Recent content by bonerstorm

LuciusDomitiusAurelianus said:

it's still frustrating when elements are missing, bugs are never fixed, and the "core" features such as combat AI, strategic AI and diplomacy are not that great.

Battles are nice, graphics are good, it's always fun smashing guys over the head with 2-handers but it gets tiresome when it's the same ole watching my HAs run into the enemy infantry, my cataphracts having 10% accuracy on thrusts, and the enemy forming up in a donut but I cannot flank them because they magically know where everyone is despite not having Line-of-Site

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Au contraire, mon frere.

They didn't just code crappy AI. They coded GREAT AI, but then systematically nerfed it for every unit.

The suck in BL is entirely on purpose.

Bjorn The Upset said:

That is their problem. While you can enjoy something for a particular reason and spent considerable amount of time doing it, you can hate that thing for another particular reason at the same time. And after that considerable amount of time, the thing you enjoy does not overwhelm the thing you hate.

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Also some people have hardcore insomnia and would rather play a game that's deeply flawed than let their $50 investment go to waste.

There's only so much crap I can binge on Netflix. I like playing a game to completion and publishing a detailed takedown on why it sucks. The REEEE of the fanbois is music to my ears... If I can't get full enjoyment out of a game, I can get enjoyment out of utterly eviscerating it and saving prospective buyers from making the same mistake while legions of obsessed lunatics scream.

Bazza_ov_da_Norf said:

My opinion hasn't changed - Bannerlord is a 7/10 that should and could have been a 10/10.

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This is a fair characterization. BL is a good game using the rest of the games industry as a barometer. It is a disappointment compared to the potential shown in WB/VC/etc.

Lord Grindelvald said:

I've tried upping my trading to 250 because I have settlements outside of my culture and the loyalty is at a standard -3, meaning I always need to have the +3 Feasts activated in order to not lose it, preventing me from building anything else. So I want to trade my town to some other lord for a town within my culture.
But you need trading to 250.
Mines at 85.
I need to do an ungodly amount of trading in order to get rid of my town (which barely runs a profit).

Some of the skills are insanely difficult. And the whole town trading perk is way to important to just sit at the back, especially with these loyalty issues.

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It's even more maddening when you find out that NPC's gain Trade skill per revenue, when you only gain skill per profit.

And you have to literally have to trade tens of millions of denars to get to 250. Even at 2x or 3x XP, it takes forever. Once you actually do it, the game becomes meaningless because you're a money-god.

One time somebody responded to my complaint by saying that leveling Trade is easy... turns out homeboy was abusing a glitch in the price of horses that allows you to make infinite profit. Some people have really weird worldviews, considering abusing cheese to be part of a game.

Ananda_The_Destroyer said:

You should never apologize or explain when accused of doing something wrong.

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Based and clownpilled.

Mozambique said:

The frustration is not really because the game is bad but because It has the potential to be nearly perfect.

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It had the potential to have as many functioning features as a literal garage game released in 2008, let alone the DLC for that game made by literal modders in 2010 and released in 2016.

The problem with reviews is:

1. People comparing it to games other than Warband
2. The Steam reviewing system assigns the same weight to EA newb with 10 hours playtime saying "TOP GAME!" as a 500-hr detailed takedown by a veteran player

Smart game purchasers filter for negative reviews to see how compelling they are, so they do have an impact. But it is annoying nonetheless.

StewVader said:

I think acknowledging mistakes and admitting their were problems is a good first step to rebuilding their reputation - rather than pretending everything is great.

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This. At this point the community is toxic with mistrust and grievance. Negative word of mouth is a cancer that will hurt TW long after BL itself is forgotten.

CaptainLee said:

Woolly-headed direction and lack of focused leadership would be my guess.

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"That's the kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."

vito397 said:

There were rumours Armagan had disagreements with a developer who was in charge of much of the roleplay stuff around 2016. As a result he left the company and his content was axed.

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A reddit post of commented-out content shows that a lot of spicy political stuff ended up on the cutting-room floor. Sexism and slavery and political intrigue all got yeeted. I figured it was apprehension about US wokeness in light of the hate campaign against Kingdom Come, but I wouldn't be surprised if this pissed off people internally.

Bugger off me lawn said:

Just remember to consume product no matter what. The product is always right. The product is always good.

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The Internet used to be the Wild West where everything wasn't curated to maximize the lubrication on the money chute. Ratings for products could be mostly trusted because corporations hadn't had time to rig the system.

