I played my first version of Mount&Blade (0.623) in May 2005, and was hooked. I was one of the initial crowd that spent huge amounts of time both playing the game, and coming up with suggestions and arguing over other's suggestions in the forums.
Mount&blade was a very different game back then. The basic core of the game - foot and mounted group combat - has always been solid, but there existed little else besides that. Endgame play consisted of fighting 100+ party size Vaegir or Swadian war parties, which took a while because the game would only allow 28 troops at a time on the battlefield. Each town was just a menu, and every NPC inhabited the same drab brick hall. Lords were just quest dispensers and would never leave their halls. There were no external town scenes, no castles, no sieges, no becoming lord or king.
With so much potential and so little content beyond fighting, the early M&B community whipped themselves up in a bit of a frenzy imagining all the things that could be done with the game. It was quite intense at times (I once mentioned here I had a dream about an upcoming patch, and
I kid you not, someone asked me for a detailed description of what the dream contained, such was the desperation for new information). Endless debates raged over how sieges could possibly be implemented (or managing a town or kingdom, for that matter). The early crop of mods explored many of these ideas, mods like Battle for Sicily and the Lombard Leagues, the latter of which I was quite heavily involved with.
After so much time imagining this stuff, it's fair to say that everyone had their own headcanon about 'what it would be like' when the game was in its finished state.
So when playing Bannerlord for the first time, I've deliberately approached it from the perspective of me 15 years ago. It's been interesting to see which parts of my headcanon match the final product.
So what is my overall impression? Pretty good, not great.
First of all, the game is gorgeous. It may not be as refined as a triple-A game laboured upon by a team of 200 artists, but it's very pretty all the same. The key for me is
verisimilitude, the feeling you're inhabiting a real world with real people walking about. The first time I visited Car Banseth during the winter I walked around with my mouth agape for like, 30 minutes. And the
scale. When we first got explorable towns (in 0.730 IIRC), they generally consisted of a gatehouse, half a dozen houses and a keep. These new scenes are massive! They also look really cool. Scenes feel wonderfully populated now with animated characters as opposed to the creepy standing staring mannequins in the original M&B taverns.
It's pleasing to see that many of the things I suggested long ago have found their way into the game.
This thread from 6 years ago contains a few. I'm glad to see there's no hard limits on the number of troops you can lead, and that inventory space depends on the number of mules you have, not on some weird "inventory management" skill.
The skill system, while hard to get your head around initially and by no means perfect, is
light years ahead of what we had previously. I think .632 was the last time I played completely without cheats in M&B. I'd always edit my character stats to have max leadership, prisoner management, inventory management etc because the game was too tedious otherwise. Because the only decent source of xp was from killing enemies, you had to be a badass to level up in a reasonable time, and to be a badass you had to invest precious levels into your increasingly-irrelevant personal combat strength. Now you can continue to improve just by doing stuff. And it's never too late to learn something new.
The area I've been most disappointed in so far is to do with the game ecology and fief management. Yes we have a real economy and actions have consequences and there's politics, but it's all been implemented in the least interesting way. There's something about the impersonal menu-driven nature of it all, combined with the constant defections, declarations of war, village burnings, complete army annihilations and subsequent rapid respawnings and so forth - all driven by menu buttons rather than actual dialogue - that just makes me not care about any of it. I understand that back in the old days the dialogue-heavy aspects of both the original game and mods were simply a limitation of what could be done with the engine, but nevertheless I really miss the presence of actual conversation. It's a shame that the city and village scenes are all so beautifully crafted, yet there is little reason to see any of that when visiting a town.
I have a fief that I don't visit. It has a prosperity of 3000 and I don't know if that's good or bad. It seems to run itself just fine. I have no idea what it is that prosperity, loyalty or security actually do - the game doesn't communicate it, and I never seem to be put into any position where I have to worry about it. When the game has underlying complexity that the player is supposed to pay attention to, it needs to somehow be communicated to the player.
I understand that not many of my criticisms are new - I see a lot of posts complaining of the constant total war, for instance. I am confident that a lot of the problems with the economy and balancing and so forth will be sorted out in one way or another through various patches and mods. From what I've seen so far, Bannerlord looks to be a platform for a really good game, it's just about uncovering the really good game inside.
