The combat also hasn't improved from Warband, as I'm fairly certain they cut velocity simulation with the damage calculation being a flat weapon calc + blunt damage factored in to arrive at the end state. Meanwhile warband simulates the velocity of the weapon, which is also why 'drags' in warband are often a bad idea as it cuts or eliminates the damage in your swing. Bannerlord also feels extremely sluggish in combat response, ie when I swing, get parried, and then have a lag at times before I can ready up a swing again. Or the swings themselves have a poor response to them. It all feels very poorly polished compared to warband.
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Bannerlord Full Release Date Updates
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I'm starting to suspect that Armageddon was a one-hit wonder with M&B, I mean, plenty of funding + much bigger team, if they aren't holding some secret alpha build under their sleeve, well, he managed to do worse than he did without funding and without a team. I think they gave too much focus on "Popularizing" the game through superficials like graphics, it never works well.
I find it a crying shame considering the oppertunity provided should have enabled an instant slam dunk of improvement, I suspect the engine change is what ultimately did them in (although I can certainly understand why they opted for a new engine lol, better than using the same engine for 20 years like Bethesda). The only place I would say that Bannerlord seriously improves is the city scenes, which don't even have much to do in them thus you don't even appreciate them much, and the sieges when the AI doesn't bug out. Outside of those two things though all that got shifted was a higher model count in field battles which is nice... but not exactly worth the price tag, shoddy performance, and simplified combat. Or how the switch to C+ means you must be a coder to mod at all.
eventually some miracle modder will show up and start fixing it, but that'll take years.
A generous frontHe also contributed to our cause on another front.
Well, yeah I do understand that the development never reached the expectations. And that's why I'm speaking about acceptation...
Probably TW should reconsider the selling price, so people starts to relativize...
I don't really agree with how you see the game evolved since EA starts though. They did refactor a lot of the code, I could see it with any new single patch after I released my mod (mods being broken is actually a proof that TW kept improving it...)
Saying that not that much changed since EA release is a easy shortcut tbh.
Anyway, let's see first what version TW is going to release in October (with or without banners, claimants quests, voice acting, etc...).
There's only so much a modder can fix if the engine is restricted and poorly made, though. A shame one will eventually try though. Shouldn't be on their shoulders at all....
The code may change, but that's exactly what I said, that they've fixed some things and focused on stabilizing the game. As a game, it barely evolved if at all. We still have seed RNG generation for too many things, crafting only encompasses weapons and it's not working properly (graphical glitches everywhere), they've slapped in a personality trait system with a vast variety of badges, but we only have 4 of them working, the quests to earn personality traits are almost all broken, and the numerical grind's absurd (1k for lvl 1 4k for lvl 2, when every action that earns person XP gives you 10 to 50, but negative losses range from -20 on seemingly harmless quests up to -1000) and some traits are virtually unatainable unless you conquer the entire map (like calculating), others are unatainable because their code grants the trait xp to the quest giverA generous front
Well, yeah I do understand that the development never reached the expectations. And that's why I'm speaking about acceptation...
Probably TW should reconsider the selling price, so people starts to relativize...
I don't really agree with how you see the game evolved since EA starts though. They did refactor a lot of the code, I could see it with any new single patch after I released my mod (mods being broken is actually a proof that TW kept improving it...)
Saying that not that much changed since EA release is a easy shortcut tbh.
Anyway, let's see first what version TW is going to release in October (with or without banners, claimants quests, voice acting, etc...).
Than we still have the missing features that are needed to round up the game-play loop, absolutely zero late-game features, even less narrative than WB (which was already poor), town, castle and village scenes are ultimately useless, they've created a virtual mitigation of said effect by forcing barber shops that actually only made changing hairstyle into a boring chore (because you spawn 10km away from the guy), castles are absolutely useless, etc. There aren't enough interactions to justify going into any scenes, in fact, the game's much faster and efficient if you never enter battles and just uses their broken auto-calc to basically win forever.