Today? Amazon spends a billion dollars on an IP, screw it up, and then blatantly delete tens of thousands of 1-star reviews. Nobody in the mainstream press bats an eye... because the system is designed to maximize consumption, regardless of the truth. The fact that everyone loses faith in the system is irrelevant, as long as the Wild West doesn't exist anymore so there's no alternative.

Sundeki said:

"Specialization" isn't what it used to be, though. Part of the problem lies there. Specifically, if you look at the sciences; the current scientific community has a catastrophic problem with replicating and verifying the results of other studies, with half of scientists surveyed here saying that they couldn't even replicate their own results.

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And this is a perfect example. Anyone with basic logic skills looking at the history of pharmaceutical development over the past 50 years will conclude that there's something deeply wrong with the way our society produces and markets drugs.

Without even needing to get into more contentious stuff like factory farming and the decimation of nutrition in almost everything we eat, there are ample examples of extremely profitable drugs that are later found to do basically nothing or actively harm people who take it. Vioxx was prescribed to 80 million people before news broke that it was linked to massive increase in heart attack risk.

Why? Academia, regulators and media were all sleeping on the job. They all - funny enough - derive an insane amount of revenue from Pharma. The entire system is geared towards:

DON'T ASK QUESTIONS, JUST CONSUME PRODUCT AND THEN GET EXCITED FOR NEXT PRODUCT​

xdj1nn said:

already doing that, I won't indulge into political debates in the wrong place

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MostBlunted said:

Still a better love story than 99% of your posts.

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Maybe TW can fund further content releases by selling @Lucius Confucius Gamer Dev Bathwater.

xdj1nn said:

Than we get the depth of each feature like smithing, kingdom management, combat, etc... None have it, it's all shallow, often grindy way above acceptable levels, double edged choices where the excessive weight negative edge turns the entire choice into a punishment, companions are saltless, so on so forth...

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Hahaa I can't play BL without Kaoses Tweaks to vastly increase XP gain so the grind is much less.

Literally there was a bug report where somebody detailed the process necessary to get Roguery to 250 using vanilla XP rules... It was something like killing 2 million peasants or raiding 10,000 caravans.

This game puts MMO grind to shame.

Grank said:

Okay. VC with Blood Eagle is too clunky and janky compared to Bannerlord to be fun.

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Grank said:

That mod is not Bloc's by the way, but your points still stand.

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It is a copy/paste of Bloc's with tweaks and extra features. Made necessary because of Bloc's ragequit - it is a vital mod and someone needed to own it.

Taveren said:

Who is the mysterious maestro known as 'Bloc'?

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A guy with a Vision for BL that the actual fans would love. But he was too good at modding for this world, and ascended directly into coding heaven on a fiery chariot.

MostBlunted said:

And as I always said, I don´t expect the modders to fix a broken game or add features that should be in vanilla. That´s the job of the company that is selling the game.

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CORRECT

xdj1nn said:

I truly admire this guy's engenuity and creativity, though most of his mods have a really unpolished finish and are a bit wonky, so using them isn't really a thrill nor a really smooth experience. He does, however, proove how TW has been lazy on the "feature" department since forever. Regardless, overtime if he sticks to his mods' development I believe we'll eventually get some of the best if not arguably the actual best from him and himself alone.

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I was working with him on a couple mods when he yeeted himself from the forum. He definitely had a single-minded drive that drove his mods in a wonky direction, but he was open to feedback if given in a logical argument. It was my idea for different jobs to give sets of often hard-to-get skill-ups in Freelancer, since grinding impossible skills like Leadership is one of the toughest things starting out.

Not to suck my own modding tool, but I'm a professional copywriter IRL. Happy to write content for good mods if people want.

Aurex said:

I might boot the game again if some absurdly good mod comes out

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I'm giving the Banner Kings mod a try. It looks... EXTREMELY ambitious. Not sure if I like the cut of its jib. But it does some serious economy tweaks that I'm really interested to see play out. It looks like it makes smithing even worse tho, which I'm not sure if I care about.

Er... and it might give lords the ability to buy your workshops from you without your consent, which sounds like a TERRIBLE idea.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Grank said:

Coincidentally, I popped up Warband again last night, and it was too clunky and janky compared to Bannerlord to be fun.

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You can't compare BL to Warband. Compare it to VC with Blood Eagle.

