Recent content by Life_Erikson

Duh_TaleWorlds said:

I very much doubt that that was said. Can you share the timestamp / quote?

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I got the impression from this:

Bjorn The Upset said:

My impression on the interview is that the game will be released when port of consoles ready. This is my impression, not what he said.

"Bir süredir erken erişimdeyiz ama konsollara esas olarak tabi çıkarmayı hedefliyoruz."
I translated this part as "For some time we are in EA but we are also trying to release the game on consoles." but this could also be translated as "For some time we are in EA but our main objective is to port the game to consoles".

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I don't speak turkish so thats what I went by.
Granted: you are right, he didn't specifically say that developement of the game itself is pretty much finished. However from the two translations Bjorn gave I feel like the last one would make the most sense, meaning most of the work that is currently being done is on the console port.

I will cross that part from my previous post. Even though I stand by what I said, I don't intend to spread misinformation.

This is what is going on though isn't it? Proper mechanical changes to the game are not to come. All what we can expect from the developement of the game until release is what we already got the last two years. Meaning: nothing to majorly change the gameplay experience in its feel. I suppose we won't get less war and more diplomacy? I suppose we won't get feasts? I suppose the developement will not swing back around towards the feudal roleplay sandbox game which Warband was and which was vividly painted in the pre-EA devlogs? I suppose instead it will tread further on the road to console friendly "fast paced action"?

If you enjoy the game, go ahead and enjoy the game. Nobody wants you to stop doing so.

But if you really are interested why people hate the game you must understand its over ten year history:

-Warband set certain expectations on what the game is about, how it functions and what features to expect. (Warband released 2010)

-Developement for Bannerlord started about 2012 and was also announced then on the forum.

-A lot of big mod developement stopped around that time because people thought Bannerlord would release eventually (L-O-L)

-Taleworlds did a lot of developement blogs talking about what features they will implement. Before these devblogs I was quite suspicous wether BL will actually be better than WB but these hit exactly the right mark. I got the feeling Taleworlds knew exactly what their game was about and what players wanted.

-Release of the game was announced in 2016 and 2017 subsequently with videos showing the new siege gameplay on youtube.

-Everybody got hyped. -> no release in sight.

-TW got relatively silent -> players got anoyed by that a lot because nobody knew wether the game was around the corner or still years away.

-TW responded by making devlogs again. Most of which completely banine and useless. At that time early access was completely out of the question even though a lot of players demanded it. (I'm not taking sides here. TW tried to appease the audience and wether early access was a good idea is a completely different topic)

-Fast forward to late 2019: TW announces Bannerlord Early Acces. "The game will have bugs but will be mostly feature complete with all of the features present from Warband just some of the new features like the barter system missing"

-Hype

-April 2020: EA release of Bannerlord: A lot of basic Warband features missing. Balance of both combat and campaign completely out of whack. Most features promised before EA missing. Siege pathfinding straight up didn't work. Horrible performance and a lot of bugs. (The letter two are to be expected and I will not criticise TW over them)

-General reaction: It's just EA bro, they will fix / add X eventually! (It will take TW two more years to fix the siege pathfinding from this point lol)

-Summer 2020: TW announces end of EA within a year.

-Also around that time conversation between playerbase could be summarized by: "Can whe have X?", "No X is to complex.", "But X was in Warband!", "-". Anyways, it was around that time it became clear to me that the features missing from BL, which were either present in WB or were announced in pre-EA devlogs, weren't missing because TW was slow but because TW couldn't be bothered to implement them (more on that later).

-The f***ing meantime between 2020 - 2022: Not much of substance has been happening in terms of game mechanics and missing features. But we got new sheep models I guess. The modders on the other hand were already going buisy and proofed that the features TW deemed to be "tO cOMplEx" could be implemented by people in their free time within days.

-Spring 2022: Siege AI is actually fixed, some features have been added and a bit of balancing has been done to some aspects of the game.

