You've gotten increasingly bitter these last 5 pages. I liked the thread for its smart and witty discussions, but whats that ^. You doin good?
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Bannerlord was a grift
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You've gotten increasingly bitter these last 5 pages. I liked the thread for its smart and witty discussions, but whats that ^. You doin good?
I think there is a certain level of acceptable 'banter' at taleworlds. The community certainly has been kept waiting a long time. But this has clearly gone off the rails...
It's this kind of stuff that keeps pushing me away from this community. Judge and criticise the game freely but you are talking about real actual human beings... If I go to the theatre I don't start shouting abuse at them halfway through because I don't enjoy it. I'll just leave...
I don't think it's any less ridiculous of a situation than what he's postulating. Even still, that kind of thing is what polite people would say behind closed doors, not to their faces. It can be easy to forget that these posts are often effectively to their faces.
I wouldn't say my sentiment has really changed much since the thread was written, nor has it really changed since April/May of 2020 (and to a lesser extent the frustration of waiting for a release date), when I got to saw the epic failure that was Bannerlord Early Access. Sure, I've been more civil than I've been earlier in the thread, though I feel like voicing my opinion strongly because that's just my preference at the moment. I think the reason is because I have been involved in the attempted revival of Persistent World/Kingdoms on Warband, however because it is such an old and dead modification, a once 200 populated server with 30-40 people spamming join hoping some random person logged out or lost connection is now down to 30-50 people. All it would need for a revival is to get on Bannerlord, there are dozens of people I've talked to personally who refuse to play on Warband and are waiting for Bannerlord. Entire clans are following suit, and it caused the mod to die. I'm just frustrated that the few precious months I have before my career starts are being wasted by TW's failure to release the Public Servers/allow multiplayer mods to be made. I'd very much like to play a Bannerlord Persistent mod, but I can't do that if A) it isn't allowed to be made by TW or B) I don't have the time for it. At this rate, in a few years when Taleworlds has finally fixed problem A, Problem B will set in. Like countless others, because of TW's neglect, we are not going to get to enjoy Bannerlord because we are simply getting older and getting into our actual lives. My vitriol and contempt for TW's decisions hasn't changed, its just that recent events have made me more vocal about it.
I'm saying the quiet part out loud, what everybody's thinking. I don't mind speaking out and tbh I'd prefer they actually see it to understand why we are frustrated. Whether they do anything about it is on them.
I am back for my try-bannerlord-again-in-6-months and tbh, compared to how it was when I complained about it in January, there has been some noticeable improvement, mostly on the diplomacy side. Economy still sucks though, and now I can't help but notice how enemy lords just keep appearing out of nowhere with 1000 soldier armies although they just got destroyed 15 minutes before. Oh and smithing is still, somehow, majorly busted.
TW still sucks cause this is still taking way too long. We want stable mods cause TW is too incompetent to make their game enjoyable.
TW still sucks cause this is still taking way too long. We want stable mods cause TW is too incompetent to make their game enjoyable.
Yeah, I feel you. It's worth a shot being more polite about expressing the same things though, it most likely won't change anything, but it's not like we haven't spent much time expressing our hardline contempt before.
It’s just difficult to be polite when the facts are just laying on the table. I re-read my original post, and am slightly more angry by it than when I wrote it two months ago, since there has been zero progress on improving multiplayer, outside duel mode, which was already in the bannerlord online mod. It’s just pitiful. Forty pages later and another two months I will not have to enjoy on Bannerlord. I think I have been far more civil than TW deserves tbh. Either way, I am just one small cog in the massive corporate machine that is TW profits, grinding on regardless of what I have to say. It doesn’t matter if we flatter or threaten them, it doesn’t matter if we beg or scream, barring a hefty
Is there a problem?
Yes
Can I fix it?
No
Dont worry!
I’ve been trying to live by the above for these last couple of months and my bloodpressure is now within acceptable measurements again. I can wholeheartedly advise trying to do so as well.
If you can not influence the outcome whatsoever, try not to worry about it.
I think you’re a stand up guy, Roy, would be a shame to see you go down in flames. Try to give it a rest, things will look a lot sunnier once you do.
Yes
Can I fix it?
No
Dont worry!
I’ve been trying to live by the above for these last couple of months and my bloodpressure is now within acceptable measurements again. I can wholeheartedly advise trying to do so as well.
If you can not influence the outcome whatsoever, try not to worry about it.