Count_Morfetico said:

I can understand the people who find this game to be super fantastic, specially if they didn't experienced warband, cause there is no other game that does, or try to do, all this stuff at the same time.

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There is nothing on the planet like Mount & Blade. It defies categorization because it's a genre unto itself. It's so sad to see BL degenerate to be a prettier but lesser version of WB and especially VC.

xdj1nn said:

I heard about that, and am not amused at all - the likelyhood I'd purchase anything from them until BL is properly done is nill... If BL ends up in a sad sore state, than I'd never buy anything from TW again - just the blunt honest truth...

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I'm already there, rapa. This game lost me as a paying customer about 6 months into EA. Barring a miracle, they'll never get another dime from me. Same thing with Bioware, Bethesda and Paradox. Gamers need to start putting their money where their mouth is if we want the future of the hobby to suck less.

I think this final set of releases will be my last attempt to squeeze fun from my wasted investment. I'll be leaning heavily on mods.

SonOfSaruman said:

This is all I want from the beggining. I remember that people complaining too much because bannerlord is too much like warband before. But now, people just want a bannerlord that feel's like warband. I really really want to see these features in BL. Let's make this thread blow up so devs maybe actually care about this. And I wanna make that tag to myself. How do we add that ~~~~~~~~~ Good features that were in Warband, but are still missing in Bannerlord ~~~~~~~~~ to our profile ?
Edit: K I just did it

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F***ing legend.

9yearsago said:

Turtles haha. You have great sense of humor man.

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Thanks! I had the "Turtles" option in all my polls, but added an anti-turtle option after @danEN complained (banned but not forgotten).

Zerosaiko said:

If I remember right, the unit AI is the main one that's hardcoded such that modders can't really mess with it (things like anti-hugging, weapon choice, etc). Formation AI is moddable, but undermined by the unit AI. Campaign AI is also moddable, I think it's mainly the pathfinding that isn't?

The stuff surrounding traits is moddable, thankfully, and so is the economy stuff.

Feasts should be possible (also one of the mods that Bloc made https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/feasts-by-bloc.451066/), I doubt TW went back and made it impossible to add them.

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It's definitely concerning that the modding scene appears to be rather sparse compared to what it was in Warband, even though I'm glad that there are more avenues for fixing BL than I thought. Bloc's ragequit was a severe blow to the community.

svelok said:

That's not true, is the thing.

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I mean the next release will be the last one before it's a "Completed" product.

I'm sure that there will be bugfixes and tweaks after release, possibly even some new free content (I doubt anything major). But this is a final end to fanboi dreams that there would be massive new content introduced before the end of EA.

Dejan said:

If you have any examples of this "hardcoded stuff" I would be happy to take note of them to bring up in a dedicated meeting. We have done numerous changes over the course of EA to make the game systems even more moddable, directly at the request of modders.

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Thanks! I haven't played since January, so I really hope that I'm wrong about the stuff I'm about to say...

I'm a medieval combat nerd, roleplaying nerd and economics nerd... so the three things I care most about are working spears in shieldwalls, working personality traits and a working economy.

1. AI: I'm given to understand that nearly all the unit/formation/campaign AI is hardcoded, so for instance - while tweaks can be made to make spears less useless - it's impossible to make spearmen use their spears in combat when they have any other weapon. Last I checked, Realistic Battle Mod can only stop spearmen from switching to swords by removing swords from inventory entirely. @Philozoraptor and @Terco_Viejo please don't hesitate to chime in about formation AI too - I'm not knowledgeable enough about reasons why we can't have working shieldwalls.
2. Traits: As far as I know, there was only one modder with a mod to fix personality traits, who is now MIA. He was able to balance some aspects of the system and provide a game log notification when you gained/lost personality, but was completely unable to do anything with Valor - which is apparently only lost by sacrificing troops and gained by winning battles while vastly outnumbered (impossible to do without cheese on realistic settings?). It is apparently absolutely impossible to level Calculating/Impulsive without convincing something like 50 clans to switch your faction as that is the only thing that modifies it.
   1. To be fair... I'm not sure how much this is moddable since nobody currently is modding it.
   2. I would really like lord NPC AI to be affected by their personality traits (cruel lords raiding etc.) but that would also fall under AI hardcoding.
3. Economics: I don't know if this is a factor of hardcoding at all or just lack of interest, honestly, but the last time I looked into Bannerlord economics the demand curve collapsed once a town reached 6-7 days of supply - which made town economy very fragile to supply shocks and made trade only consistently profitable in low volumes. I suggested tweaking the multiplier to stabilize at 15-30 days supply. The multiplier that governs price equilibrium - I believe - was hardcoded. As far as I know, the only current mod that affects economy is Banner Kings - which does a ton of other stuff, but doesn't impact the price curve directly.

