Frankly I consider Bannerlord to be early access garbage with either an expressly manipulative dev cycle as is now the norm to dupe people into buying No Man's Feudalism (but without the support cycle yet that made NMS make a comeback), or internal communication is so horrendously incompetent that the current mess is an unintentional and unfortunate conclusion. Either way the game is completely vapid and devoid of even the minor depth of Warband when it comes to non combat features, and the combat of Bannerlord itself is atrocious unless you play like a blinkered moron and thus never realize how fast the jenga tower falls apart if you lightly poke it.
Everything outside of combat basically doesn't exist, there really is not even gameplay to be had for a character if you don't endlessly play battles, but the issue falls that the battles themselves play like utter garbage that blend together in same-ness so regardless of what I do, regardless of what mods I use, every single battle turns into the exact same affair of utterly decisive victories with no risk unless I'm hideously outnumbered. Because yet again we have another medieval game where the AI has the general intelligence of a catatonic stroke victim and cannot cope or defeat a foe that enters a basic infantry square, and troop quality has been largely thrown out to die with the removal of the old stat system so elite troops can be pretty easily mulched by infantry or cavalry in a good spot.
My disappointment is immeasurable because I foolishly thought that despite being early access, this game would be enjoyable, that at the least it would have modding potential, and that it would be a worthy successor to Warband. Instead what I ended up buying was nothing short of an infuriating, miserable mistake of a purchase that served as yet another lesson of why anything labelled early access is probably going to turn out to be hot garbage.
And I have no intention to mince words in this because I actually cared about this game being good, but from the perspective of a medievalist and enjoyment found in Warband, Bannerlord's 'development' cycle has been nothing more than watching a trainwreck where you watch your childhood stuffed toy get ripped asunder. Because not
only is combat in this game atrocious compared to Warband, but the move to more complex coding and removal of such things as MCM .ini files for modules means you have zero hope of trying to tweak things on your own end to achieve a realistic feeling end where armor isn't ****ing paper or even behaves in a realistic manner. And it's not like mods fix this either, as either it's a hardcoded part of the game where armor doesn't soak damage like it used to, or mods like Realistic Battle just have zero actual intention of being a realistic battle mod, leaving you on your own without the means to engage in high skill coding to
try to tweak the game to a point where you find it actually respectable. It is safe to say that I will never recommend Bannerlord to anyone unless there's some radical shifts in development or modding down the line, because all I see now is 448 hours I wasted trying to have fun.
Also on the topic of modding, I may have tried to take a crack at banging my head against a wall to learn c to make some basic attempt to mod literally anything, even just changing the values of armor in bannerlord, but the documentation from talesworld
did not pay to update the domain!
Regarding the nature of battles when talking about sameness as well, where all the rest of the game has nothing in the way of meaningful development, combat thus becomes the sole focus of the game. But in every battle I play it's the same song and dance every time. Terrain in Bannerlord means little to nothing like it did in Warband for one, altitude seriously improves the performance of ranged units but it doesn't mean much in bannerlord because ranged is
already hideously deadly in vanilla. Forests likewise don't hurt cav as much as they do in warband, I don't see cavalry impacting trees much and getting stopped, thus they don't offer nearly as much protection against cavalry charges, and nor does water either. In warband water slows any unit to a crawl, thus anchoring infantry on the riverbank is hyper-effective when facing overwhelming amounts of horsemen. Warband also in some regions will toss obscene amounts of hills at you, such as in Rhodok territory, which throws another wrench in the idea that one tactic solves all problems.
But this
isn't the case with Bannerlord, where one playstyle resolves all problems and situations. Every battle I fight for the course of a hundred hours is the exact same song and dance, over and over again, with the same results unless the enemy completely outnumbers me. Said tactic? Stick infantry into square/shieldwall, aggro AI into a suicide charge, then loop around and lead a cavalry lance to utterly smash the bots, and to only use units with the 'follow me' command so they stick together, because the AI has its units fly apart at the seams when it charges so you have individual horsemen zipping across the battlefield erratically. Meanwhile you, the player, are
not an idiot, so you just personally lead your cavalry to delete the enemy with 60+ heavy cav smashing clean into their flanks with maximum concentration of mass to bowl them over. Then you do this again. And again. And again. And again. For hundreds of hours because it's really the only part of the 'game' that has gameplay, and it all turns into a monotonous chore that never changes, never sees unexpected curveballs, and always wins, forever. You can't have combat be the sole focus of a game and then have personal combat which is trash because of ridiculously bad armor/lack of realistic armor soaking, and bad field tactics because the AI is hideously stupid and environmental factors do little to screw up your battle plan.
He was specifically talking about the thumbs down, which is fair. If the game is really bad and deserves a thumbs down, why is that person still playing or played a lot of it?
The thing about a game/movie/whatever is that you will get sick of it if you play it too much. Play any game for a thousand hours in a relatively daily manner. You will get sick of it, no matter how good the game actually is. Then it becomes "This guy hates the game only because he's played way too much."
Also this isn't true. I have played Warband for 3,262 hours and I am far from sick of it, with mods like Warsword Conquest it continues to shine where so many modern videogames are nothing more than exploitative garbage. I have played Warframe, Skyrim, Vermintide 2, Battlefront 2, and Dawn of War 2 for hundreds of hours each as well. None of them I would say are at all bad, and most I thoroughly enjoy. I could and one day likely will, end up spending literal thousands of hours on most of their number
because they are good and close enough to perfection that I hardly develop a hatred of them.
The issue rather is that if you play for something long enough you will learn every flaw, every exploit, and every defect no different than if you spend hundreds to thousands of hours with a singular person. If that person is actually good you
don't get sick of them, the problem is rather if the product in the same line,
isn't good at all. And Bannerlord is frankly atrocious in its current state and its entire state since it was put up on the steam store, as hundreds of hours gave me in depth look to all of its problems. It's the same issue I have with total war, the game series is actually made like hot garbage if you play long enough to
learn the game rather than merely playing an immersive experience for 100 hours and then forget about it for the rest of your life. There is a serious difference between testing the temperature of a pool with your toes and leaping in for a swim.