Hello everybody,
First, I want to say that I love M&B, I played the older versions and spent a lot of time on warband and waited for Bannerlord for years. I'm still exploring Bannerlord, as you know, there is a lot of content. But here are my first impressions: Please allow me to be somehow negative, I'm not here to list the good stuff, I bought the game because I loved the good stuff.
I'm here to talk about the room for upgrade. So, let's not forget that we are all on the same team and let's talk together in good spirit.
The big and huge thing missing in Bannerlord, would be coop multiplayer. I know it wasn't there in the older version. But eh, why it wasn't there in warband? I'm just surprised why I can connect to multiplayer and fight other players, showing that there is already a multiplayer system. But I can't invite my friends to join a battle and help me out in a siege. Many games, like the Total War franchise got the hot seat option that allows you to jump in the campaign of a random player or a friend to take control of the bots in his campaign, or an ally army and help them or fight them in their single player campaign. But in Bannerlord, no such thing. Why?
That's a HUGE potential for fun that is lost. I have friends playing Bannerlord, and I can't play with them. We do mostly coop and we are not used to playing against each others. Maybe other players we don't know, but never against each others. It's too bad, really.
The second part is that the game is "closed". I mean, the beginning of the game is fun. You are low level, you are happy to recruit troops, to see them level up, find companions, get some money, buy some stuff, make more money, build a clan, own a village, upgrade etc... But at some point the game goes "meh". And the fun ends. Right now, I have a huge amount of mules or whatever to carry all the stuff I want. I travel the world, make money, trade, attack, the missions aren't fun to do, I send a companion and troops to do it mostly. Some missions require weird skills I don't find in my companions, so I can't do them. So I pass... And... I'm bored. I'm bored. I have money, troops, companions. And I'm bored.
Can't we make the things really exciting? Like allow the player more freedom. Give the ability to build cities. New cities. Put troops with food and money in a camp to train while you are roaming the map, giving you elite troops after a few months. Then you can send these elite troops to conquer the world. Give the money some real power in the game. Because right now, money is useful, but not all powerful.
Imagine a wargame where you get rich and powerful and then... Nothing to do. Money is a mean to an end. Once you have a strong economy, you build a strong army and conquer the world.
Bannerlord got the technology to allow us to make a real wargame. Give the player the feeling of being a Gengis Khan or something of the kind. With a huge complex world to conquer in many different ways. Diplomacy, economy, war, culture, intrigue etc...
And about the modding community, the player can only be lost in a sea of mods. And most modding teams have like a few coders to add new mechanics and an unlimited supply of artists and texture makers. In Warband I remember having huge mods with tons of horses, armors, colors, arts etc... But the only interesting thing in the whole mode was a salt mine to put your prisonners to work to make some money. And the salt mine was poorly coded. Selling slaves was still a better option most of the time.
In a game open to modding, we need quality filters. Maybe the original DEVs should pick the successful mods and add them to the game. Because you can't expect from a player to have the time and resources to try all these mods and find the right ones. Most will download the most downloaded mod and miss the good stuff.