Bonus: I'd like feasts, which are apparently impossible to mod because of AI hardcoding.

Zerosaiko said:

I have no clue about the other stuff, but I do remember the post about the infantry AI nerf.

Dev Blog 12/09/19

In this week’s blog, we will be showing you some raw gameplay footage from Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s vast sandbox campaign. This particular video was captured from the demo we took to this year’s Gamescom, which put a heavy emphasis on large battles and sieges, dropping the player in the...

forums.taleworlds.com

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Thanks! I've been looking for that link in my couch cushions. It was "foolish" - not "silly!" How goofy of me.

Taveren said:

I'm new to TW having never played WB. My sons played WB endlessly and were very keen to try BL. Played it initially for hours and kept at me to try it. "Best game ever" stuff. I'm more a Bioware kind of guy - I like deep interactions with my crew, I have a liking for magic in a medieval setting.

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From what it sounds like, you'd like WB a lot more. I recommend starting with Viking Conquest modded with Blood Eagle and maybe moving on to Warband with one of the comprehensive mods - I don't remember if Floris was one of the earlier ones or one of the perfected ones?

Regardless, if BL is worth $50, then WB was priceless. So many features from the original game ended up on the cutting room floor in the last 12 years.

If you want more immersive RPG experiences along the lines of OG Bioware, I heartily recommend Underrail and Tyranny.

Stefmon said:

I work in game development now, and what you described sounds like a total trash fire. Why would you listen more to internal testing than your actual user base? Are they trying to dumb it down for consoles? Console players aren't dumb you know. They put god damn Age of Empires on Xbox.

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Yeah I got the impression it wasn't dumbing it down for console players, but dumbing it down to meet hardware capacity and simplicity for use by gamepads over keyboards Maybe simplifying the code so multiple versions can be more easily maintained? I'm not familiar with the console market, so maybe they intend to release on last-gen?

Stefmon said:

I was quite confused about all the negativity on the forums regarding the state of the game, but reading that, it's all justified. From a developer perspective, whoever made the call to dumb down the game is being very reactionary. The game is meant to be complex to play, that's why people play it...

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Absolutely. TW used to have an extremely passionately supportive fanbase, but that changed around 8 months into Early Access. It became painfully clear to almost everyone - with the notable exception of a small cadre of Recruits coming in every time there was a Steam sale - that TW DGAF about actual user feedback. None of the hundreds of poll posts about development direction got the slightest nod of understanding from the devs, no matter how emphatic and specific the requests were.

Management wanted things simple. And simple meant making a game that has less features than vanilla WB. If you click the top link on my sig, you'll see a comprehensive list of popular requests that were summarily ignored. To the extent that some have been fulfilled, that appears to be completely incidental.

To the left of that link is a badge identifying me as one of the "upset subset" of the community which, if you look around enough, comprises a large proportion of the regular posters.

Stefmon said:

I bet whatever programmer or engineer was in charge of that Ai is pretty disappointed too...
Poor management and shot calling is what damages studios most, not the people actually physically building the game.

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Hahaaa you don't know the half. A little over a year ago there was practically a riot on the forums when the devs announced that they would be responding to modders' requests that they fix the #1 issue facing TC mod creation - the haphazard over-use of access modifiers - by saying that they're going to make the problem both worse and better on a case-by-case basis. No explanation. No elaboration. Here's my contemporary write-up of the situation.

In the aftermath of that cluster, one of the most prolific modders - @Bloc - loudly ragequit the forum and at least one of his farewell FU posts is still being bumped today.

We've had a VERY long road through EA development.

Stefmon said:

And I'm sorry but spear Inf is meant to be effective against cavalry, that's why you don't charge a pike wall xD

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Dude... I love medieval warfare and fantasy RPG-playing...

All I've cared about from the start is working spears and working personality traits and... you know... actual opportunities to play roles.

Bannerlord is a medieval combat RPG that doesn't remotely simulate medieval combat and has about as many roleplaying elements as an excel spreadsheet. Le heart... it is broken.