This. It's like thier whole team has not played mount and blade.
Soon someone will say we are intentionally trying to kill it
I have 3k+ hours on SP, 50~ MP Warband. 150+ MP, 0 SP Bannerlord. Not that it matters.
This. It's like thier whole team has not played mount and blade.
Soon someone will say we are intentionally trying to kill it
I have 3k+ hours on SP, 50~ MP Warband. 150+ MP, 0 SP Bannerlord. Not that it matters.
Nobody tries to intentionally kill their own game. Bad decision making does. See games like Anthem for example (I say Anthem because it's triple A, so money did not matter but decisions did). I have 500 hours on Bannerlord MP, did not really touch SP except from like 10 hours max. Stubborn development logic and decisions that find the majority of players opposite, very poor balancing are what kills your game. Specifically:
1) Combat
2) Classes
3) Bad matchmaking
On top of that, you decided to launch with: Captain mode, Siege, Skirmish, TDM. 4 modes that split the fanbase and none of them are properly balanced. I remember petmonster, a TW dev, saying that ''people who played the beta LOVE the game'' his exact words. That was a lie and the current population shows.
So no, you do not try to kill your game and nobody will accuse of doing so, but you enforce visions nobody likes with the 'hope' that the population will go up. Which won't happen.
I understand but bringing hours played to discussion is not a good idea. Although some like the opposite narrative, devs generally have high amount of hours played and they care about the game. Discussing that wouldn't do any good imho. I personally like detailed conversations for example around snowballing and learn from them.
I understand but bringing hours played to discussion is not a good idea. Although some like the opposite narrative, devs generally have high amount of hours played and they care about the game. Discussing that wouldn't do any good imho. I personally like detailed conversations for example around snowballing and learn from them.
That's precisely what I've started to wonder. I can't believe that a dev team can make such absurd, insane, devastating decisions not on purpose.Soon someone will say we are intentionally trying to kill it
Dedicated servers will be the only hope for mp, even if they fix everything, the game is revolving around an esport style that will never take off and there wont be enough people queing for matchmaking. Clans, communities and mods kept warband alive.. not TWThat's precisely what I've started to wonder. I can't believe that a dev team can make such absurd, insane, devastating decisions not on purpose.
Now the question is, why would they do that? Console? This would only explain a few of the terrible decisions. Maybe some kind of agreement with other companies which were afraid Bannerlord MP would have too much success and overshadow other MP games? Like "focus on SP and make it as good as you wish but let us the MP domain". I know it sounds totally delusional... but how they ruined the MP is delusional too.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that's how game development works. It's not a public service. It's a private endeavour. Obviously they need to bend the knee to shareholders, but at the end of the day, it's still their project.I just think that having a specific vision for MP as a game developer and refusing to change it won’t bring you anywhere (unless this vision is perfect). In fact, for multiplayer you need the people approval if you want them to play, you can’t just do as you please because you think it is the right thing. Players won’t play it if they don’t like it, and from the way the game is dying, they don’t like it. At first I believed it when players were saying that only the warband comp players didn’t like it but now the warband MP scene is bigger than the Bannerlord MP scene. US_GK_TDM has more pop than the two tdm servers, and if Gk tdm is populated it means that the casual also got bored of Bannerlord.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that's how game development works. It's not a public service. It's a private endeavour. Obviously they need to bend the knee to shareholders, but at the end of the day, it's still their project.
The trouble with competitive games like these is that I think some of the old guard will ultimately remain to play older iterations of the game(this is a common occurence in the fighting game community, with players preferring different iterations over others for one reason or another). Some people are less enthused about change and that's natural, especially if you have spent a decade or so practicing and mastering a game.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that's how game development works. It's not a public service. It's a private endeavour. Obviously they need to bend the knee to shareholders, but at the end of the day, it's still their project.
Since you specifically mention it, what do you think of my take on snowballing from earlier in this thread? Is this something that you agree with, and if so, do the people who make the design choices (sorry if that's you, don't know for sure) agree as well? If so, what do you think could be done to help against this issue?I personally like detailed conversations for example around snowballing and learn from them.
I remember this discussion, and I think Callum and the other devs were talking about how Warband multiplayer didn't draw singleplayer players into the multiplayer, and frankly, they're right. Maybe 5-10% of Warband's players even tried multiplayer, and far fewer stuck around.The beta stuff I'm talking about I don't have links to because of how long ago it was, but I distinctly remember Callum saying Warband's MP had very limited appeal and that their changes were intended to change that. I remember one other dev saying something similar, but I don't remember who or on what thread it was.
I feel like TW was misguided in thinking accessibility was the best way to get the SP crowd into MP. I think if they wanted to attract that playerbase, they should have looked at what the SP players found fun and tried to incorporate that into MP, without degrading the experience for people who enjoyed MP for what it is. I think something resembling the Mount and Blade subreddit's Calradic Campaign or For Honor's faction war would have been a good start or some kind of coop battle/survival mode. Eventually, I think a lot of people playing for these features (or ones like them) would have bled over into the more traditional MP game.I remember this discussion, and I think Callum and the other devs were talking about how Warband multiplayer didn't draw singleplayer players into the multiplayer, and frankly, they're right. Maybe 5-10% of Warband's players even tried multiplayer, and far fewer stuck around.