Lastly, all of the features we have now are completely disjointed, there's absolutely no connection between them, and almost all of them involve some sort of poorly made micro-management.
In 1.8:
- Workshops? Scout all surrounding towns to make sure no neighboring town has the same workshop as the one you want (and if it does and you WANT IT BADLY, you must buy, change production and sell inflating the investment making it even less worth the hassle). After that, micro-manage the market and manually run a caravan with your toon completely locking you out of any other gameplay as long as you're focusing on making it profitable. That's not taking into account the raise in prices for workshops which ultimately amount to a even harsher start money grind.
- Caravans? You better always stay close to them, otherwise'll risk losing money. It also pushes the meta into NOT joining ANY KINGDOMS if you want to prevent mino-clans from randomly joining wars while the kingdom they've joined is on the other side of the map. The risk of losing the caravan due to that (mercenaries roaming in Khuzait join the vlandias as your cav passes by and immediately destroy it) is very high, happens way too frequently. The price for a decent caravan's very high too, but the caveat is that now it can take ages for a caravan to even start making you any money. You also cannot give instructions for your caravans to help distribute your workshop's goods neither, nor any instructions at all really. You also have to lose 1 companion for each.
- Smithing? Welcome to click simulator, want that great golden hilt for a 2h? Too bad, only 1h! Want that literally named 2h grip from 1h crafting screen? Too bad, only 1h can have that 2h grip (?!?!?!). Now you found what you want? A shame the blade's floating isn't it!? Btw, you can't leave town to do anything because stamina only recovers in towns
- Level up in arena? Too bad, you'll earn excrutiantingly less XP and you can't chose weapons!
- Gangs system shown in gaming events? Too bad, never implemented.
- Want those sweet decent wanderer companions? Too bad, RNG!
- Trading routes? Oh! We made sure there aren't none!
Fact is that I thought they'd flush out the entirety of the features and create a over-arching system that actually made them interact with each-other, they didn't do neither of those, rebalanced to handicap the player as much as possible and turned everything they could into a grind. The worst part being "click simulator" stuff. Warband too suffered from useless scenes, but at least there were some easter-eggs like the strange armor... Now we didn't get even that, just those gang alleys that are ultimately useless for anything but early game (with perks buffing civilian related stuff that became ultimately useless too, like "increased civilian armor" "increased civilian dmg" all in the roguery tree).
What I think is that they may continue after release, but that could also mean less commitment and as such it could take forever for these things to be patched in. They've also been neglecting minor code fixes for ages, like those personality trait quest bugs, it literally takes them a few minutes to fix that.
Than we ultimately have a grievous design flaw which's the perk system... It simply doesn't make sense, it's virtually impossible to remember traits relative levels and to which skill tree they belong, that not mentioning repeated perk names. If you run a playthrough with too many companions, you'll start to lose your mind micro-managing their perks, often you'll pick the wrong one because you didn't remember what was your plan, or, you'll pick the wrong one because the UI for it isn't that great neither, if you just distributed a bunch and miss-clicked, you'll reset the entire screen, adding another annoying step to it.
And arguably, battles, also aren't done in my point of view. Cavalry still manages to go through foot troops like they were crossing some sort of liquid pool, so any tactics to stop cav charges with infantry are out the window. You can't use enemies to block each other because of the "push-aside" effect for both cav and infantry, the AI doesn't use spears properly (that's why Pilum's so effective, because it's short enough for them to kiss foreheads and spam attack), many battle scenes simply do not give you enough time to setup as the player due to bad UI design and lack of commands, so on so forth. The latter's a second coming, though, because that was also present in Warband. AI had access to advanced commands while the player can only call charges or advances. That's really bad for skirmishing tactics or any other multi-step tactics that you want the AI to do, the result's even more micro management, where the major issue is that your PC has to be SEEING THE GROUND to issue the order properly. They've also removed the 10 steps commands from Warband, and that's the worst part. For any experienced WB player, we know all too well how important that was to properly control tactical advances and retreats + it made it less stupid to put archers in firing range.