-about a week ago: In an interview Armagan (the owner of the company and lead developer of previous M&B titles) said that currently there is not much work going into the PC-version of Bannerlord since the game is pretty much finished*, however porting Bannerlord to console proves to be a hard task. *He actually just stated that finishing the game and porting it to console is being done at the moment in parallel. That porting Bannerlord to console makes up most of the workload at the moment is an assumption on my side. However I think it is a sound one.

This proves what a lot of us were already thinking: TW doesn't care about what PC players want. They espacially don't care what Warband veterans want. They already got our money. What they care about is getting the next bunch of cash by releasing the game for console, on which the more nuanced and complex features either prominent in Warband or promised in earlier devlogs wouldn't work well anyways and thus are "too complex".

Adding insult to injury TW never cleared us up about how their vision of the game changed. They never told us which featues they promised we could expect and which not. They never gave us a specific roadmap of whats to come and what not. And they didn't tell us that in fact they are not working on improving the game but instead making a console port while still keeping everything under the veil of "Early Access" so criticism could just be done away with saying: "well, it is still not done yet. It is in Early Access afterall!".

People stuck loyally for over ten years with Taleworlds just to get stripped of money and then stabbed in the back.

RodLimitless said:

also it is beyond aggravating that the vlandian knight plate helms do NOT cover the neck. like are u kidding me??? as a historian i can tell you the first thing anyone would grab is 1) a shield 2) a helmet, and if u wanna protect anything else, you protect YOUR NECK. so many of these mail coif sure have a visor but no neck coverage, even the vlandian knight unit or banner knight one of those, has no neck covered and yes im talking about the aesthetics

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No.

darksoulshin said:

If you had read the thread, you would have read, in the beginning, that there doesn't necessarily have to be 25 hurtboxes.
There are currently 6.
Going from 6 to 10, although it has a cost, I do not think it is unsustainable.
If then for someone it is difficult to distinguish the hyperbolic example (25 hurtboxes which would guarantee a very high realisticity) from the realistic one (going from the current 6 to 10), the problem lies with those who base the criticism on the hyperbolic example by criticizing the "practicality of the example "instead of the" concept or model ".
Practicality should be criticized in the case of 10 hurtboxes.
It is up to the developer to make the uncoverable hurtboxes small enough to be hardly hit but positioned in such a way that directional attacks can reach them.
All possible things and not even difficult to do.

That said, innovating doesn't mean "taking old stuff from other games and putting it in here".
Innovating means "making new stuff, possibly expansive of the old one". And in the case of bannerlord, the core system, the combat.
And combat involves an overhaul of the armor system that isn't like the old system.
But apparently you like to pay for the reheated soup, not the new soup.

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Look. TW is already struggling (or actively resisting) to implement the stuff that they promised / that would be necessary to make the game balanced and playable. I don't see how being adamant about a completely new game system which wouldn't be adopted by TW anyways helps the discussion. It was hard enough making TW agree that there is a problem with armor and that WB did it better.

Everybody loves realism. But you do have to remember that this is a game not a simulator. The more complex the game becomes the harder it will be to develope, the more prone it will be to bugs and the more demanding it will be on hardware. If complexity is added it should really positively change the game experience. People aren't opposed to more realism, people rightfully believe that your proposal isn't enough bang for its buck.

What I liked about WB was that even with an army of just 40 to 60 men you could influence the outcome of the war to an extend by choosing your battles wisely. Using your soldiers to win a battle that would otherwise be lost or take out multiple small armies of your enemy one by one.

Bigger battles sound great on paper, but their outcome needs to matter and the player should have some influence on said outcome.
If the commander system worked and if armies would actually be lost and not replenished by day two big battles would be great. But even then they should be a rare occurance so as to not become grindy.

This reminds me a lot of the old Settlement mod for the original M&B. Unbelievable whats possible for a good programmer with that engine.

