Another review from one of those 5k+ hours warband players

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I'm gonna post my verdict first. It's still M&B but if you liked it in a more competitive kind of way only barely so.

The one huge change for the better compared to warband for me is ranged. I've seen people complain how oh-so-overpowered to warband it is because of how much more accurate and how much more damage (don't quote me on that) they now do. This for all I know can be true but I honestly do not really care about how much damage ranged players do. I care about their inability to endlessly kite and run away. Few things were as frustrating in warband as finally getting into the melee range of an archer and then to just watch him make a run for it and basically reset the whole getting-into-melee-range process with you now having to dodge his projectiles again.
So that's a genuine improvement with no real caveats.

Now onto melee.
I've read numerous posts so far of people complaining how chambers have effectively been removed from the game thus lowering the overall skill-cap. While it's true that they've been made, let's just call it "inaccessible", this is kind of a non-issue. Unless you deeply cared about dueling in warband, where chambering a stab from face-range was literally unblockable, chambers were almost an obscure mechanic mainly used to show off. Think of all the melee hits ever dished out in warband and then think how many of those had to do with chambers one way or another. I feel like a single percentage point would be generous.

Jumping on the same bandwagon of skill-cap removal, what I do find a little concering is how feints are just kind of not there anymore either. I think everyone knew that this was coming in some capacity because of how feinting had degenerated into comical levels of spasms but the remedy has been kind of over the top. The purpose that feints served was to make your opponend block in the wrong direction and that's pretty much not possible anymore. Feints are just highly unconvincing because hits are telegraphed from miles away. It simply is too slow. This used to be a defining mechanic and it's by and large gone.
Now, we could sit here all day arguing back and forth about which one did it better from every conceivable angle so here's a simple proposal: Simply make it an option like a slider when people set up servers instead of having this one-size-fits-all approach to it.
I'd reckon that people would naturally gravitate towards the servers with a more warband-like feinting experience.

And the whole thing really goes for the entirety of melee combat really. "Sluggish" is the word I've most often seen picked-up when seeing people talk about it and while personally I can tolerate it, I can understand those who cannot. So same proposal here. Channel all the different parameters that go into the "sluggish" feeling into a slider-option that server owners can set according to their liking.

Shields are kind of a mixed bag. Personally, I always thought that shields should be more durable and I don't even have a problem with the damage that it now takes to destroy sombody's shield but the shield coverage (aka force field) itself is just too large. I've managed to sneak up on people from behind numerous tims but ultimately to no avail because even when swinging in a seemingly perfect 90 degree angle from behind at them, their shield would, in a manner which can only be descirbed as magical, still block it. Simply undo that. That's too much leeway given to shielders, especially in conjunction with the increase in durability.
Why did I say mixed bag before? Because projectiles now seem to hit through shields in a consistent manner. What used to be a curiosity in warband is now a staple and I don't see any reason why it should be. Do you?
Another, albeit minor, thing about shields that bugs me is how there is no visual difference between a shield that's taken 0 damage and a shield that's one hit away from being broken. First because it's one of those attention-to-detail things that just adds to the overall picture. Second, from a gameplay perspective, because it was a useful signal. When going up against a group of shielders, not knowing whom to attack first, focusing on the guy whose shield already had visible cracks in it was pretty much your best decision in that scenario.

I don't know if just no one has figured out how to use shield bashes in a successul manner but I do want them to be a reliable tool in combat. Same for kicking which seems to have been given the same feinting-treatment for reasons I cannot imagine.

The troop system:
Personally, I dislike it but it's bearable and maybe even understandable why they did away with the old system in its favor. However, even the limited customization that warband allowed made for more individuality and thus a better experience. Now it just feels like you're fighting clones even more. At least let us make some visual changes to our gear.
Also one of the inconveniences I find myself having with it is spawning with the default gear-loadout for a unit instead of a specific one because it resets with every server rejoin. What easier than setting your own preferences for default gear in the troop option menu and then being able to save them?
Another one is that the game regularly wants you and makes you spawn with more weapons than you would want. Ever want, for some. My favorite one here is the voulgier that can spawn with a)a voulge b)a one-handed sword c)a spear. Finding yourself in a situation where you would want, let alone have the possibility, to change your weapon is extremely rare, let alone potentially switching to a third weapon, let alone switching from a two-handed weapon to a one-handed one without the shield.
Which brings me to another point. Picking up weapons is too unintuitive. This is one of the things that should be 100% fun over realism. Having to stand over and kneel down to pick up something and having to watch the whole animation is no fun, especially if you are getting attacked. This should be all warband. You walk over it, you press F and now you draw it almost instantaneously.

