Another "Should I Come Back to Bannerlord SP?" Question

[TheShermanator]

My best Fonzie "Heyyyy" greeting to you all.

I last played Bannerlord in 2020. As my few hundred hours suggest, I had a lot of fun. But, the game was clearly incomplete in a lot of ways. I most acutely felt the lack of completeness in the mid to late game features. The "warband" stage of the game was *mostly* fun and rewarding, but the kingdom/fief/army/war/diplomacy stage was mostly unfun and unrewarding. The game felt like it had a ton of unrealized potential, and I thought to myself "hey, if they end up actually finishing this game later, maybe I should just play it more later?". Plus, I mildly modded the game, and I just did not have the patience to keep fixing my game after every little patch: Another reason to just wait for the game to be more or less done.

So, the game is out of beta, 2+ years later. Should I come back? If I do, should I expect a rewarding experience? From start to finish? Etc., Etc. Not the first thread like this y'all have seen, I'm sure. But I haven't seen one post-beta yet.

 

[Nordous]

I'm looking to play Bannerlord SP a year in post-release. I'm following the updates but haven't really played since early builds. I hope for a strongly exceeded expectations eventually.

 

[Delinard]

When Banner Kings or Calradia Expanded gets updated. Then add Diplomacy or Realistic Battles if you like that one, and some quality of life mods and ur good to go.

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

kingdom/fief/army/war/diplomacy

If these are what you are looking for, then there is no need for you to waste another hour for this game.

 

[froggyluv]

When Banner Kings or Calradia Expanded gets updated. Then add Diplomacy or Realistic Battles if you like that one, and some quality of life mods and ur good to go.

Is BannerKings the mod in which you connect to Crusader Kings and all the battles play out Bannerlord style? That always sounded pretty intriguing to me even tho ive never player CK.

 

[bestmods168]

no. just transform into the spermanator and start your new life.

 

[Delinard]

Is BannerKings the mod in which you connect to Crusader Kings and all the battles play out Bannerlord style? That always sounded pretty intriguing to me even tho ive never player CK.

No it adds a bunch of features to deepen non-combat gameplay.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/3826

 

[Lucius Confucius]

Yes, Bannerlord is worth coming back to. It is an excellent wargame with a lot of nice features. Army managment and sieges are improved upon from warband in major ways.

You can easily play the game unmodded right now.

 

[Apocal]

So, the game is out of beta, 2+ years later. Should I come back? If I do, should I expect a rewarding experience? From start to finish? Etc., Etc.

No.

 

[five bucks]

My best Fonzie "Heyyyy" greeting to you all.

I last played Bannerlord in 2020. As my few hundred hours suggest, I had a lot of fun. But, the game was clearly incomplete in a lot of ways. I most acutely felt the lack of completeness in the mid to late game features. The "warband" stage of the game was *mostly* fun and rewarding, but the kingdom/fief/army/war/diplomacy stage was mostly unfun and unrewarding. The game felt like it had a ton of unrealized potential, and I thought to myself "hey, if they end up actually finishing this game later, maybe I should just play it more later?". Plus, I mildly modded the game, and I just did not have the patience to keep fixing my game after every little patch: Another reason to just wait for the game to be more or less done.

So, the game is out of beta, 2+ years later. Should I come back? If I do, should I expect a rewarding experience? From start to finish? Etc., Etc. Not the first thread like this y'all have seen, I'm sure. But I haven't seen one post-beta yet.

The kingdom/fief/army/war/diplomacy stage is still mostly unfun and unrewarding. It's full of repetition and grind and stupid AI decisions you are sometimes powerless to change and mechanics that don't work as they should.

For example: Spend hours doing quests for a lord and aiding them in battle and even marrying their daughter to grind your relation to 100, and what does it get you? 5% cheaper cost of recruiting them, that's it.

One of the core mechanics of the M&B series doesn't even do anything relevant.

Or voting. You get a huge amount of influence from your series of battle victories that are saving the kingdom. But in each vote you can only spend 150 at a time, which is never enough to sway the vote when all lords vote the same, which they do often. So you end up getting no say in votes until you become a ruler, at which point you can spend Influence to cancel a vote. Good, right?... Except the AI will keep spamming the same moronic vote to drain your Influence. For example, voting to make peace with an enemy which you are currently beating hard and can take the whole kingdom of.

The late game is full of stuff like that.

 

[Bluko88]

If these are what you are looking for, then there is no need for you to waste another hour for this game.

2nd this

They've done nothing to improve Diplomacy or Kingdom Management. Late game is just a chore. It's really more or less the same game it was in 2020, just A.I. can finally (most of the time) climb ladders and much more stable. And armor isn't totally useless.

Snowballing is gone I guess, though it also makes the game a bit dull, since battles/sieges will get extremely repetitive. Expect to fight over the same castle/town A LOT.

And the campaign is still embarrassingly bad. Mark my words when the "honeymoon" phase is over for console players, and the game's many flaws/shortcomings are apparent to all - going to be a lot of bitterness.


Wait for some kind of quality overhaul mod I say. I would only play campaign/sandbox if you literally have nothing better to do.

 

[Grank]

You already own the game. Just play and see for yourself. You've taken two years of break. Your experience will differ from people who have been playing it non-stop for thousands of hours. Unlike those people, you might actually have fun for a while.

