No, I just know what TW employees said about that. They should know.Did you just travel from future to make a guess like that?
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Bannerlord was a grift
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TW has made enough statements about what will be in the game and what not so we have a rough idea about what will be in the game when it is finished. It is not much. As far as TW is concerned the game is pretty much finished. They stated that at the start of EA if you read between the lines, they stated it in their one year EA review and in multiple dev posts in this forum.
There aren't going to be years of EA to be had in the future. TW wanted to be finished with EA this spring. They pushed that now to autumn, maybe it will be pushed again to spring next year, but thats about it.
We aren't complaining that dev takes to long. We are complaining that the game that was promised isn't going to be delivered and TW seems to be absolutely fine with that.
Precisely this.
Oh... another complaint that will never be heard.
What about planned DLCs? I'm not up on this so bare with me, but have we considered that one of the reasons for this scrapping of features deemed "too complex" runaway train actually just be TWs prepping to give themselves the opportunity later down the line to cherry pick for multiple DLC drive-bys?
I mean surely they must have considered it. To take away from the game what they know fans are anchoring after and yes, hold those features to ransom. It's a thing game companies do after all. Perhaps TWs have made that transition and is why they often appear "vague and nonsensical" with their decision making and that at some point in the last 4-5 years they made that call. All just speculation of course, we've nothing to back it up.
I mean surely they must have considered it. To take away from the game what they know fans are anchoring after and yes, hold those features to ransom. It's a thing game companies do after all. Perhaps TWs have made that transition and is why they often appear "vague and nonsensical" with their decision making and that at some point in the last 4-5 years they made that call. All just speculation of course, we've nothing to back it up.
You are giving TW too much credit. They are quite unable to do what they want to do in the first place, let alone follow some cunning plan.
The DLCs will be better however because they will be outsourced to non-TW crews who know what players want. The effect will be (ironically) the same, as if TW masterminded this so you would buy the DLCs too.
A private company being profitable is hardly a grift, unless you think all private entities are grifts, in which case I agree.
Speaking of Paradox... Sim City was comfortable at the top regarding city builders. Then along came Cities Skylines and with Paradox’s backing they took the lead.
Perhaps Paradox isn’t too fond of Taleworlds after their breakup but does recognize the market potential...
Perhaps Paradox isn’t too fond of Taleworlds after their breakup but does recognize the market potential...
Sometimes when I close my eyes, I imagine a couple of guys who have seen the Bannerlord EA sales and the subsequent disappointment, and decided to become millionaires by making a Mount and Blade game that Bannerlord should have been. It would take at least several years to make such a game, but they know gamers would back them up along the way as long as they listen to them (and they have the competence to make a mass combat game engine optimized for performance).
I'll wait for it.
Only a matter of time.
I just read this thread: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...total-conversion-mod-community.440886/page-11
On how TW is blocking modders from fixing the game and how modders respond with throwing in the towel.
I wouldn't call it a grift, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Taleworlds was probably running low on funds since sales of Warband had to be drying up after 10 years with BL still a long ways off. So they prematurely released the early access to generate some needed cash to keep going. I don't think they ever expected to sell so many copies right off the bat.
I do believe that they are genuinely trying to make the best game that they can, but I think they got in way over their heads by making everything in the gameworld so overly complex that they're still struggling to get the core features balanced properly a year later. Except now there are angry paying customers breathing down their necks, so the pressure's on to just finish what they can so they can finally be done with it.
I do believe that they are genuinely trying to make the best game that they can, but I think they got in way over their heads by making everything in the gameworld so overly complex that they're still struggling to get the core features balanced properly a year later. Except now there are angry paying customers breathing down their necks, so the pressure's on to just finish what they can so they can finally be done with it.
Julio-Claudian
Sergeant Knight
It definitely feels as though they just lost all ambition at some point, or like a bunch of staff left and got replaced with people who wanted to make a different sort of game. idk it's just weird and sad.
loxley86
It didn't start as a grift - but its becoming one due to dev hell and 0% accountability or transparency on taleworlds behalf.This is a thread going into more detail on a post I made last month here.