Maybe I'll add some more things to this list later but as of now, that's all I could come up with.
 
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I've read numerous posts so far of people complaining how chambers have effectively been removed from the game thus lowering the overall skill-cap. While it's true that they've been made, let's just call it "inaccessible", this is kind of a non-issue. Unless you deeply cared about dueling in warband, where chambering a stab from face-range was literally unblockable, chambers were almost an obscure mechanic mainly used to show off.

Thank you. You hit the nail on the head. Whenever I see someone complaining in the in-game chat about the lack of chambering, I honestly question the sincerity of their grievance. Chambers were a thing on duel servers, and not much anywhere else. Even then, getting a successful chamber was predicated so much on distance, angle, timing, and ping, that the risk often outweighed the reward. Most of the highest level duels were decided by distance and timing anyway, not fancy chambers or eurofeints. In scrims, the general school of thought was to not go for a chamber, because once again the risk/reward ratio wasn't ideal, it was better to just stay alive and help your teammates.
 
Thank you. You hit the nail on the head. Whenever I see someone complaining in the in-game chat about the lack of chambering, I honestly question the sincerity of their grievance. Chambers were a thing on duel servers, and not much anywhere else. Even then, getting a successful chamber was predicated so much on distance, angle, timing, and ping, that the risk often outweighed the reward. Most of the highest level duels were decided by distance and timing anyway, not fancy chambers or eurofeints. In scrims, the general school of thought was to not go for a chamber, because once again the risk/reward ratio wasn't ideal, it was better to just stay alive and help your teammates.

Chambers were not just a thing on duel servers, they were regularly used in battle by good players too. It's a medium risk medium reward move that is really fun to use. I miss it loads.
 
Chambers were not just a thing on duel servers, they were regularly used in battle by good players too. It's a medium risk medium reward move that is really fun to use. I miss it loads.

Yeah to completely dismiss the use of chambering any where other than duel is silly. It was used regularly in battle and in scrims/matches.
 
I constantly used chambers because I loved how it felt and got really good at it. Not just in duels but in all game modes including competitive because it threw people off. You're making false assumptions about it's prevalence in warband.
 
Chambers were not that common but they were still excellent at breaking the pace of a drawn out hit / block / hit / block duel / small fight between good players. I really dislike how they made chambering waaay harder and at the same time didn't give us the proper tools to learn how to do it now.
 
chambers were absolutely not only used in duels, good for 1v1 in battle as surprise. very good for clutches, outplays and 2v1s
Yeah to completely dismiss the use of chambering any where other than duel is silly. It was used regularly in battle and in scrims/matches.
Chambers were not just a thing on duel servers, they were regularly used in battle by good players too. It's a medium risk medium reward move that is really fun to use. I miss it loads.

Nostalgia glasses. You're acting as if everyone was constantly trying to chamber and like it is this one huge difference between bannerlord and warband when really it was this fairly niche mechanic with little payoff in terms of actual results.
 
Nostalgia glasses. You're acting as if everyone was constantly trying to chamber and like it this one huge difference between bannerlord and warband when really it was this fairly niche mechanic with little payoff in terms of actual results.
Wouldn't say everyone was constantly trying to chamber but chambers were a useful mechanic that raised the skill ceiling. But you made it sound like chambers were barely ever seen beside in duel and that is simply not true.
 