 

[TheShermanator]

You already own the game. Just play and see for yourself. You've taken two years of break. Your experience will differ from people who have been playing it non-stop for thousands of hours. Unlike those people, you might actually have fun for a while.

Yeah... the more I think about it, the more I realize that there is really no down side (besides SSD space, ) to just re-installing and starting up a campaign. I did generally enjoy the early mid-game regardless, and I am sure I could get plenty of good hours out of 1-3 mercenary level run-throughs, especially if the game is more stable now.

That said, due to changing life circumstances, I do value my time differently now than I did in the past - even the recent past. Because video games, at least in the genres I tend to like, take hundreds of hours, I have to be much more careful before I invest in them. And if I spend the hours building up a character so that I can have a robust late game experience, it would suck to find out that the late game experience still doesn't have much to offer. But if the early-mid game is fun no matter what, I can just go in expecting to end play-throughs around the end of the mercenary arc.

 

[TheShermanator]

@Bluko88 @five bucks @Delinard Thanks gents.

While it is disappointing to hear that they never really addressed the late game deficiencies, I always speculated that it would be modders that really finished the game.

Which brings on a second order question: With the game out of EA, and hopefully (?) the rate of patching decreasing, does the community expect a new golden age of great mods (new mods, and/or finalized stable mods)? Obviously no one can see the future, but for you guys that are still plugged in, is there an expectation that:

• Some modders that waited for full release will now complete and release great new mods?
• The pace of patching will slow dramatically, reducing the burden of mod list hygiene (and risk of broken playthroughs)?
• etc.

 

[Dean Beecham]

@Bluko88 @five bucks @Delinard Thanks gents.

While it is disappointing to hear that they never really addressed the late game deficiencies, I always speculated that it would be modders that really finished the game.

Which brings on a second order question: With the game out of EA, and hopefully (?) the rate of patching decreasing, does the community expect a new golden age of great mods (new mods, and/or finalized stable mods)? Obviously no one can see the future, but for you guys that are still plugged in, is there an expectation that:

• Some modders that waited for full release will now complete and release great new mods?
• The pace of patching will slow dramatically, reducing the burden of mod list hygiene (and risk of broken playthroughs)?
• etc.

Hi There good man.
Seeing the Fonzie "Heyyy... you must be around my age in real life. i played over 5,000 hrs on Warband but never played Warband with out mods . I have played to date over 2,000 hrs on Bannerlord and the game is much better now than what it was in 2020. with late game since the game has only been out of EA from the 25th i am not sure but i am at Mid game and its been fun. Its going to be Mods that will make the game great like Warband.. and i have tested many of them.. So should you start a new game Yes as you said you have not played since 2020 and you will see many new changes ..

 

[Apocal]

The pace of patching will slow dramatically, reducing the burden of mod list hygiene (and risk of broken playthroughs)?

There are already post-release content patches on the docket and TW mentioned they planned to continue patching for years after release. There is no reason to disbelieve them because the they did the same with BL.

 

[Grank]

That said, due to changing life circumstances, I do value my time differently now than I did in the past - even the recent past.

That's fair. My situation is similar actually. I still think that the time you spend mulling it over and asking people here could be spent kicking up the game instead, but I see that you're of the "investment" type. In that case, I'd recommend you to wait until mods develop to maturity. I think that you will probably enjoy one campaign of conquest. It's really not that bad, especially considering that you've taken two years break from the game. But you still might not like it. Who knows. Again, these questions can be easily answered by just starting the game and playing.

 

[Gambles]

Kind of the same boat, checking in on the game throughout EA and saw changes that were more akin to regular updates a launched game would get instead of EA huge content drops. Figured I'd check it out again on release and the war/diplomacy/fief stuff still feels at best bare bones. The campaign/overworld feels about ankle deep. The in battle stuff is still decent I guess though. At this point when some friends jump on we just do captain mode multiplayer on custom servers and thats alright for a bit of a different kind of game.

It's kind of funny to see a lot of the people who defended the state of EA, saying the game would improve leaps and bounds and have this and that by the time it launched, slowly coming to the realization that this is it. lol.

 

[Dead End]

I think it will be entertaining, but everytime I've cranked everything up to realistic, so far haven't had an experience as positive as warband. I've tinkered on my PC and Steam Deck with the release version, but nothing extraordinary so far. Voice acting for some dialogue I guess?

 

[Ser Jon]

I'm going to throw in my experiences every time I returned, including release.

No.

At the end of the day, because EA andies couldn't be honest with themselves or with Bannerlord, this lifeless game is the end product we will receive for the foreseeable future. The game was nowhere near ready for release. It wouldn't have hurt to keep it in EA one more year, work through these new things they added, but I suspect they weren't too keen on releasing EA on console and what that could mean for them, and that's why we got this rushed release.

That said, there are some things that are "fun" to the game, but it is still lacking a lot of soul. If you go over about 40 hours or so, repetition and the AI really starts to stand out and you'll probably begin to lose interest fast. It starts with constantly dealing with defeated lords and other AI hounding you every damn second, sieges are still quite broken even with the latest patch in that AI doesn't behave intelligently at all, NPCs being husks, etc etc.

I would suggest seeing if the Realistic Battle mod and Diplomacy are updated and get those if you decide to play again. Many players (rightly) consider it a must have for Bannerlord, because it just makes what you can do, exceptionally more enjoyable. Beyond that, I think after 2 years, you should definitely see something at least like 20hrs of enjoyment.