As a side note and unrelated to the topic I was discussing in this reply, tactical warfare's still doable in battle-scenes, but it all falls down into a harder micro-management than WB had. Understanding of formations and how to use them was key in WB, in BL not all of them work properly due to the "push-aside", so you have to give 5 to 10 extra commands so the AI behaves properly. Leading through "follow me" on a warrior built or tank built PC's still the most efficient use of infantry.
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And you added a big chunk to that information if I remember well, thank you and the other constructive people for this.
My greatest failure, 11 god damn years or is it 13 or 14 now?...He also contributed to our cause on another front.
TW's ambition went beyond their capabilities... or the management didn't evaluate it correctly...The code may change, but that's exactly what I said, that they've fixed some things and focused on stabilizing the game. As a game, it barely evolved if at all. We still have seed RNG generation for too many things, crafting only encompasses weapons and it's not working properly (graphical glitches everywhere), they've slapped in a personality trait system with a vast variety of badges, but we only have 4 of them working, the quests to earn personality traits are almost all broken, and the numerical grind's absurd (1k for lvl 1 4k for lvl 2, when every action that earns person XP gives you 10 to 50, but negative losses range from -20 on seemingly harmless quests up to -1000) and some traits are virtually unatainable unless you conquer the entire map (like calculating), others are unatainable because their code grants the trait xp to the quest giver
Than we still have the missing features that are needed to round up the game-play loop, absolutely zero late-game features, even less narrative than WB (which was already poor), town, castle and village scenes are ultimately useless, they've created a virtual mitigation of said effect by forcing barber shops that actually only made changing hairstyle into a boring chore (because you spawn 10km away from the guy), castles are absolutely useless, etc. There aren't enough interactions to justify going into any scenes, in fact, the game's much faster and efficient if you never enter battles and just uses their broken auto-calc to basically win forever.
Lastly, all of the features we have now are completely disjointed, there's absolutely no connection between them, and almost all of them involve some sort of poorly made micro-management.
In 1.8:
and the list goes on and on and on and on.
- Workshops? Scout all surrounding towns to make sure no neighboring town has the same workshop as the one you want (and if it does and you WANT IT BADLY, you must buy, change production and sell inflating the investment making it even less worth the hassle). After that, micro-manage the market and manually run a caravan with your toon completely locking you out of any other gameplay as long as you're focusing on making it profitable. That's not taking into account the raise in prices for workshops which ultimately amount to a even harsher start money grind.
- Caravans? You better always stay close to them, otherwise'll risk losing money. It also pushes the meta into NOT joining ANY KINGDOMS if you want to prevent mino-clans from randomly joining wars while the kingdom they've joined is on the other side of the map. The risk of losing the caravan due to that (mercenaries roaming in Khuzait join the vlandias as your cav passes by and immediately destroy it) is very high, happens way too frequently. The price for a decent caravan's very high too, but the caveat is that now it can take ages for a caravan to even start making you any money. You also cannot give instructions for your caravans to help distribute your workshop's goods neither, nor any instructions at all really. You also have to lose 1 companion for each.
- Smithing? Welcome to click simulator, want that great golden hilt for a 2h? Too bad, only 1h! Want that literally named 2h grip from 1h crafting screen? Too bad, only 1h can have that 2h grip (?!?!?!). Now you found what you want? A shame the blade's floating isn't it!? Btw, you can't leave town to do anything because stamina only recovers in towns
- Level up in arena? Too bad, you'll earn excrutiantingly less XP and you can't chose weapons!
- Gangs system shown in gaming events? Too bad, never implemented.
- Want those sweet decent wanderer companions? Too bad, RNG!
- Trading routes? Oh! We made sure there aren't none!
