also have 4 slots. Probably that 4 slot able to us get a bigger castle.

epic blog is epic.

love the developement of this game, and i love that engine and its powers.

I am so happy that choose the right path and took all that was good in warband and just pushed it further.

Heres to hope we get maybe a bit more infos more often, and that we can get our hands on it in 2015!

What I hope Bannerlord does not have in its battles is this:


#madskillz

haslal said:

WOW, just wow. It looks awesome. But there is something I want to mention. It is about last battle scene in the video, first the warrior atack to someone, after that he changes his target, and atack the next nearest warrior and all other warriors do same. Well this would make game more realistic of course but If they will keep changing target, it will actually be less unrealistic. Hope you understand what I am saying.

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Do you mean the replay battle scene? I'm fairly certain that it is a multiplayer match.

Okay, this might sound ridiculous, but I am going to gush here.

The Mount and Blade franchise has been such a large part of my teenage years. The first Mount & Blade blew my mind when I found it, and I gushed hundreds of hours into it with my cousin and always enjoyed the game an absurd amount. Then Warband came out and the game took control of my life. I have thousands of hours in Warband, and I enjoyed it. Out of any game out there, this simplistic yet addictive game has become my favorite and it is something that never goes away. The political intrigue, combat, empire and troop management... It is a unique and wonderful game. When Bannerlord was announced I was ecstatic and I continue to hang on to each update and new feature that comes out.
It's pretty silly, when I think about it. This game has been there for me for years, and I just keep looking forward to Bannerlord, knowing that it will be spectacular and create so many more memories in the years to come.

Calradia beckons.

Owen Wulfson said:

I would like to know if we could raze structures and upgrades on plots of land already built by npc lords and re-purpose said plots.

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The following quote from the blog would suggest that this is possible:

''What's really interesting is that AI Lords start new projects and modify their villages over time, just like the player. So during a long playthrough, the face of the map and nature of various settlements can change significantly, in ways that are fully dependent on the current economic and political situation of the NPCs and their factions.''

Do you plan on making DEV diaries per month?

mike56 said:

Dyktator said:

Thank you for this blog, Tale Worlds. It's very useful.

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Sarcasm?

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For fapping

A bit wary of the idea of hitting multiple people in one swing (could be cool for mods, especially fantasy mods, but for native? ) It doesn't sound feasible but maybe I'm mistaken. Other than that it all sounds good, a bit curious about how well this new system for villages will work in practise but the basic idea sounds nice.

This is pure speculation but the blog keeps using the term "yearly cycle" when talking about seasons. Could this mean they've added faster time progression to the game?!

Also adding the feature to construct castle is a great idea imo, especially the way they are implementing it. With this system there will be some villages were it would not prudent to build a castle, perhaps it is at the center of your faction. Alternatively you may be granted a village at the very border of the realm, making it a prime target for raids, so building a castle would become a priority. I love it.

It was a great blog but we need more info dammit!