Your outta da loop Long Termer. You remember that 8 years long thread on these forums with like 100,000 entries with hopeful and wishful suggestions for the sequel to Warband? Yeah Id gather that since zero of those made it into the sequel, that accounts for a pretty large base of disappointment. Of course no ones gonna have absolute numbers on such a thing - but if you follow my reasoning that - THIS is why those 2 critic's reviews matches up with the current complaints here on the forums and not so much with the overall Steams thumbs up.
The thing is: the forum population is just a tiny tiny fraction of the wider player base. How many accounts are there? 20k? 30k? Most of them neither post nor read the forums. I am playing the game since 2006 or 2008 and I never posted on the old forum (I did have an account that I can't find anymore though).
It aint complicated. people who have fully played out the base games and are aware with both its predecessors and mods capabilities -are going to have a different level of standard than would be a casual fan who's never played this genre -in which there is only ONE franchise. That aint rocket science and its happened to all kinds of niche,fan favorite under the radar type games and even book/movies - in which whose owners have decided to go the more mainstream accessible route to both increase their fanbase and their earnings.
Warband was sold more than 6 million times. They are currently at ~3 million sold units as far as I know. So you are telling me that the 3 million Bannerlord players aren't part of the 6 million Warband veterans? They are all new to the genre and almost nobody who played Warband wanted to try Bannerlord?
In the end its always gonna be subjective - thats why we place our subjective opinions here -but yours is just as subjective as you based your entire argument off of yourself. Population:You.
So Babylon..babelfisch
True. I just think that 'people have different opinions' is a much better explanation than 'everyone who likes the game must be a newcomer'.
I get it. You had 10 years time to build up expectations and imagine all kind of things. The thing is, developing games takes more time and effort than imagining things, so that's why the game can't meet your expectations.
I don't blame you for your disappointment alone though. Taleworlds should not have announced the game so early and I guess that part of the long development time was due to bad decisions by the management.
Their blogs showed features that didn't make it into the game. That's nothing special but I understand that it sucks.
They should not have said that Bannerlord would be finished soon when in truth it wasn't.
That doesn't make it a bad game though. It's still the best (or only) Medieval sandbox. I don't think any other developer could have created a better successor to Warband. I do agree with most of the criticism (not the tone though) because coming up with good ideas is pretty easy and lots of gameplay loops could be better and more fleshed out.
It's still better than Warband in almost* every way. And that's what
I expected from M&B2.
*I still miss feasts and learning poems, but they
never were the pinnacle of gameplay. And if that's really the biggest issue the game must be almost perfect...