Fact is that I thought they'd flush out the entirety of the features and create a over-arching system that actually made them interact with each-other, they didn't do neither of those, rebalanced to handicap the player as much as possible and turned everything they could into a grind. The worst part being "click simulator" stuff. Warband too suffered from useless scenes, but at least there were some easter-eggs like the strange armor... Now we didn't get even that, just those gang alleys that are ultimately useless for anything but early game (with perks buffing civilian related stuff that became ultimately useless too, like "increased civilian armor" "increased civilian dmg" all in the roguery tree).
What I think is that they may continue after release, but that could also mean less commitment and as such it could take forever for these things to be patched in. They've also been neglecting minor code fixes for ages, like those personality trait quest bugs, it literally takes them a few minutes to fix that.
Than we ultimately have a grievous design flaw which's the perk system... It simply doesn't make sense, it's virtually impossible to remember traits relative levels and to which skill tree they belong, that not mentioning repeated perk names. If you run a playthrough with too many companions, you'll start to lose your mind micro-managing their perks, often you'll pick the wrong one because you didn't remember what was your plan, or, you'll pick the wrong one because the UI for it isn't that great neither, if you just distributed a bunch and miss-clicked, you'll reset the entire screen, adding another annoying step to it.
And arguably, battles, also aren't done in my point of view. Cavalry still manages to go through foot troops like they were crossing some sort of liquid pool, so any tactics to stop cav charges with infantry are out the window. You can't use enemies to block each other because of the "push-aside" effect for both cav and infantry, the AI doesn't use spears properly (that's why Pilum's so effective, because it's short enough for them to kiss foreheads and spam attack), many battle scenes simply do not give you enough time to setup as the player due to bad UI design and lack of commands, so on so forth.
So you want them to keep the game in EA for a few more years?
At least, they have to take their responsibilities once the game is fully released... or not (Cyberpunk....).
yes, keep it in EA, consider revamps of features if needed and starts listening to the community. What I'm seeing is: they are rushing out of EA, they have become stubborn about features, and they are completely ignoring the community (on the decision level, they may interact with us, but no S tier suggestions have come to fruition at all, all declined / ignored)
No. Its pencils down time. More time in EA isn't going to bring dramatic improvements. Let them move on and hopefully learn some lessons for their next game. Time to be done with it.
The code may change, but that's exactly what I said, that they've fixed some things and focused on stabilizing the game. As a game, it barely evolved if at all. We still have seed RNG generation for too many things, crafting only encompasses weapons and it's not working properly (graphical glitches everywhere), they've slapped in a personality trait system with a vast variety of badges, but we only have 4 of them working, the quests to earn personality traits are almost all broken, and the numerical grind's absurd (1k for lvl 1 4k for lvl 2, when every action that earns person XP gives you 10 to 50, but negative losses range from -20 on seemingly harmless quests up to -1000) and some traits are virtually unatainable unless you conquer the entire map (like calculating), others are unatainable because their code grants the trait xp to the quest giver
Than we still have the missing features that are needed to round up the game-play loop, absolutely zero late-game features, even less narrative than WB (which was already poor), town, castle and village scenes are ultimately useless, they've created a virtual mitigation of said effect by forcing barber shops that actually only made changing hairstyle into a boring chore (because you spawn 10km away from the guy), castles are absolutely useless, etc. There aren't enough interactions to justify going into any scenes, in fact, the game's much faster and efficient if you never enter battles and just uses their broken auto-calc to basically win forever.
Lastly, all of the features we have now are completely disjointed, there's absolutely no connection between them, and almost all of them involve some sort of poorly made micro-management.
In 1.8:
and the list goes on and on and on and on.
- Workshops? Scout all surrounding towns to make sure no neighboring town has the same workshop as the one you want (and if it does and you WANT IT BADLY, you must buy, change production and sell inflating the investment making it even less worth the hassle). After that, micro-manage the market and manually run a caravan with your toon completely locking you out of any other gameplay as long as you're focusing on making it profitable. That's not taking into account the raise in prices for workshops which ultimately amount to a even harsher start money grind.
