Yeah it is really odd. It also just looks stupid, and it's not something
I personally have no issue with historical inaccuracies, this is a fictional world after all, and I think it's fine to have weapons and armour from earlier periods (such as Celtic-inspired Battanian ones), and later periods (much of the Vlandian arsenal), as they serve a good gameplay and variety purpose.
That is however in my eyes no excuse to have all these really poorly designed weapons that don't even look good. Much of it is down to using bad components. For example, many purely one-handed swords have two-handed grips. In fact, you can make a sword out of the exact same components with the same proportions, and depending on what you picked in the menu, it'll either be one-handed or hand-and-a-half. That sucks both from a common sense perspective and from an intuitiveness standpoint.
Indeed, it's a problem regarding aesthetics and proportions, historical accuracy aside. Problem to which is added the technical inconsistency you mentioned.
I must say that I was happy to encounter
one of my favorites swords in the smith -
the sword of King Sancho IV of Castile (well it's from the late 13th century, so very inconsistent regarding the chronological borders the devs themselves set - btw they probably got the idea via the cover of Oakeshott's
Records of the Medieval Sword, the most commonplace book about medieval swords. The so-called Charlemagne's
Joyeuse would have been a better choice). But of course, I was compelled to reduce the length of the grip at the minimum, which screwed the round heraldric devices despite the grip still being too long.
It also has to be noted that modern swords for HEMA and Buhurt and other similar activities tend to have excessively long grips, usually to fit massive gloves. Look at Regenyei's rapiers for some particularly egregious examples. Even the Feders tend to have much longer grips than surviving historical examples for reasons that are beyond me, historical grip lengths feel better and fit just fine.
Absolutely. When ordering to makers used to deal with HEMA/Buhurt practicers or basic reenactors, I always insist on the grip length, because it's the main flaw of their swords.
But this is all kinda irrelevant since the time period in which bannerlord takes place would not have "longswords" and hence would not be employing techniques that lack a shield (like protecting hands from a steep angle crossing at the crossguard because).
There might have been a few longswords used as far as in the Viking era, but yeah that was marginal. However I totally understand the decision to implement "longswords" in the game, they are important in terms of gameplay. But to this regard, I regret that TW designed some kind of generic late medieval longsword instead of looking for earlier models, as there are
conserved two-handed swords which might date as far as the 11th century. They would have been a good source of inspiration to design these Vlandian great/long/two-handed swords. It's all the more frustrating as Talewords did some historical research regarding this issue, but obviously not enough:
Vlandian arms and armour are based on that of Western Europe from the 9th to the early 12th centuries. This was a period of relatively fast evolution, and leaves us with some balancing issues. For example, there are textual references to what appear to be two-handed swords in this period, notably as wielded by Swabian mercenaries at the 1053 battle of Civitate, but as far as we know no artistic depictions or specimens. Two-handed swords were a popular weapon in Warband, so we're including them - but we're ensuring they're relatively rare, a hero's weapon rather than standard equipment.