Question about this 8 years of Development thing

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

he started comparing them.
then he made a blanket statement and didn't clarify how NMS has bigger scope and is more ambitious than bannerlord.
it's only natural that i compare them however i wish to.

how would you compare them?

I wouldn't compare them at all, because they're different games made in different circumstances, and to achieve different things. The only reason anyone compares mutually exclusive things like this is when they have a personal attachment to one game over the other and try to make a case for it.

1. When did they start pre production and full production?
2. How long did it take to develop the current engine?
3. How long did it take to create development tools?
4. How big was the team during early / mid and late production?
5. Did any key members leave the team during development?

1. Pre production seems to have lasted up to about 2011, and full production had started by 2013 at the latest. There are some company stats I remember seeing where they had officially started hiring for the game in 2009 or 2008.
2. It was completely usable by 2013 at the latest, and possibly earlier since there were people working on assets for the game as far back as 2011.
3. Development tools were usable by 2014 at the latest when we got the first screenshots and videos of it. They have changed very little since then.
4. The team was sized 43 employees in 2012 when bannerlord was announced, and was around 100 for most of the rest of development. It's 131 now, which is about the size of a low end AAA team.
5. Not that I know of.

And before you say "where are you getting this information from", I have talked to developers and moderators extensively about this for years, mainly because game development just interests me, but also because I want to dispel a lot of the completely untrue myths that have arisen since around 2016 such as "the engine was scrapped" or "development only really started in 2017" or "the Turkish government is funding most of the development" or whatever.

 

[Namakan]

the key world is 5y old

but here ppl are adult

in your example the 25y/o Person would ask the mother why there is no cake and if it is not a total ****ty explanation accept it and move on
but ppl here ride the cake incident for half a year now and it gets only worse

and some are just trolls like in every forum

i do understand that ppl beleave and tell them self that they do it for the love of the game, but i fail to see how endless dev bashing will help the game

yes, people are adults but its also not their mum not baking a cake, its a ~100 people company completly ****ing up the development of their game that they have been teasing for about 8 years. large parts of what they have shown working or pretended would be in the game aren't, but they're still selling it and everyone here complaining bought it - for 40 to 50€.

It's a paid product that's far worse than they made it out to be beforehand, not your moms birthday cake.

 

[babelfisch]

I wouldn't compare them at all, because they're different games made in different circumstances, and to achieve different things. The only reason anyone compares mutually exclusive things like this is when they have a personal attachment to one game over the other and try to make a case for it.


1. Pre production seems to have lasted up to about 2011, and full production had started by 2013 at the latest. There are some company stats I remember seeing where they had officially started hiring for the game in 2009 or 2008.
2. It was completely usable by 2013 at the latest, and possibly earlier since there were people working on assets for the game as far back as 2011.
3. Development tools were usable by 2014 at the latest when we got the first screenshots and videos of it. They have changed very little since then.
4. The team was sized 43 employees in 2012 when bannerlord was announced, and was around 100 for most of the rest of development. It's 131 now, which is about the size of a low end AAA team.
5. Not that I know of.

And before you say "where are you getting this information from", I have talked to developers and moderators extensively about this for years, mainly because game development just interests me, but also because I want to dispel a lot of the completely untrue myths that have arisen since around 2016 such as "the engine was scrapped" or "development only really started in 2017" or "the Turkish government is funding most of the development" or whatever.

Thanks for the effort but most of it seems to be very questionable. I seriously doubt they started hiring for Bannerlord 2 years before they released Warband.

 

[Akka]

NMS wasn't finished after 3 years. It was a complete mess.

That's more or less the situation that BL is today, and that's after 8 years of development, not 3 and it's not yet even released.
Also, you may have trouble to read, but I said :

NMS had a pretty rough release because it was boring and the reality didn't live up to the expectation, but it was actually fully working and it was finished in 3 years.

So yeah, it was a mess and boring, I explicitely said so myself, but it was a full game working fully. In other words, it was at the same point in fun, but further ahead in development and project state than BL in one third of the time with a team less than one quarter as big. Get it ?