The point is that chambering was a significant enough to mention part of a good player's arsenal in any given melee encounter, and at least personally speaking I used it whenever I could get away with it, sometimes even trying to trick my opponent into chambering my chamber, delaying it a little and hitting them instead. It's a silly little detail to get stuck in, you're wrong about it, so it's probably better to move on so that the better parts of your post get the attention they deserve.
 
chambering was not a huge part of Warband's combat, particularly between good players. In all of the ft7s I did at Bucharest (5 in total) I chambered once - one chamber in 50+ duels. Fundamentally the risk was not really worth it, but I agree it had some niche use in battle to catch people out since nobody expected anyone to do it. In more casual play they were fun to do, so I definitely miss them as others do. The risk-reward is simply terrible on chambers in Bannerlord, nobody can pull them off reliably DURING combat, even if people can do them in a sterile scenario. Personally, I think they should have made chambering even easier in Bannerlord to give it more of a place, like it has in Mordhau, as a way of enhancing the complexity of play and increasing the frequency of their use in combat. That, or making them a bit more rewarding and harder to block than they are, but I'm not a fan of making basic chambers nearly unblockable. There were certain angled chambers you could do in Warband that were close to unblockable, some even requiring pre-blocking to get past Warband's block delay, but a route for Bannerlord that saw basic chambers becoming easier and complicated chambers becoming more rewarding would have been great for the combat in my opinion. Unfortunately, we've gone in the opposite direction and chambers are not only incredibly hard to pull off in actual combat, but are also very easy for the opponent to block :/

also, I agree with the majority of what you are saying in your post. I think that archers should be less accurate at long distances, as they are incredibly accurate when shooting at very far away targets at the moment. I think their headshot damage should be increased and their damage to unarmoured opponents lowered slightly to try and give those classes a chance of being viable. Primarily, though, increasing the forcefield on infantry's shields would be the biggest nerf to archers as it would stop them from so easily targeting legs, feet, hands and other exposed body parts.
 
Chambering was a fun mechanic to have, no negatives to adding it back in, if people want it they can use it, if not whatever. Stop sounding like a snob and being above chambers just because you didn't do them often. They were used in all modes, battle, siege duels etc. It's not one percentage of the population you're affecting. To the guy talking about pro play - who cares, this game isn't about pro play it's about the majority so it doesn't matter if it was hardly used in "pro play".
 
Chambers existed only on an advanced level to begin with. The average player could not even do them. You still had people in 2019 asking what just happened if you chambered them.
 
Chambering was a fun mechanic to have, no negatives to adding it back in, if people want it they can use it, if not whatever. Stop sounding like a snob and being above chambers just because you didn't do them often. They were used in all modes, battle, siege duels etc. It's not one percentage of the population you're affecting. To the guy talking about pro play - who cares, this game isn't about pro play it's about the majority so it doesn't matter if it was hardly used in "pro play".

don't see anyone acting "above" chambers, most comments seem to agree that they should be doable and should be made MORE viable than they were in Warband, rather than less-so as Bannerlord has made them.
 
bannerlord chambering is terrible because all the devs are bots and dont know how to melee well enough to recreate it let alone why its important
 
US NW players chambered alot it was on of the few ways you can turn a 1v2 around was chambering the first attack, if it was a down attack and then stabbing the other dude, because you chambered the first dude, the main thing chambering did though was stop spammers.

I could chamber on native a little bit just I never really played native, that much since I was a NW nerd.
 
Aye, chambering being uncommon is totally untrue. See it all over the place in warband. Yes, some people don't know how to do them. As far as I know it's not a mechanic shown in the tutorial, so obviously people find out about it from other people. Sometimes you learn about something late. I myself only found out that you can chamber couches lances with a shield equipped (to which I called bull**** on when I was first told. Didn't believe it.) Just over a year ago, but been chambering as long as I can remember.

They're very useful in 2v1's (and 1v1 obviously), and against cavalry lances (though generally more of a "**** you" since the stab back usually comes off too slow and the rider has run off).
So far I've done one in bannerlord, total. Accidentally. And my muscle memory keeps making me try them and I keep getting hit because they can't seem to bloody happen.
Oh and I hope when/if they do fix them, held chambers are still possible. I don't know if they currently are, because I can't bloody do it in blord.

Seriously what is it with people wanting to take out mechanics?? How.. I just don't get how anyone can be in support of that.
Yes, maybe blord isn't meant to be warband 2.0 - but a sequel to a game you love and have played for a decade or more shouldn't make you want to feel like stopping to go play the old one when you do.
You don't open up halo 3 on Xbox and talk about all the **** from halo 2 they took out and how much you miss it.
But you do when you go from m2tw to s2tw because **** is missing.
And at the moment you do when you play bannerlord. And that's a damn shame, because I know we all want to love this game as much as we got to love warband.
 
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