I think you’re a stand up guy, Roy, would be a shame to see you go down in flames. Try to give it a rest, things will look a lot sunnier once you do.
For Warband veterans there's the psycho drama of confronting the mediocre present (Bannerlord), which looks inferior compared to the good old times (Warband) when they were younger and with more future ahead of them. There's nostalgia and sentimentality, but I bet the roughest rants come from people unhappy with their present condition, which they transfer to unhappiness with a product.
Bannerlord is a GIFT, a therapeutic gift.
Bannerlord is a GIFT, a therapeutic gift.
They can be irritating to behold, just laying there, taunting you.
I would argue it is less corporate machine and more familial dysfunction, TaleWorlds is basically a mom and pop game studio (husband, wife and son are all CEO's/founders) that has grown past the small business stage and if the past employee allegations are true has not really evolved to meet industry standards of management or structure despite blowing up in size and finances.
TaleWorlds once had a publisher, Paradox Interactive, and as soon as they could they bought themselves out from under them to be on their own. I imagine because of all the rules, deadlines and corpo threats of liquidation if they were not followed and met. Admirable enough to be honest.
That said it left the artists in charge and if other allegations are to be believed, they have been chasing perfection and creating, scrapping and recreating the same systems over and over again for over a decade because nothing is good enough. It is not about money for them, money is a means to create, they like what they do and I quote "we just like going to work everyday and making video games".
I imagine it only released in early access in 2020 because they had finally ran out of money they made off Warband/renting their engine out and needed the cash to keep pathologically toiling away at their magnum opus. A project that in the past they have admitted not only has no internal timetable for completion as a whole, but nor do individual workloads they hand out, they never say 'we need this done by'. You cannot rush perfection, after all.
A practicing stoic in the wild.
If you could see the cabbages that I have planted with my own hands, you would not suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of the present with the storms of my past.
Something, something Diocletian. Something, something complete.
It will definitely not change anything. We are here to shout into the void, because we feel like it.
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What's the goal of all this? To be honest, I don't know. What can be accomplished from us complaining? I don't really know what good can come of this, what we can do. The doomer theme of my posts as of late is kind of sad, but really, whats the goal of all this? It is fun to complain and voice our grievances on here, and maybe if this thread gets big enough, someone will pay attention. After all, Mexxico did make a very long and heartfelt post. That being said, don't get your hopes up.
For the first part of your sentence, no one is going to actually pay attention to this thread and take it seriously. If you are just complaining for fun, then it really isn't being serious. TW will listen to things like the modding letter because that was made out of necessity, not out of a sense of enjoyment. Mexxico posted here to try and get people to understand the hardships that TW has gone through, and I don't know if that post worked.
I am fairly certain quite a few people have taken this thread very seriously, you yourself amongst them, seeing as you continue to post on it.
I'm not complaining/arguing for complaining's/arguing's sake, but it is interesting and gives me something to do, rather than being bored. That being said, I am posting with an end-goal of this actually raising awareness of Bannerlord's terrible state and the truth that it is at this point a grift. That being entertaining at the same time does not invalidate it.
As mentioned above, I believe both this thread and the modding letter have both the same purpose, goal and meaning behind them. Sure, theirs was far more professional (although this thread did start very fact based, as you can look at the OP, you can see I lay out my argument in a very succinct and regimented way. It was only after the pages and pages that the discourse devolved into what it is now, though when people such as @ShakenSpeare and @MadVader post, they do point out things very factually, albeit with some snarkiness/cunning/cheekiness from the latter.
It's inconclusive imo. While back in those pages (I think it was around page
people were pretty sympathetic towards them, though the bad updates since then cooled those sentiments, and the unmitigated failure of the recent 1.6 update has enraged everyone again, and understandably so. I can't say that I'm not happy with the negative reaction to 1.6; the vitriol is well-deserved.I recall the sheer amount of bannerwhen/butterwhen posts/replies on Bannerlord's subreddit between 2014-2019 pretty much made up the entire sub. When anyone tried to post something different, or to ask what was going on, it was just bannerwhen after butterwhen over and over again as I watched a community collectively lose it's mind month after month for years on end. It was sad, beautiful, glorious and disgusting.
They did not want tribute, or song, or monuments, or poems of war and valor, their wish was simple... remember us. That was their hope, that any free soul which would come across that place, in all the countless centuries yet to be, that their voices would whisper to them from the ageless screen and say "go tell TaleWorlds passerby, that in the year of our butterlord 1314, the patriots of Warband, starving and outnumbered, fought like warrior poets; and won their freedom".