I will avoid the usage of the word "scam" as that could be seen as disingenuous and possibly libelous, even though as I will outline below, the figures are roughly correct, and it isn't libel if its true. Nevertheless, I'm going to lay forth a claim that Bannerlord, at least in its current state (And, as far as we know, the past few years) was simply a grift. Here's why:
Part 1. The Financial Breakdown
There will be bold in statements which are amendments to my previous post, or things needed to be added.
The average game developer in Istanbul (similar to Ankara) makes about 60 Turkish Lira an hour, which equates to about 7.05 USD, with an average pay of 125,000 Lira per year (about 14,500 USD). There are 131 employees at Taleworlds as of 2020. Therefore, the employee pay would be roughly 1,899,500 USD, probably a little less or more based on currency exchanges. I am not sure about Turkish tax law, but assuming their payroll taxes are roughly the same as the US, lets say 10%, rounding up lets say 2,200,000 for payroll and payroll taxes per year. Overhead is somewhat difficult to calculate, but I would put their facility costs (With electricity, which is cheap in Turkey) is probably around 5,000 a month, that is just a rough estimate based on how many employees they have and how much square footage they would need. So, overhead would be roughly 60,000 USD a year. To be conservative and account for accidents/miscellaneous expenses, lets put their expenses aside from marketing at roughly 2.5 million USD.
Bannerlord has sold between 3-5 million copies, according to steamdb and steamspy. At an average price of $45 (it depends on region, some places sell for less, some like pound and euro sell for more), after Steam's 30% cut, this leaves Taleworlds with roughly $31.50 for each sale. To be conservative, let's put it down to $30. With roughly 4 million sales, Taleworlds has made roughly $120 million in revenue from Bannerlord. Bannerlord has been in development since 2012 as far as we know, lets give them 2 years pre-announcement of development, which equals 11 years. Assuming 100% of their time at Taleworlds was devoted to Bannerlord (which it wasn't, warband was still in development well during this time period), this means that 27.5 million dollars was spent in expenses, lets double that for marketing. This expense of 55 million yielded them 120,000,000, which, with much wiggle room, cushions and conservative estimates, 65 million dollars (likely more because I doubt taleworlds spent that much in marketing, and salaries are probably less than I calculated, could be as much as 100 million USD). I may have gotten some calculations wrong along the way, and I may have estimated poorly, but no matter what, that is a lot of profit for the garbage can/excuse for a game that we got.
Part 2. Gameplay Features, or lack thereof
The gameplay of this "game" is, to put it lightly, lacking. There are more than enough threads to complain about the bare-bones, hollowness of the game. I am not a singleplayer player, I like multiplayer. The lack of multiplayer support for this game is at this point astounding and legendary. The fact that modders for various projects are simply waiting on Taleworlds to just let them get their hands on it so they can improve the game for everyone's enjoyment is beyond me. It is so snail-brained and what few "Explanations" taleworlds has given are vague and meaningless. They use a lot of words to say nothing.
The recent patches to the game have improved almost nothing, and the dev diaries show us no hope. With feature after feature being cancelled or postponed, it seems like Taleworlds is just doing nothing while goading us to trust them, holding a carrot in front of our eyes. Not even heraldry can be fixed.
Part 3. Bannerlord Online
The lack of support for the Bannerlord Online mod, made by one random Russian guy in a basement, an absolutely gorgeous mod with so much ambition and potential, but most importantly what the fans wanted. The ambivalence towards it by Taleworlds shows, after years of people begging for co-op campaign somewhat proves that Taleworlds doesn't give a damn what their fans want or think. This is the most egregious example, but there are more. Gone are the days of improving upon mods like Mount and Musket, in with the days of "WE KNOW BEST **** OFF MODDERS!"
Part 4. Time
Bannerlord took forever to release and it is still in early access. You would think that a game with more time being tacked on to development would be better, not worse. But here we are, 11 years later, with nothing to show for it. What were they doing all that time? Twiddling their thumbs?