Duh_TaleWorlds said:

In the case of armor, though, we are currently testing different options. This could mean you may see a change in weeks or in months or not at all (imo unlikely) - depending on how the tests go.

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That you are actually in the process of testing stuff sounds great. I was until now under the impression that wether something has to be done or not was still in discussion.

@Duh_TaleWorlds: Thanks for answering!

Duh_TaleWorlds said:

As long as development continues there will be discussion on how the various systems of the game can and should work, yes.

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I don't expect you to answer this. By all likelyhood for one reason or the other you couldn't anyways. But this is probably the most confusing answer you could have given me.
I guess the question which everybody has on his mind and pretty much everybody has asked before is: how does the decision making process in your company work? To me it defies all logic. I thought somebody, Armagan or anybody else, had the pants on and a very specific vision of where the game needs to go which shall not be interupted. That pretty much made sense looking backwards. But now you tell me basically everything (at least balance wise) is still up for discussion.

@Antoine de Saint-Exupéry : Thanks for sharing the essay like post. I took my time to read it and it was certainly interesting. I'm certainly no expert in Tolkien and the post held plenty of new stuff for me. Though reading it I think whats going on is that we are talking past each other.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said:

the simple fact of the matter is that you are wrong. you are wrong about tolkien's inspirations, you are wrong about the meaning behind them, you are wrong about the "pagan european tradition of folk tales" and its relation to tolkien's writing, you are wrong about the depiction of diversity in tolkien's own writing, you are wrong about the depictioin of diversity in adaptations of tolkien.

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You are reading way to much into my post. It is like you are hearing some non existant far-right dog whistle.
I very much agree with your statements in your conclusion:

"But the problem with going hands-off, as Tolkien did within his works, is people will tell others what you “really meant”, and the people who speak the loudest on those lines tend to be the people who are most concerned with race. They'll assume your stances are theirs if they like what you have, and they'll assume your stances are their enemies’ if they don't. This is why Tolkien can explicitly badmouth Nazi race-doctrine, call Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus” and still be loved by white supremacists."

However this cuts both ways. It is not only the far-right which is obsessed with race. The progressive left is too. And just like far-right types would love to see only whites in their epic tales and other ethnicities if at all as the baddies, far-left pogressives want the opposite. This, at least as a tendency, I see in a lot of in modern media.

I'm indeed very thankful you decided to share your post. If you hadn't done that you would have left the impression with me of a bad-mouthed far-left loonie. I do believe in fact in some regard our views aren't at all that dissimilar. Here you bascially make my point:

"Now, I should (even though it pains me to feel I need it) should give the disclaimer that I'm not saying Tolkien was creating a speckled crowd of characters that you would see in a modern city. I'm also not saying he was creating an Aryan wonderland. I'm saying he did not have the preoccupation with the simple and stupid idea of Race that is the common denominator to both those lines of thought. If you let either of these lines of thought dominate your view, you're always going to get something mangled when you look at how he describes populations."

Modern media tries their hardest to stick the "speckled crowd of characters that you would see in a modern (western) city" (if not more than that) in almost everything. In medieval fantasy movies this is immersion breaking, in historical movies or worse still documentaries this is outright historical revisionism.

I won't deny that to me there is more to this than that. I think this tendency has an ideological origin which I very much despise (I talked about how the left in fact is too obsessed with race). If it wasn't for that I would be far more tolerant of such things. It is similar to how the left thinks whitewashing is the worst thing ever because they think it was done with the intention to erase other ethnicities.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said:

and i say this as someone who, much like the author of that essay, thinks the show will probably be **** anyway.

speaking of which, you are also wrong about why the show will be ****.

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You are again projecting to much onto me. Probably we have the very same concerns why we think the show will be garbage. Racial diversity will be absolutely the least of its problems. People like to get hung up on this because thats what they can primarily make out from the trailers and because of similar reasons why I get hung up on this.

