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

[Gibby Jr]

when i said not viable i didn't mean uncommon, i meant not particularly effective at killing other good players. it was good for cleaning up weaker players, i agree. Bannerlord chambers are incredibly hard to do, and I think they should have gone in the opposite direction - making them even easier than they were in Warband would have made them common-place in every engagement and easier for new players to grasp.

 

[xombie5]

Well... I suppose viability depends on what you intend a chamber to do. Depending on definition of viability even swinging your sword normally isn't viable against a good player.
We both know you don't expect most of your attacks to land in a fight, but we throw them out anyway slowly peeling open and judging the other until an opening is found or made. Sometimes that comes from a chamber, a wiggle, a feint...
Having that chamber in your arsenal, even unused, has an effective on a fight. The same way you don't stand in front of someone of Criss cross their front for fear of getting kicked. You don't throw out lazy stabs because they are easier to chamber.
Sometimes you chamber the guy stabbing at you from the right to throw into the guy on your left unexpectedly. Sometimes you do it just to let him know you can do it so it's an extra thing they have to think about.
Sometimes it's just to break their rythm. Sometimes it's to chamber their feints to get a cheeky hit in, or to make them stop doing it so much.

Obviously I do disagree and think they were actually still are "viable" as long as you consider them just another tool and not something you necessarily expect to guarantee a hit.

As for making them easier... Honestly I'm not sure I agree. They aren't particularly difficult in warband. The difficulty came from all the different weapon speeds and animation ****ery. If your opponent is harder to read obviously it's harder to chamber that attack, so the difficulty still scaled.

On the other hand I feel like even if the window to do them was made wider in bannerlord - I think they'd still be harder since I'm finding movement and animation in general to feel quite.. rubber-bandy, and everyone feels like they're swinging giant pendulums about. Generally a bad feeling of connection between your avatar and your mind, and audio-visual feedback.

My opinion, anyway. Apologies if I came off as snarky. Not intending to.

 

[Danny D]

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.

Great post, agree with you on a lot of your points, specifically about ranged. I love Taleworlds but you used the word “tolerate” quite a bit in your post. The combat should be fun not tolerable. I believe that it will eventually become great with more development though.

Now chambering, I know this is an MP thread but I have a couple of points I have about chambering that have to do with SP and MP. I chamber a lot in SP Warband because its easy , fun, and effective on bots. In Bannerlord I think I’ve successfully chambered a bot twice haha. In MP it was very, very useful against spears and pikes. Great way to counter them with an overhead chamber.

Also, you could chamber a couched lance in Warband which was very useful if you had no shield. Low percentage? Yes. Unrealistic? Yes. Great for rewarding a skilled player? Yes.

Dumbing down the gameplay is not good. Making it more casual is not necessarily a bad thing, but lowering the floor as well as the skill ceiling is just dumb. Which is why making the combat sluggish, less fluidity (AKA less control via unresponsive to multiple inputs), and reducing the effectiveness of alternative combat techniques ruins the enjoyment of the game.

 

[Shemaforash]

when someone tells me chambers aren't useful

 

[RemnantHaru]

when someone tells me chambers aren't useful

This video makes me miss Warband, the speed of the combat and the extra movement acceleration...moments like this can't happen in Bannerlord and it breaks my heart.

 

[guilemaster]

Chambers were cool. I agree with the people saying they should have been made even more generous than in Warband, rather than rarer. It was a cool and unique mechanic that should have been expanded on like Mordhau did.

 

[Leifr Eiríksson]

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.

Yup. I used chambers on a regular basis in every mode, and mod, that was available to Warband MP. Out of our group of 20 players or so, I'd say a third of them could chamber reliably and use it effectively, the rest were aware of it but didn't have the timings correct.

 

[metafa]

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.

I will not, and you know what? There won't have to be that "slider" there will be MODS for that. Everyone is going to be happy.

Furthermore thank you for your a LITTLE less "desparate" review, not using that fatalist language of "broken", "mess", ect and going for that somewhat more leveled language. It really has gotten bad in this forum.

 

[Caius_III]

when someone tells me chambers aren't useful

Again, a nice example of how a chamber can change a situation + look how nervous the combat is, pure control.