Conclusion: Bannerlord was a Grift
With all this being said, I think it is safe to include that, while perhaps Taleworlds intentions when they first developed Bannerlord wanted to make a better game, the idea of grandeur and money probably got the best of them. It's hard to exactly pinpoint when Taleworlds decided that money was more important than keeping fans happy, but I would wager around 2015-2016 was when the idea of an excellent game was thrown out the window in favor of cash. Do you agree?
The fact that they made 60-100 million USD profit for an unfinished game in an egregious amount of time (it takes a few years to develop a game, Bannerlord has been in for 4X that and its garbage) makes it a grift. Stomping Lands was a grift.
Do remember that console warband was released in 2016, which gave them a huge influx on cash. While I suppose it is true that had run dry by 2020, bear in mind 2 years is enough time to develop a game -- 4 years enough to create a great game. Total War games are **** out every year (Sometimes every other year) and are more complete (Rome II aside) than this sad sack. I suspected Warband console was being used in order to tide them over until they could finish Bannerlord. I was wrong.
Details?
I've given up on trying to have fun with the game so recently I've just been unearthing old threads to fully understand all the thing that are wrong - it's an archeological expedition into an ancient salt mine.
I think they could turn everything around tomorrow with a better communications strategy that outlined a clear and detailed vision for BL's future. Bonus points if that vision is actually informed by feedback from fans or credibly outlines how feedback from fans will be systematically addressed.
For an example of fan feedback, here's a forum poll from almost 2 years ago where 84% of fans asked for spearmen to actually be effective against cavalry instead of just derping with janky AI (that was ON PURPOSE btw - it's not a bug). It turns out that most fans of a historical medieval RPG don't actually want shieldwalls to be literally the worst formation and spears to be virtually useless, contrary to everything we know about medieval history.
This is a fan forum and - even with the extreme jank of BL - there's no shortage of simps for the game who insist that it's divine. If TW got their heads out of their asses for one measly minute, they could probably win a lot of us back (myself included).
True. Not holding my breath, though. They can "develop" all they want, but it won't mean jack until they have an actual strategy for making the game we were promised. At this point it's totally schizophrenic: we've got major complaints completely ignored for over a year but 10 people complaining about javelins in Skirmish prompt them to nerf all thrown weapons in all game modes with no warning.
From the beginning, almost every single patch has been substantially about NONE of the things being discussed in the forum at the time. Mexxico listened to us about snowballing and that was awesome, but even he's going bye-bye.
Because the game you're playing now is probably going to look a lot like the game they release in a few months, assuming they want to monetize their planned console port on time.
Yeah the modders wrote an open letter to the devs 2 months ago. We just got a response 2 days ago... which was basically to f*** ourselves and stop complaining. A popular modder publicly ragequit shortly thereafter and everybody else was like "WTF?"
My money is on this. They can't monetize DLC or microtransactions or console port until - at a minimum - they s*** out a game that they can at least call "complete". At that point, the simping will shift from "Well it's EARLY ACCESS!" to "Well obviously that feature is for DLC! It's too complicated! Stop expecting miracles!"
THIS ^
Lesbosisles
Knight at Arms
Sadly, that sounds more realistic nowadays, than it was at the beginning of the EA.
I read many suggestion posts here and there all over the forums and I see what devs reply to them - roughly these are "We are still discussing it" or "We won't make this".
Feasts are being discussed, taking over alleys is being discussed, manhunters are either being discussed or rejected (can't remember well), don't know what are their plans for implementing NPC party orders system (telling a lord/lady to go to a specific town, attack a village, etc. like in Warband) - the list may be continued.
If the game as it is considered to be almost finished - well, that'll be a huge disappointment
I think MadVader refered to Lust(former CM) comment during E3 2016 which was at 3.14 of the video:
The fact we might not even get feasts says it all... TW honestly doesn't deserve the succes of Bannerlord. I wish some real western competition would come and show them how it's done.
I'm saying western because games like Conqueror's Blade exists and it's sort of an Asian MMO Mount & Blade. Yet it actually feels way more polished and generally well-made than Bannerlord...
I'm saying western because games like Conqueror's Blade exists and it's sort of an Asian MMO Mount & Blade. Yet it actually feels way more polished and generally well-made than Bannerlord...
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