Duh_TaleWorlds said:

Never say never <3

Appreciate the post. As I noted in the other thread - we are exploring options to make armor more meaningful. Because this is still not fully settled, IMO we have to be a bit careful about over-promising on the what and the when.

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How could somebody "overpromise" something so basic as balancing armor protection?
Either the balancing works or it doesn't. Granted that may be subjective but still. This sounds like you are planning an over complex system to deal with this. An over complex system isn't needed. If you give us a solution similar to how armor worked in WB that would be enough.

Or is it that there is still a discussion about what the Vision™ of armor protection is?

MadVader said:

Inclusivity is not what you think it is. It's mainstreaming of acceptance all minority disadvantaged groups. The same groups that are under constant attack by the alt right. Obviously those seeking to offend don't deserve to be included anywhere.

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Acceptance for minorities IS mainstream. So mainstream in fact that we can't escape its forced messaging in politics and media even though the general populance had this already figured out in the 90ies. Strangely enough racial tensions have only risen since then. Either it doesn't work as intended or it isn't intended to make the society more inclusive. I believe it is a bit of both.

MadVader said:

I use this same argument in reverse, when right-wingers are complaining about leftist identity politics, and then cry for the white hetero male, the real victim in their minds (which is their unacknowledged identity politics).

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So we agree then that there are loonies on both sides?
Also is it cultural conservatives who are dominant in media and politics or left progressives?

MadVader said:

I don't think victimhood was invented by the left. All kinds of old and current political narratives use it.
You need to invade Poland? Pretend they attacked you first. You need to invade the Czechs? They are abusing your minority!
I also don't think a sense of entitlement was invented by leftist and feminists. Whites felt entitled to privileged white-only spaces for a long time. Some still do.

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Thats correct. But nazi germany didn't sit there and whine to the league of nations to give them back Danzig and the Sudetenland. Nazi germany stood up and took it through violance. The victim narrative was there to pretend their violance and injustice was in fact just, whereas the victim narrative of incels and the progressive left is used to either cause enough pitty to get what they want or to bully those with power into submission through making them look as unmoral monsters. That was the point I was making.

MadVader said:

The female quotas are not reparations, they are there to break barriers and glass ceilings until they are no longer needed, because more women get into decision-making positions and more women decide to follow there.

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Reparation was the wrong term then. However it sure feels to me like it is that.
I study mechanical engineering. The subject is roughly 90 to 95% male dominated. On every leaflet I read from my university about my subject there are at least two women pictured. There are multiple programs to get more women to participate in engineering. For example when I went to school there was this project called "girls day". Girls would have a day off of school and would get the chance to go and visit places where you could study or make an apprenticeship in technical fields in order to show them what options they have while us boys stayed in school and didn't get that chance. These projects have been going on since 20 years now. Yet nothing has changed. Is this all due to men holding women back?

In terms of female fellow stundents I asked a few how they feel about things. One of them has faced one lecturer who truely was sexist by definition. Apart from that all had comparatively positive experiences and even said that lecturers would treat them favourably and so did other male students since everybody was happy to have at least some women around in an environment that could quickly get quite monotonous as everybody and his mother is male.

MadVader said:

The fact that they think of women as second-rate humans, makes them far-right mysogynists, and this has nothing to do with the attitudes on the far left, which are all about inclusivity.

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And the fact that a lot of feminist progressives think of men as second-rate humans, makes them far-left misandrists.

The left is about inclusivity? That must be a joke. The left is about shutting down discussion, forbidding words, seeing people as collective entities rather than individuals and weaving all of these collectivized people into a new victim-hirarchy.

In these specific points you mentioned: the progressive left and the identitarian right are the mirror image of each other. The major differences are the groups they support and that the left is the one wich is culturally and politically dominant.

