Missing WB features are not up to the standards of Bannerlord!

[Spinozart1]

Clone post?

Missing features of Warband are not up to Bannerlord Standards

https://www.reddit.com/r/mountandblade/comments/x02bxs/tw_missing_warband_features_are_not_up_to_the/ So that's the devs words on missing features from Warband. I guess the Bannerlord Standards is that it has to be as shallow, boring and repetitive as possible, so they discarded any chance of...

forums.taleworlds.com

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

I think Goyyyio did not see this thread before opening that thread.

 

[Goyyyio]

I think Goyyyio did not see this thread before opening that thread.

Yes, my bad. Let's use this one from now on.

Considering there might be a wrong interpretation of what the devs said, even then, I think they're not caring enough to bring some of the old Warband features back, and it's magic too. Take for example companions, they just had a good concept, and instead of improving it, they just made it a random thing, gave it less importance and moved on. It's a terrible port and interpretation of a feature, and companions need to be improved on asap

 

[Jehiel]

I don't totally disagree tbh. Some of the features people keep calling for were incredibly shallow and simple.

Like, I saw a post asking for poems. Poems!? There were nothing to them. There were like 5 in the whole game, you buy them, you give them to a princess, you see +10 rep. You move on. Did anyone even ever read them? Probably not. They were such a nothing mechanic.

Same thing as feasts. The current encyclopedia does what the feast system did and more. Also, while they were cool the first 2 or 3 times, all they did for the 423 times after that was ruin the momentum of a campaign or a war.

But I would like to see more changes before release and hope they plan on supporting it post release too.

 

[Lord Irontoe]

Yes, my bad. Let's use this one from now on.

Considering there might be a wrong interpretation of what the devs said, even then, I think they're not caring enough to bring some of the old Warband features back, and it's magic too. Take for example companions, they just had a good concept, and instead of improving it, they just made it a random thing, gave it less importance and moved on. It's a terrible port and interpretation of a feature, and companions need to be improved on asap

Yep. And in some areas, they actually did make improvements, but still somehow made it worse.

For an example that's been hounding my current playthrough, recruiting clans into your kingdom. I think its safe to say that the dialogue for convincing lords to join your kingdom has been improved in Bannerlord. Its clear and easy to see if your choices will be persuasive or not. You don't have to memorize all the different lord greetings to figure out their personalities and you don't have to check a wiki to know how to answer. Big improvement, and yet recruiting lords in Bannerlord is so much suckier than it was before. In Warband, you could talk directly to any lord you ran across and try to get him to join you. Now you can only speak to the clan leader and good luck finding him when he's not in an army. And Warband had lords showing up at your hall to offer their services, so you could always hire those ****heads if you were desperate for manpower. And when a faction got destroyed you might get a whole bunch of good lords just showing up at your hall.

From the developer's perspective, they probably think they succeeded at improving lord recruitment because they improved the interface when they actually made the whole experience much worse.

 

[argon45]

Yes! Buying a woman whom you never met from his father with 100k dinars+some mules are much more complex and interesting mechanic than:
Actually meeting the lady in feasts in person, dedicating your victories of tournaments to her, reading poems according to her personality, deciding to get marry, asking his parent for permisson then getting rejected because you were meeting secretly, deciding elope and becoming enemies of her family and country. (!)

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

Like, I saw a post asking for poems. Poems!? There were nothing to them. There were like 5 in the whole game, you buy them, you give them to a princess, you see +10 rep. You move on. Did anyone even ever read them? Probably not. They were such a nothing mechanic.

WB generally is overrated. Let's remove these overrated features, what we got left in our hands? Yeah, that would be the most amazing game called Bannerlord.

Instead of improving these rpg features of Warband, TW completely scrapped them out of the game. Thus, what we have in our hands right now is just battles. Even battles have some serious problems anyway.

 

[black_bulldog]

Saying "they're making it for the money" or "consoles" is presupposing that there is a coherent, unified vision from taleworlds, and i think kind of misses the point. I can guarantee you that if he had asked a different developer he would have got a different answer.

It's happened a lot here where a developer says something controversial and then other developers contradict him in the posts below. If taleworlds is making the game for anyone, it's taleworlds itself. There are probably wildly different opinions on how the game should be developed, which is why the addition of new features is so random.

You're correct there isn't coherent or unified vision. But I suspect that's because Taleworlds was trying to add everything and anything they could to broaden the appeal to as wide an audience as possible, regardless of whether it fit in or not. Imho Taleworlds feels any mechanic or addition would require too much work or wouldn't appeal to a larger audience they just won't do. I suspect they feel that things like wedding cutscenes or feasts aren't worth their time because most people outside of these forums would really give 2 about them. The whole line about not up to our quality standards is just that a company catchphrase that devs can use to shut people up, much like not our vision.

 

[Spinozart1]

The whole line about not up to our quality standards

Here we are... It is an English translation of a post from a Turkish guy who had some kind of chat with a "whoever" TW person during Gamescon...
"The whole line" is far from being factual...

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

"The whole line" is far from being factual...

So? The whole game in our hands for two years is saying this whole line, anyway. The game itself is a evidence for the high probability of "this whole line" to be true.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

You're correct there isn't coherent or unified vision. But I suspect that's because Taleworlds was trying to add everything and anything they could to broaden the appeal to as wide an audience as possible, regardless of whether it fit in or not.

Even that is still a coherent vision that would require everyone in the office to agree. On the contrary, the fact that some mechanics are far more complex than warband makes me think that everyone had their own ideas, and everything got thrown in. The glassdoor employee reviews, some of the statements from developers, and the overall haphazardness of the game suggests that to me.