Bannerlord is way more complex than NMS and requires more resources.

How so ?

he started comparing them.
then he made a blanket statement and didn't clarify how NMS has bigger scope and is more ambitious than bannerlord.

I made the obviously far too optimistic assumption that people would simply act maturely and roughly compare the complexity of the inner working of both games without playing dumb.

it's only natural that i compare them however i wish to.

No, what is natural in a conversation is to try to understand what the other is saying and then think about the points he's making, trying to see their validity. If your first reaction is to just try to pile up bad faith and use the most idiotic comparisons possible just to act contrarian, then you really should wonder why you even bother to pretend to communicate.

how would you compare them?

Both have developped their graphic engine in-house, both able to have a big number of independent actors in the same scene.
BL includes complex management of positioning with each actor, complex AI able to take into account itself and all the others, an economic and social system. It's only able to deal with maps limited in scale and can't do procedural creation though.
NMS can manage procedural maps of humongous size, and is able to create them on-the-fly. It allows for map modification, several different way of locomotion including vehicles, air, ground and underwater. It also allows for base creation and management with a very in-depth crafting system.

Anyone not completely blind or of bad faith can recognize that BL can manage better large crowd of actors with a more developed fighting system, but NMS has a MUCH more advanced engine and more (and more polished) systems around.

Notice it has absolutely nothing to do with how good/fun the game is. Modern WoW has a MUCH better engine than Vanilla and tons of systems that Vanilla couldn't manage, I still much prefer Vanilla. The original point was that TW has had absolutely abysmal project management, and it's noticeable because you can compare project with similar or higher complexity made by teams which are much smaller which still were farther ahead (if not completely done already) by the same time mark.

Blind fanboys who simply lash at anyone who isn't drinking their Kool-aid are not only stupid, but actively detrimental to the very game they so mindlessly defend. Yes-men never caused anything to improve, criticism does.

 

[kreamy]

The game has been in its current state since around 2016, ever since then the lead developers have been going in circles redesigning stuff over and over again, wasting time as if they were close to the end of development. The most progress you see in screenshots and developer blogs is in 2013-2016.

thats the problem of not setting a release date.
No pressure, no objective. Its 100% counter-intuitive.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Thanks for the effort but most of it seems to be very questionable. I seriously doubt they started hiring for Bannerlord 2 years before they released Warband.

who would win
1. sourced evidence corroborated from multiple developers over about 5 years
2. "nah i dont think so"

It's only able to deal with maps limited in scale and can't do procedural creation though.

In all fairness I'm pretty sure Bannerlord's engine could handle procedural maps of enormous size (pretty much any engine made in the last 20 years could), they just haven't bothered to add them. Warband's maps were made on the fly from a random generator and the game ran fine.

 

[babelfisch]

yes, people are adults but its also not their mum not baking a cake, its a ~100 people company completly ****ing up the development of their game that they have been teasing for about 8 years. large parts of what they have shown working or pretended would be in the game aren't, but they're still selling it and everyone here complaining bought it - for 40 to 50€.

It's a paid product that's far worse than they made it out to be beforehand, not your moms birthday cake.

Bannerlord has quite a lot of active players and very good reviews. Despite all valid criticism, that doesn't sound like they completely ****ed up at all.

 

[babelfisch]

Blind fanboys who simply lash at anyone who isn't drinking their Kool-aid are not only stupid, but actively detrimental to the very game they so mindlessly defend. Yes-men never caused anything to improve, criticism does.

This is only true of the criticism isn't complete bollocks.

'Your management sucks and NMS is a better game' isn't criticism, it's just trolling.

 

[babelfisch]

who would win
1. sourced evidence corroborated from multiple developers over about 5 years
2. "nah i dont think so"



In all fairness I'm pretty sure Bannerlord's engine could handle procedural maps of enormous size (pretty much any engine made in the last 20 years could), they just haven't bothered to add them. Warband's maps were made on the fly from a random generator and the game ran fine.

