Does anyone else get the feeling that all their characters and companions are pretty much the same regardless of leveling and perks? I just can't shake the feeling every time I play Bannerlord that each companion and character is fundamentally the same. I have tried to limit myself to a certain playstyle but it just doesn't really feel different. Like if I wanted to I could just as well be an archer as I could use throwing weapons or be a two handed berserker with every play through.
The only one if feel really does it is athletics with the insane change in speed but maybe I am playing with rose colored glasses but it seemed to feel skills gave bigger changes in Warband. I have even tried it with companions but I always just give them whatever is the best weapon and they do fine.
yeah I kinda get what you're saying. There are many issues at hand...
For one we have the main issue, where leveling skills becomes so grindy that you would only reach the end-level perks by unrealistic dedication. It's even more impossible to level up anything on your companions, so all character are just kinda "balanced", or, the same. [It's easy to level up smithing still, but anything else just becomes a chore. You are forced to play only one thing because exp gain decreases after level-ups, so a big joy-killer for me is that I have to force myself to min-max if I want a desired character, and it's still slow af. Smithing tricked me for a long time. It's like: oh, we give you 1 endurance point and 1 vigor or control if you level up smithing so you level up skills faster, what a bargain! But in reality the levels gained because of smithing makes you gain exp actually slower in other skills, which makes the vigor/endurance bonus way less than useless, so now I have to avoid smithing on main character, even if I specialize in endurance... and it doesn't make your character any different when you level smithing and gain more attributes because you gain something only to lose it through the bad mechanic of reducing exp after level-up (because attributes ONLY give extra exp anyway, so what's the point of this?). And then gameplay becomes really boring, because I'm forced to just shoot enemies with my crossbow my entire life just so that I don't reduce my exp gain in crossbow by doing other actions, like quests (god forbid if I have 1 charm skill by mistake and that will make me level up if I do quests so now I have to NOT do quests to reach my character goals)... and even when you do literally everything right, you still level-up slow as F! too much exp requirements!!!]
Also the high damage of weapons and the ineffectiveness of armor makes combat skills obsolete. I can one-shot any unit with a menavlion without any points in polearms (there are weapons with over 100 base damage...), so what is the point of gaining %damage for more skill in polearms, and also the last perk that gives more damage, what is the point of it again? The point is that more damage = more exp gain, so you want more damage to gain more exp for the stupid system again, that is literally the only reason you want more damage, to level-up faster. You don't want more damage to actually be more effective in combat, everything ties up into the lackluster leveling system... it's actually painful.
There are also things missing in the game. Remember in warband the attributes also gave small stat bonuses. This needs to make a return to bannerlord, some kind of bonus when choosing an attribute other than "increase exp gain and limit". The only things we gain from focus points and attributes are things that shouldn't have been in the game to begin with - we lower "HARD CAPS". Remove the hard caps and adjust the exp gain and exp multiplier of focus points, max it out let's say to 3% and start all skills at 0.5% learning rate and reduce the freaking exp requirements with the dumb math that is in place atm, so you then reduce the exp gain bonus from attributes or even remove it and add other benefits that make characters more unique instead. Putting a vigor/endurance requirement on melee weapons/armors (it's heavy ****, cmon, at least implement some penalties for not having the requirement like more movement speed reduction for armor, less damage/speed with weapons... those are basic rpg features that just shouldn't be missing). And do the same thing with Control and ranged weapons. Then intelligence can again be used with a long-lost feature, Books. Your character and your companions can read books if they have a certain intelligence level and that would give them 1 focus point or experience in different skills etc. It would also give another incentive to wait in cities when doing smithing and such.
Without those kind of little nuances then of course characters feel the same. What would be cool would be if the attributes gave small bonus for each of the 3 skills. For example 1 point in endurance can give some riding bonus, some movement speed bonus, and maybe some health for smithing or something. Something that helps in general, that improves those skills a little bit more than if you didn't have the attributes governing the skills or just give other unique bonuses. Because why else put everything under one specific attribute, if it doesn't influence anything but a hard-cap in exp? How I imagine it should be is that a character with 50 polearms but with all attributes in intelligence should not be "the same" as a character with 50 polearms but all his attribute points in vigor. The vigor character should definitely stand out in combat in comparison, by damage, knockback, anything (call it inherent ability, talent or something. Same way an intelligent character should be better at engineering even if they just started leveling up the skill). And high endurance characters being a little more tanky and not needing the last athletics perk to achieve that would just be great. It would give every unique character some better stats, and by that I mean player character, companions, and lords, so they finally stand out just a little bit more. And it doesn't have to be big stat boosts... I'm sure that players would be happy with literally anything that is more than what we have now, which is currently just nothing... I mean it's crazy to think that the only thing we're receiving is a leveling speed bonus, and even that is taken away from us by leveling up anyway, and by huge amounts of exp requirements at the later skill points. It's just meaningless... we basically have no rewards for leveling up, there are penalties for leveling up and that's it.
If you don't want to read my giant rant: Long story short, characters are the same because they don't gain anything for leveling up, the perks are not so unique/significant to make a noticeable difference (Which I don't mind, still there needs to be more unique perks, and attributes need to give something more than exp bonus), game/combat is not very well balanced (some weapons deal way too much base damage. Polearms should just gain more armor penetration instead of 120+ damage, so it still takes 2 hits to kill something without leveling up polearms, and armor should be more effective in general), and there are features missing as well. Maybe such small things will be introduced later on, who knows.
I want to add that some perks do change gameplay, like the trading perk to buy castles, roguery will introduce a perk where you can recruit bandits over your party limit, in leadership you can transform bandits to actual recruits... but we just need way more such game changing perks for us to see real differences in our playthroughs and companions, plus what I mentioned with small bonuses for attributes would be great I think.