Now, I don't think this is something that can be fixed. There is inherently a very large group in gaming that is not interested in skillbased PvP multiplayer gameplay, and one of the main draws of M&B singleplayer is the power fantasy element of growing to become extremely powerful and a god on the battlefield. This doesn't happen in multiplayer, and it can't.
But TW still wanted to attract more singleplayer players, so they dumbed down the multiplayer to the point where neither part of the playerbase is interested. The old MP players don't care because it's not as good as it used to be, and the SP players still just don't care about MP.
I remember this discussion, and I think Callum and the other devs were talking about how Warband multiplayer didn't draw singleplayer players into the multiplayer, and frankly, they're right. Maybe 5-10% of Warband's players even tried multiplayer, and far fewer stuck around.
Now, I don't think this is something that can be fixed. There is inherently a very large group in gaming that is not interested in skillbased PvP multiplayer gameplay, and one of the main draws of M&B singleplayer is the power fantasy element of growing to become extremely powerful and a god on the battlefield. This doesn't happen in multiplayer, and it can't.
But TW still wanted to attract more singleplayer players, so they dumbed down the multiplayer to the point where neither part of the playerbase is interested. The old MP players don't care because it's not as good as it used to be, and the SP players still just don't care about MP.
Warband MP drove off players for certain things that are always mentioned. Difficulty, bad spazzing animations and lack of general understanding of the game and combat. Bannerlord does absolutely nothing to address those issues.
1) Difficulty: no decent tutorials whatsoever and matchmaking against veterans
2) Spazzing animations: pump DPI to 2.000, get a glaive or any 2 handed. It's actually worse than warband, because it's unreadable even though animations are better, the blending is horrible and the 360 run back to swing again are pathetic.
3) Understanding and combat: The game does nothing to push players to objectives, it does not even have a low morale sound cue and essentially everything including skirmish is played as deathmatch. Combat is very self-explanatory, too many variables, stats, randomness, ghosthits etc.
Warband was a medieval game and like all medieval games, they have niche communities. Even mordhau that sold like 2 million within a month has 6-7k players daily now that can be considered 'core' to the community. Any game that is hard and has a high skill ceiling and no differentiation between the players (pour them all into 1 matchmaking) will never go multi-hundend thousand online players. Especially on games with directional combat which is naturally a much harder system by itself.
Warband was not failed, it was an old game that went big due to steam sales and it was late already. No matter how much it sold at the end (was about 8 mil, last time I checked?) in the steam achievement page you will clearly see that not a big percentage played even the single player aspect judging from what achievements players got as a percentage worldwide.
To put it bluntly, if devs think warband 'failed' yet they all somehow claim they have a lot of hours in MP, then they should drop the hipocrisy, because they have no idea what the hell they are talking about.
Don't remember the source post, but I do remember (Callum?) saying something a long the lines of Warband MP being a failure.?
Where exactly did the devs say that warband was a failure?
From what I say in the daily gaming of the game is that even though the game is so accessible and that you can select the most powerful classes in the game instantly because your starting gold is fixed and you basicly can just grow your gold stack by surviving without dieing it's still an uphill battle for newcomers.Exactly. It doesn't matter how "accessible" you make the game, that group of people are not going to play MP. They aren't interested in it. Instead, TW should have been looking at attracting the playerbases from other skill-based melee pvp games, like Mordhau, where there is a clear market and a clear group of people that are interested in exactly the kind of gameplay that Bannerlord's MP could have offered. Mordhau was MP-only and peaked at 60k concurrent players, so the idea that Bannerlord's MP was inevitably going to be as small as or smaller than Warband's is nonsense.
It stems from viewing Warband's MP as a failed project and from concluding that the solution is to focus on accessibility. Neither of these things are true or good ideas. As you say, you can't attract that SP-crowd who enjoy the power fantasy and RP elements to skill-based MP. You can create casual modes that they are more likely to try and enjoy, like siege and captain modes, and you can create ranked MM so that they don't have to instantly go against insurmountable odds if they do want to try playing competitively, but the quality of the gameplay should not be sacrificed at the altar of accessibility. That is the real problem and TW have incorporated accessibility in the way they have designed every aspect of Bannerlord's MP. It is not even the case that only "elite competitive players" from Warband are dissatisfied with Bannerlord's MP, because casual players, even if they were not masters of Warband's combat, enjoyed how intuitive, fluid, reactive and responsive it was. All it would have taken is for TW to survey different groups of people in Warband and they would have realised that love for the combat system was universal. It had problems, like animation abuses, but it did not need to be completely re-worked in the way that it has been.
I didn't read the statement and couldn't find it, but in case this was said I simply do not understand how you can come to this conclusion. Warband had a lot of mods and content to dive into for MP, all created by a loyal and dedicated fanbase. This fanbase kept the game alive for 10 years with player numbers dwindling, but the game is just refusing to die in MP, so what? How can you consider a game which had small dev support a failure, if it's working for itself? Who failed here?Don't remember the source post, but I do remember (Callum?) saying something a long the lines of Warband MP being a failure.