Sundeki is right too when he sais that these incels use tools for their argumentation the left specifically uses. The victim narrative is their bread and butter, they don't want to change themselves and compete, they want to have everything distributet and handed to them. Just how feminists see no problem in female quotas in management and government positions and always argue from the position of being oppressed by some patriarchy which grants them the right to reparation.

Adorno said:

I think there's a difference between objecting to casting choices based om aesthetics, lore and narratives and then being racist.
They don't necessarily go together.

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Exactly. It is not like people opposing forced diversity in media "don't like them black people" ; the forced part is the issue.
I'd love to see a historical movie set in any other place in the world other than europe and then I would oppose forced diversity hires in that all the same.

Also there are always exceptions to the rule. In theatre this also is less of an issue. Unlike movies people expect inaccuracies especially in the visual department. There a young woman may play the role as an old man. This is also possible because the characters are acted out more and less portrayed through their visuals.

Sometimes an actor may not have the background to back the role up but yet is a very good fit both in terms of looks and acting. Strangely enough when it is the very specific case of a white actor portraying a non white person the opposite side of the political spectrum has a problem and calls it "cultural appropriation".

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said:

buddy. my guy. "the pagan european tradition". c'mon now.

even beyond this you are so wrong it's not even entertaning to correct you. ****ing hell.

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Life_Erikson said:

Tolkien wanted to continue the pagan european tradition of folktales when he wrote LOTR.

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I never claimed Tolkien was pagan.
"Its not even entertaining to correct you." is also a very interesting way of saying "I don't have any arguments."

Goyyyio said:

I won't read your whole post because it's the usual "it's inspired by" bla bla bla "they must be white" discourse. Tolkien said he was inspired by it, not entirely based on those myths, in fact I recall a Tolkien interview saying his inspirations were completely loose and he ended up creating whatever he want upon those stories. Now, it's a TV show wrong for doing the same thing the creator done, 100 years later? You guys get really fed up.

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Of course Lord of the Rings is "only" inspired by myths. I never claimed it was a retelling of anything. That doesn't mean though that suddenly racially diversity makes sense in that world or was ever part of his vision when he wrote the books.

If you don't mind racial diversity in media where it doesn't fit thats fine by me I am not going to change your mind and I don't want to. Good for you if you are able to enjoy media with forced diversity. And I actually mean that.
However the topic of the thread is not wether we like it or not but wether it is racist to dislike it or not.
I dislike it out of the reasons I mentioned. Do you think i'm racist?

Goyyyio said:

Historical representation? Watch every movie you have seen til today, and tell me they're 100% completely real historical representations. Take every medieval movie with people shooting fire arrows, completely ridiculous. People fighting with swords and no helmets to see the pretty dude riding, super strong plot armours, a gazillion historical inaccuracies, but hey, I draw the line at having a single black dude here man, that is so wrong and the other things aren't... Not because I'm racist, definetly not! Hell dude the LOTR movies were cancelled by Tolkien's descendants because how come Legolas is shooting arrows while sliding in a shield????1? Here's why: it's fun, and because Peter Jackson can do whatever the hell he wants in HIS own adaptation of the book. . Based on your discourse, we should all go cancel Tarzan because he's a white dude lost in the African woods while it was more likely it was a black person, the thing here is, who the f cares, it's a fantasy, you don't like it? Go watch something else. I don't think it's that hard, getting entirely angry on people doing their own thing -because they can - it's dumb, and many "woke" people make the same dumb complaints when a white person plays in an idk, an Asian movie or whatever. Anyone can play anything, I geniunly don't give a crap, the only thing that matters to me is: Is it good?

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Thats a strawman and you know it. I'm equally bothered by other historical inaccuracies as any other person interested in history. However there are some inaccuracies more problematic than others.