- Caravans? You better always stay close to them, otherwise'll risk losing money. It also pushes the meta into NOT joining ANY KINGDOMS if you want to prevent mino-clans from randomly joining wars while the kingdom they've joined is on the other side of the map. The risk of losing the caravan due to that (mercenaries roaming in Khuzait join the vlandias as your cav passes by and immediately destroy it) is very high, happens way too frequently. The price for a decent caravan's very high too, but the caveat is that now it can take ages for a caravan to even start making you any money. You also cannot give instructions for your caravans to help distribute your workshop's goods neither, nor any instructions at all really. You also have to lose 1 companion for each.
- Smithing? Welcome to click simulator, want that great golden hilt for a 2h? Too bad, only 1h! Want that literally named 2h grip from 1h crafting screen? Too bad, only 1h can have that 2h grip (?!?!?!). Now you found what you want? A shame the blade's floating isn't it!? Btw, you can't leave town to do anything because stamina only recovers in towns
- Level up in arena? Too bad, you'll earn excrutiantingly less XP and you can't chose weapons!
- Gangs system shown in gaming events? Too bad, never implemented.
- Want those sweet decent wanderer companions? Too bad, RNG!
- Trading routes? Oh! We made sure there aren't none!
Fact is that I thought they'd flush out the entirety of the features and create a over-arching system that actually made them interact with each-other, they didn't do neither of those, rebalanced to handicap the player as much as possible and turned everything they could into a grind. The worst part being "click simulator" stuff. Warband too suffered from useless scenes, but at least there were some easter-eggs like the strange armor... Now we didn't get even that, just those gang alleys that are ultimately useless for anything but early game (with perks buffing civilian related stuff that became ultimately useless too, like "increased civilian armor" "increased civilian dmg" all in the roguery tree).
What I think is that they may continue after release, but that could also mean less commitment and as such it could take forever for these things to be patched in. They've also been neglecting minor code fixes for ages, like those personality trait quest bugs, it literally takes them a few minutes to fix that.
Than we ultimately have a grievous design flaw which's the perk system... It simply doesn't make sense, it's virtually impossible to remember traits relative levels and to which skill tree they belong, that not mentioning repeated perk names. If you run a playthrough with too many companions, you'll start to lose your mind micro-managing their perks, often you'll pick the wrong one because you didn't remember what was your plan, or, you'll pick the wrong one because the UI for it isn't that great neither, if you just distributed a bunch and miss-clicked, you'll reset the entire screen, adding another annoying step to it.
And arguably, battles, also aren't done in my point of view. Cavalry still manages to go through foot troops like they were crossing some sort of liquid pool, so any tactics to stop cav charges with infantry are out the window. You can't use enemies to block each other because of the "push-aside" effect for both cav and infantry, the AI doesn't use spears properly (that's why Pilum's so effective, because it's short enough for them to kiss foreheads and spam attack), many battle scenes simply do not give you enough time to setup as the player due to bad UI design and lack of commands, so on so forth. The latter's a second coming, though, because that was also present in Warband. AI had access to advanced commands while the player can only call charges or advances. That's really bad for skirmishing tactics or any other multi-step tactics that you want the AI to do, the result's even more micro management, where the major issue is that your PC has to be SEEING THE GROUND to issue the order properly. They've also removed the 10 steps commands from Warband, and that's the worst part. For any experienced WB player, we know all too well how important that was to properly control tactical advances and retreats + it made it less stupid to put archers in firing range.
As a side note and unrelated to the topic I was discussing in this reply, tactical warfare's still doable in battle-scenes, but it all falls down into a harder micro-management than WB had. Understanding of formations and how to use them was key in WB, in BL not all of them work properly due to the "push-aside", so you have to give 5 to 10 extra commands so the AI behaves properly. Leading through "follow me" on a warrior built or tank built PC's still the most efficient use of infantrIy
I agree 100% with every point, well said!.