No source, no evidence.
It's just you saying 'believe me, I know stuff'. Which might be true just as it might be false. That's not a basis for a discussion.

 

[Namakan]

Bannerlord has quite a lot of active players and very good reviews. Despite all valid criticism, that doesn't sound like they completely ****ed up at all.

yeah it was a financial success because of the hype generated beforehand.
reviews don't matter at all, here's why:

The vast majority of reviews were given on day one or within ~3 weeks after that - people bought the game and gave it a good review after it didn't immediately crash on them (or even if it did, because they were hyped and expecting TaleWorlds to improve the game throughout EA - that has barely happened.)
tl;dr: reviews aren't recent and they don't show how people feel about the game after actually playing it for a while.

 

[HumanCancer]

how is this a 3 page discussion, lol. just ask the developer.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

No source, no evidence.
It's just you saying 'believe me, I know stuff'. Which might be true just as it might be false. That's not a basis for a discussion.

The only reason you're disagreeing is because you've been on a "defend taleworlds" streak the last few weeks. I could post the hundreds of PMs over the years of correspondence I've had with developers but it wouldn't really matter to you, because for whatever reason you've decided to argue against criticism of the company regardless.

I can understand getting frustrated with the amount of negativity on the forums and feeling the urge to balance it out, but you have to realise how ridiculous it is when people are outlining how the company has messed up over the last few years and you just argue against all of them with no real aim other than to balance out criticism with praise.

 

[Akka]

This is only true of the criticism isn't complete bollocks.

'Your management sucks and NMS is a better game' isn't criticism, it's just trolling.

Mate, you're the very last person in the thread who should call others "trolls".

In all fairness I'm pretty sure Bannerlord's engine could handle procedural maps of enormous size (pretty much any engine made in the last 20 years could), they just haven't bothered to add them. Warband's maps were made on the fly from a random generator and the game ran fine.

But procedural generation is precisely something they removed in BL (also, Warband were generated on-demand, but not on-the-fly, which is a pretty important distinction). That actually one of the main drawbacks the game has, it needs hand-made maps and that requires tons of man-hours.

Also, all modern engines can manage pretty big maps, but we're talking about absolutely humongous ones here, literally the size of several planets. The engine would need to manage procedural generation in real-time, because they would be too big to be pre-generated.

 

[babelfisch]

yeah it was a financial success because of the hype generated beforehand.
reviews don't matter at all, here's why:

The vast majority of reviews were given on day one or within ~3 weeks after that - people bought the game and gave it a good review after it didn't immediately crash on them (or even if it did, because they were hyped and expecting TaleWorlds to improve the game throughout EA - that has barely happened.)
tl;dr: reviews aren't recent and they don't show how people feel about the game after actually playing it for a while.

You can check recent reviews on Steam and they are still +80%. Sorry but you don't have a point.

 

[babelfisch]

The only reason you're disagreeing is because you've been on a "defend taleworlds" streak the last few weeks. I could post the hundreds of PMs over the years of correspondence I've had with developers but it wouldn't really matter to you, because for whatever reason you've decided to argue against criticism of the company regardless.

I can understand getting frustrated with the amount of negativity on the forums and feeling the urge to balance it out, but you have to realise how ridiculous it is when people are outlining how the company has messed up over the last few years and you just argue against all of them with no real aim other than to balance out criticism with praise.

What I am arguing against are pointless comparisons (NMS vs Bannerlord) and nonsense statements like games aren't allowed to take 8 years development time.

A few posts earlier I actually agreed that management is probably to blame for the long development time. I doubt that the game would be better with a different boss or faster development though. What matters to me is that we get a good game, not how long it takes.

The game took 8 years. So what? As I said earlier, Cyberpunk took 8 years as well. And they managed to completely **** up, despite being a very good and large team, and almost endless money.

And regarding the good game, just for the record, I agree with lots of the criticism posted on the forums. When people claim that development is 'completely ****ed up' things are getting ridiculous though. If people can't make a point without idiotic statements they shouldn't be surprised when I disagree.