This also explains why multiplayer has basically been abandoned. I don't think there's much will in the office to work on it, even though multiplayer was a significant avenue for new players to get into the warband, and they've said multiple times that they want MP to be accessible.

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

everything got thrown in

I think that is exactly why i do not feel that complexity as an end user and also i feel most of the features disconnected from each other.

 

[azakhi]

Like, I saw a post asking for poems. Poems!? There were nothing to them. There were like 5 in the whole game, you buy them, you give them to a princess, you see +10 rep. You move on. Did anyone even ever read them? Probably not. They were such a nothing mechanic.

If you go down that logic rabbit hole, nothing is stopping you to call every RPG a nothing mechanic. People like different things and I respect it was nothing to you but they were good for some people. And since it is quite simple, why not just do it?

 

[Spinozart1]

So? The whole game in our hands for two years is saying this whole line, anyway. The game itself is a evidence for the high probability of "this whole line" to be true.

Totally agree with you, this EA clearly showed us the limits of development of TW. We are yet to see the full release though.
But what bother me here is that that post is being considered as legit, without any filter of criticism... just because it is close to what a lot are "thinking" what the truth is...

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

If you go down that logic rabbit hole, nothing is stopping you to call every RPG a nothing mechanic. People like different things and I respect it was nothing to you but they were good for some people. And since it is quite simple, why not just do it?

Before Bannerlord, nobody liked the poems. In the 10 or so years I've been browsing this forum, this is the first time I've seen anyone say anything positive about them. They were just busywork with some robotic flavour text that made your wife feel even more like an android.

The only reason people are now talking about these features is because they have fond memories of warband as a whole. But honestly I agree with the dev statement, some of the stuff in warband just isn't acceptable to shoehorn into a big budget game. That's not to say there isn't stuff like that in bannerlord right now, but that doesn't mean there has to be more.

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

But what bother me here is that that post is being considered as legit, without any filter of criticism...

In a normal circumstances, i would not started this thread, post this on reddit and write the last sentence bc the same filter of criticism is in my head. But this two years of EA and someone i know from the forum writes that he got an answer like that just boils me head to toe.

 

[Lord Irontoe]

Before Bannerlord, nobody liked the poems. In the 10 or so years I've been browsing this forum, this is the first time I've seen anyone say anything positive about them. They were just busywork with some robotic flavour text that made your wife feel even more like an android.

The only reason people are now talking about these features is because they have fond memories of warband as a whole. But honestly I agree with the dev statement, some of the stuff in warband just isn't acceptable to shoehorn into a big budget game. That's not to say there isn't stuff like that in bannerlord right now, but that doesn't mean there has to be more.

I think you're missing the point about Warband's features. Its not that Warband was the pinnacle of perfection. It was a primitive indy game with a lot of very simplistic interactions. The point is that even Warband, as primitive as it was, still at least attempted to make the world immersive by having these little details in it. Bannerlord's not even trying.

You're absolutely right that Warband's courtship minigame sucked. But what does it say about Bannerlord that it couldn't even improve upon that crappy system so they just replaced it with a barter screen instead?

 

[black_bulldog]

I think you're missing the point about Warband's features. Its not that Warband was the pinnacle of perfection. It was a primitive indy game with a lot of very simplistic interactions. The point is that even Warband, as primitive as it was, still at least attempted to make the world immersive by having these little details in it. Bannerlord's not even trying.

You're absolutely right that Warband's courtship minigame sucked. But what does it say about Bannerlord that it couldn't even improve upon that crappy system so they just replaced it with a barter screen instead?

I agree that Warband's courting was pretty tedious but at least they were trying to add immersion to the game. Bannerlord feels like a step backwards, having to pass 3 skill checks, that you can just save scum, and then pay off daddy is hardly the height of immersion.

 

[azakhi]

Before Bannerlord, nobody liked the poems. In the 10 or so years I've been browsing this forum, this is the first time I've seen anyone say anything positive about them. They were just busywork with some robotic flavour text that made your wife feel even more like an android.

The only reason people are now talking about these features is because they have fond memories of warband as a whole.

I played M&B games since 2011 and have probably over 3k hours at this point and I don't remember ever coming to this forums to say that I like any single one of the features, big or small. It is pretty normal you realize the importance of something when you lose it, human nature. I really don't think people are talking about poems just cause they have fond memories of Warband. Once again, it is personal preference. The fact that you find poems "just busywork with some robotic flavour text" doesn't mean we all do.

 

[JunKeteer]

Before Bannerlord, nobody liked the poems. In the 10 or so years I've been browsing this forum, this is the first time I've seen anyone say anything positive about them. They were just busywork with some robotic flavour text that made your wife feel even more like an android.

The only reason people are now talking about these features is because they have fond memories of warband as a whole. But honestly I agree with the dev statement, some of the stuff in warband just isn't acceptable to shoehorn into a big budget game. That's not to say there isn't stuff like that in bannerlord right now, but that doesn't mean there has to be more.

Putting it like that is not wrong, but as a sandbox game, it allowed players to create and implant their own sense of 'flavor' to the world. Same applies with wanting feasts back or other seemingly mundane/'simple' feature that was in WB but now lacking in BL. Your companions are all generic, lords have practically no 'character', emperors are all the same, traits do nothing, forced 'balance', etc...
It's not that it's just missing too, they didn't even replace it with anything worthwhile or 'meaningful'; all we got is some half-assed smithing system, illogical perks/skill progression (some still not working), no banditry, etc...that have next to no 'character' to it.

I probably have as many hours in BL now as I have in WB, but the only memories I have are the frustrations and 'dumb' decisions that mar the playthroughs.