I would like to add an totally dysfunctional income / expenses balance between fief taxes, trade income and battle loot income. The latter just renders all the other systems useless with the exception of smithing due to the ridicules weapon prices. recruitment, upkeep and upgrades on the other hand are ridiculous cheap with no relation to the units armor and weapon set costs.
I offered, even though somewhat jkingly, to transcribe a proper Game Design Document for them with a spreadsheet that would take care of balance. That would involve a revamp of troop trees to force all factions to have a wider infantry army composition, and it would limit both player and AI from owning too many t6 units due to a more historical approach to medieval economy. Elite units were small for that reason, otherwise the Byzantines would've reformed the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, they had the best tech and the best military compared to any Western European kingdom, and eventually they lost everything, reason being $$$$
Armor soaking and I now just learned they've killed the speed momentum factor for melee weapons (those need to come back), than I'd repeat somem micro-balancing I already made in Warband for myself a million times. Crafting's supposed to be OP (it's like having a super specialist instead of a generic town smith), but it has to make sense, and the entire system must change into something more engaging, the best way to do that is making it, again, closer to historical reality.
idk, there are so many little adjustments that are relatively easy to plan for, the challenge here is that they must make some core changes to some systems, like dmg calc and smithing system, other than that it's all about adjustments and adding a wider array of player control. As is most stuff's either "spray&pray" or click-simulators.
I'd also fix the Sturgians, Druhzina if I'm not mistaken were the HEAVY INFANTRY of the KIEVAN RUS, not cavalry. Yes, they must have some sort of melee cav, but Sturgia should keep to their infantry-centric theme, and receive a massive boost against cavalry in both auto-calc and battle-field engagements. Just like all other factions, they should be hard to deal with requiring a wider array of tactics, as is you can simply spam Empire Legionaries mixed with a few Menavilon and Sturgians get wiped under seconds, inf v inf mixed armies, Batttaninas also win, hell, if you send Fians on hold fire to charge sturgians, they'll win. For auto-calc, simply get any cav even t2, and you'll win.
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These guys better get an actual game designer for their next title, becuase Bannerlord being relased in this state reflects what a game looks like without a vision.
Battle formations and AI, diplomacy, settlement management, gang system and roguery, sally-outs, quests, late-game features, unique scenes for each location, things to do in scenes, feature integration and depth etc. I would have gladly accepted a delay of a year or two to sort this out and slowly integrate the features in the game. Instead, „look, we put everything together with some duct tape. Now play”. I'm very disappointed and equally confused about future development support for the game.
Battle formations and AI, diplomacy, settlement management, gang system and roguery, sally-outs, quests, late-game features, unique scenes for each location, things to do in scenes, feature integration and depth etc. I would have gladly accepted a delay of a year or two to sort this out and slowly integrate the features in the game. Instead, „look, we put everything together with some duct tape. Now play”. I'm very disappointed and equally confused about future development support for the game.
My greatest failure, 11 god damn years or is it 13 or 14 now?...
There's still two months of hope that we won't be resorting to modders for such trivial stuff.
There's still two months of hope that we won't be resorting to modders for such trivial stuff.
These guys better get an actual game designer for their next title, becuase Bannerlord being relased in this state reflects what a game looks like without a vision.
Battle formations and AI, diplomacy, settlement management, gang system and roguery, sally-outs, quests, late-game features, unique scenes for each location, things to do in scenes, feature integration and depth etc. I would have gladly accepted a delay of a year or two to sort this out and slowly integrate the features in the game. Instead, „look, we put everything together with some duct tape. Now play”. I'm very disappointed and equally confused about future development support for the game.
They're probably already working on the next title, and it'll be just as disjointed and broken.
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