Take Braveheart for exemple:
-The scots wearing kilts even though it is the beginning of the 14th century -> small problem
-William Wallace being presented as if he was a commoner and not a knight -> medium problem
-The film making out a lovestory between him and a french princess which actually was 11 years old at the time -> big problem
-The film claiming William Wallace besieged York even though the scots never came that far south -> major problem
-The film inventing the PRIMA NOCTE myth -> *pull your f*cking hair out* problem

I love the movie, it is enjoyable to watch, but what it is doing is a BIG problem, because people actually believe the bulls*it it portrays. People believing scots wore kilts during the middle ages is the least of that problems though. Them believing such a thing as PRIMA NOCTE even existed is dangerously misinformative though and explaining to them that this is made up is surprisingly difficult as people rather believe some Hollywood movie than some history nerd.

When a historical movie (or other type of media) portrays past cultures as multiethnical or multiracial when in fact they weren't this is not something people just pass aside as something that was done for diversities sake in the movie, they actually believe that was the case historically. Thats a problem. And at that a problem not in the magnitude of a swords scabbard being worn on the back.

Goyyyio said:

Im just going to say based and call it a day. Anyone who's truly bothered and cares too much to scream on the internet because black elves has obviously some issues with race, and I agree sometimes diversity makes no sense in some contexts, but definetly LOTR is not the case, same thing in The Witcher series where I didn't even had read the books but really how could having black elves ruin my experience, seeing people angry at it just doesn't makes a lot of sense.

Now in this case in particular, it's just what I call a "bruh moment" because there is a black man and only a white woman as protag in a DLC and therefore it's too woke, it's definetly an exaggeration, and I don't know if Mad is the kind of person that's going to harrass black people - he is worried about coming out as a racist in the end - but it's definitely overthinking, and it's that little incel in every alt right's mind saying "hey you should worry about this little thing and make a value judgement over it". Don't end up like archaic warrior, white people are still the bigger presence in literally everything western media produces, trying to reach more cultures and people isn't something wrong, is just globalization man, we are all human beings living in the same world, you're going to have to face and get used to seeing different looking people than what you're normally used to, believe me, unlike what deranged internet people say, nothing bad is going to happen

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LOTR is specifically inspired by pagan tales like beowulf. Its cultures and languages are based off germanic and celtic culture of the iron age.
Tolkien wanted to continue the pagan european tradition of folktales when he wrote LOTR.
For Witcher the situation is similar albeit not the same. The books take inspiration from slavic mythology and european fairytales. The world that he created is one inspired by medieval europe in which due to technological constraints and cultural reasons multiculturalism as we know it today didn't exist. It also isn't described as such in the books. Hell, the people in that world are xenophobic enough to hate their direct neighbors even though they are of the same ethnicity, culture and language just because they have a different king.
In both cases putting in different ethnicities in a "multicultural" sense doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't fit to the scenario and it is breaking immersion.

What I ask myself is; why can't they create something unique on their own? They could have complete creative freedom. They could create a fantastical world where they would have the multiculturalism they want to portray so much. They could even have lore to explain it as to create an immersive experience! They can't. I know they can't because what they create is sub-par even when they piggy-back off a popular franchise. The witcher series valued in isolation (ignoring the books) is mediocre. Having read the books I seriously don't know how they could have screwed this up so badly. I have the suspicion the amazon series will be worse. Star Wars they already killed (and racial diversity had none to do with it).

Which brings me to my last point: Why do they do this?
You say they do it to reach a broader audience and make it more inclusive. Fair enough.
But even then. You say that I'm racist for wanting white people in my lord of the rings. Why are black people not racist when they want black people in theirs?
Even worse, they also do it to historical movies or historical fiction. Why would you do that?
Fantasy, fine. Do what you want, at worst the immersion will suffer a bit. But historical movies? Isn't that misrepresenting history?
It is. They are portraying histroy as if multiculturalism always existed. Its ideological propaganda thats what it is. I'm not saying everybody does it with the intend of producing propaganda. At this point its a trend and it has cultural momentum, but there are people who do.

You say it is just part of globalization.
I say damn right its and I don't like any of it.

In the meantime excuse myself I have to do incel things.