"Variety is the spice of life"
In Bannerlord, fighting is
really fun. But it is the
only fun part of the game. And only in the early-mid game as afterwards your army is so large that you are
forced into a commander role.
All the other gameplay features in the game are some form of a
Skinner Box.
- Village Issues are terrible and allow for almost 0 roleplay. Honestly they are in the same level of fetch quests in MMO to me.
- Look at Skyrim's radiant quests. They are as shallow as fetch quests or Village Issues, but they reinforce the game's core mechanic of exploration and, therefore, are actually meaningful.
- I use that as an example to showcase that Village Issues add nothing to the game except yet another Skinner Box to fool the player into thinking the game has content.
- Economy is complex but that does not automatically mean fun. The economy is mostly manipulated through passive means (caravans and workshops) instead through player agency. Worst of all, it is convoluted from the players perspective and it does not tie itself back to any other system of gameplay in meaningful ways.
- Diplomacy is similar, the system seems complex enough to handle interesting scenarios but it fails for three main reasons:
- 1. Very little player agency until late game
- 2. Many many policies with very small impacts. At one point I was in a kingdom with half of all the policies active and it felt 0% different than if none of them were active.
- 3. It, again, does not tie into any other mechanic in the game.
- Why as one of the most powerful merchants in Calradia I cannot affect Kingdom policies accross multiple factions?
- Why as one of the most powerful lords in my faction I cannot "punch above my clan weight"?
- Role playing is impossible outside of player imagination. None of the game mechanics really support RP focused play. This is fine if it is by design, but if you want to be an Action game with RP+Strategy features sprinkled in (leveling system, character creation, troop tactics), make sure that these supporting mechanics actually, you know, support your core game mechanic (Action). Throwing mechanics in game because it feels like they should be there is poor game design.
- The traits are something particularly egregious (honour, devious, etc). Nothing ties into this from a player perspective.
- Disjoint game mechanics. I have touched on this in my points above but it really needs its own bullet. NONE of the game mecahnics interact in meaningful ways.
- War is CONSTANT and therefore BORING
- Character progression does not introduce any new player mechanic, it is ALL passive apart from very few perks like the "everything has a price". (I dislike that perk for RP reasons, but at least it unlocks something new)
- The world does not tell a story. There is very little sense of history or the impact of the passage of time. This is different from having a Main Quest line. Games can tell a compelling story without having a predefined narrative, just look at CK2.
And I agree that all the games mechanic are not fully impemented (Economy, War, Diplomacy, Leveling, Troop Tactics, etc.), but even at their partial state it is evident that there is little connective tissue between them.
It feels like the game was "designed" by a group of people saying "Oh, mechanic X is cool, lets add that" instead of "What is the
essence of Bannerlord? OK, let's add mechanics that reinforce that".
Anyway, I'm in a Zoom meeting and should get to work
[edit for cleaning]