I find it draining, personally, I only feel the urge a few times a year to come here, or reddit or steam discussion to simply bring up the same facts I have been bringing up every year since 2016 to what few white knights remain. There are less and less of them every year. Maybe it's just me but it seems really thinned out this year save for a few of them. I wondered what happened to all of them and then it hit me, oh... covid.
Not going to happen. Although I was genuinely shocked they replied to the mod author's open letter. It's success wildly surpassed my expectations.
Of course they still had to shoot themselves in the foot immediately after in what I can only describe as some kind of bad translation of the upcoming patch notes on this forum and caused at least one well known modder to quit modding the game.
It sort of reminds me of when Creative Assembly refused to give Darth, the author of some of the most popular overhaul mods for Empire/Napoleon/Shogun 2 a ticket to a total assembly of mod authors they were organizing because they thought his mods/he was not sophisticated enough and so he refused to mod any of their games after that. Definitely an unforced error in both situations.
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I think it's less "covid" (after all, people at home means more people doing nothing but complaining. Though covid killed a lot of people, I doubt that covid killed off a large amount of TW detractors) and more that people have moved on. A lot of people don't have the same resolve as those on this thread, and just threw in the towel. A decade of groveling and waiting is enough for them, lets just move to conqueror's blade or mordhau or something like that. That, or they have grown old. Bear in mind that 11 years is a long time, someone who was a teenager at that time is now in his mid-to-late 20's. Probably more important things to worry about.
I can't believe I hadn't thought of this analogy sooner. TBH, it works amazingly. Darth mods were absolutely amazing and I miss them to all hell. Why CA didn't give Darth literally every tool at their disposal is absolutely absurd, and it seems as if TW hasn't learned from their mistake. Just keep going, APE STRONG, GME, DIAMOND HANDS it Taleworlds, trust me, it'll eventually work.
TW in their attempts to keep winning people over to their class system multiplayer:
My attempt at gallows humor aside, yea.
It's funny because they would frequently accuse us of being 'lesser fans'.
If I remember correctly they said his mods were just tweaking numbers and that wasn't difficult. He mentioned if I remember right "apparently it is because I have had to do this to every one of your games just to make them playable"... or was that me? I can't remember, someone said that and I never forgot it because I thought it was funny.
"And as he got older, Napoleon's battle tactics seem to become a little less refined and a little more run straight at the enemy, try not to die."
Had me rolling. That first big battle after awhile of not playing, yea, I'm going to flank this way, horse archers here, archers here, big surprise right there, it's going to be glorious. Three empires deep and 500 battles later, look, just charge, okay?
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Not to defend or justify creative assembly's actions, but the guy had a massive ego and his mods really were just tweaking for the most part. He was a good marketer, making grandiose claims about how he had "fixed" the AI in empire total war or "overhauled" the combat, but neither of those things were possible or true in his case. Everyone has this collective memory of empire and napoleon being unplayable without darthmod, but gameplay wise they have the exact same problems.
I do remember those accusations, now that you mention it. I played Empire/Napoleon probably the least out of all the Total War games so it was a brief period for me. They were the first titles on their new warscape engine, and also based on a period they had never done before and it really showed. It was just so... bad.
I think those were the only two Total War games I used DarthMod on, because admittedly there were usually better alternatives, like Stainless Steel for Medieval 2, Rome Total Realism or Europa Barbarorum for the original Rome and so on. Eventually I did switch to Rights of Man but honestly I never liked those games no matter how much lipstick, real or not, was put on those pigs.
Shogun 2 won me back, Rome 2 had it's problems but I made it work, Attila was the first standalone expansion I ever actually enjoyed, and the Warhammer series is the best to date.
It doesn't take a genius to change a few numbers on units. However, to be fair...this type of rebalancing modding (slightly editing stats) is incredibly tough. Not in terms of actual work, but in terms of what needs to be done. A slight difference can severely outbalance the game and a ton of care and thought needs to be put into each decision. I think that of all the mods I've heard of with this type of modding, Darth definitely did it best. He was incredibly skilled in that regard, and its again, quite a shame he didn't continue past when he did. Would be nice if we had someone like this in Bannerlord, though if you thought CA was bad with their modders, oh boy, TW says hold my beer...
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