 

[Pizi_G]

The vast majority of reviews were given on day one or within ~3 weeks after that - people bought the game and gave it a good review after it didn't immediately crash on them (or even if it did, because they were hyped and expecting TaleWorlds to improve the game throughout EA - that has barely happened.)

so you are telling me ppl gave good reviews then and after 9 month of adding stuff and refining things ppl would rate it now bad ??

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

But procedural generation is precisely something they removed in BL

That probably has to do with the software they're using to make maps which is 3rd party and unlicensable. Other games get around this by having premade tiles, and Bannerlord could probably do this as well, it just requires a lot of testing.

(also, Warband were generated on-demand, but not on-the-fly, which is a pretty important distinction).

In Warband it almost didn't matter because of how fast it was. The main hangup when generating terrain in-game is loading the assets, with the actual terrain parsing happening in about a second for regular maps. In edit mode you can generate the maps in isolation and they're really fast, especially considering how inefficient some of the code is. In a game with infinitely scrolling terrain like Minecraft or NMS or whatever, this is fine.

My point is that they could easily have a mapgen system far superior to warband in the current engine, but like with so many things in the game, they just haven't bothered. I really don't believe there's anything inherently special about the engine NMS is using in comparison to the Bannerlord engine.

A few posts earlier I actually agreed that management is probably to blame for the long development time. I doubt that the game would be better with a different boss or faster development though. What matters to me is that we get a good game, not how long it takes. And regarding the good game, just for the record, I agree with lots of the criticism posted on the forums. When people claim that development is 'completely ****ed up' things are getting ridiculous though. If people can't make a point without idiotic statements they shouldn't be surprised when I disagree.

The problem is that at this rate the game will never be good. Some of the people you see complaining now have been extremely patient with the game, but that was almost 2 whole years ago in the closed alpha. Since then there are major problems that could easily be fixed that are still in the game with no sign of progress, while they fiddle with balance and graphical changes that will just get broken in future anyway. To make matters worse there has been no official acknowledgement of these issues for literally years.

The real problem isn't that they're taking forever, it's that they're going in the wrong direction entirely.

 

[htlaets]

I think the main issue is that taleworlds and the fans underestimate/d the complexity of such a game. You need quite experienced people for a project like this. But to hire such veterans, you need a big budget. Thats also one of the reasons why cyberpunk fades in comparison to gta.
Only old-established studios can handle big projects.
Smaller studios have to excel with new ideas. Taleworlds would have been better off neglecting so many new mechanisms, keeping the complexity low, polishing the graphics and animations and focusing on improving the combat system of M&B.

 

[vonbalt]

You can check recent reviews on Steam and they are still +80%. Sorry but you don't have a point.

The game had good graphics and is fast action paced something that casuals whom play 40-50hours at max then move to the next shinny thing love.

If you play more than that you'll start to see the problems in the game and how it lacks a soul, even faster if you played previous M&B games, warband had some barebones features but they were there atleast to add immersion.

Bannerlord only sold so well because of the hype generated and spread to all corners of the internet by the passionated community of the series.

 

[vonbalt]

I think the main issue is that taleworlds and the fans underestimate/d the complexity of such a game. You need quite experienced people for a project like this. But to hire such veterans, you need a big budget. Thats also one of the reasons why cyberpunk fades in comparison to gta.
Only old-established studios can handle big projects.
Smaller studios have to excel with new ideas. Taleworlds would have been better off neglecting so many new mechanisms, keeping the complexity low, polishing the graphics and animations and focusing on improving the combat system of M&B.

Honestly my "high hopes" for bannerlord was warband as a base + shinny new graphics and maybe a few cool additions just like warband was from M&B classic, they failed to deliver on that because many things we had in base warband were axed from bannerlord without any feature taking it's place.

Basically anything they couldn't fit into a boring menu or button was axed from the game, don't get me wrong convenience is good but not at the sake of features and immersion.