Bannerlord is really just a broken game.

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Warband didnt come out of nowhere either. It's basically an expansion of the original MnB from c. 2005. Modders had a lot of the same problems back then as well, updates would break mods all the time and there weren't enough tools to make modding easy.

 

[hoboistice]

Did you read what I write ? And did you really compare total overhauls to some bottom of the barrel mod ? Both in terms of work and quality ?
Come on, I know this forum is home to bad faith but you're being silly at this point. That's like comparing (taking your example of bethesda games) the waifu mods to the likes of skyblivion or beyond skyrim... which have been in development for over a decade at this point btw

Dunno why you're so dead set on making excuses for the terrible mod support we've recieved for Bannerlord. Skyblivion and beyond skyrim are also garbage idk why you'd mention em. Porting a crappy game into another crappy game. Just play TR for Morrowind.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

I think you're misunderstanding what sh1ny4 meant by "the standard of mods has increased". He doesn't mean that all mods are better now or whatever. He means that making a mod that looks like the base game is a lot harder now than in 2008 because of how graphics work now. Its so complex to mod for modern games that former modders are just making their own games now.

 

[NormanSteel]

Totally agree with your ending, it is so frustrating when you see the potential of the bannerlord's world an it keeps being rough and unpolish for so long. My conclusion is that their vision is a battle simulator, the world is just a container where you fight battle after battle... design to be in a never ending war, they won't improve the RPG part of the game.

What annoys me is the fact that many features were added but they were so bare bones they may as well not have. Look at Custom Battle. Why is it so restrictive? The assets are there in the game. Warband custom battle was even worse.

 

[sh1ny4]

I think you're misunderstanding what sh1ny4 meant by "the standard of mods has increased". He doesn't mean that all mods are better now or whatever. He means that making a mod that looks like the base game is a lot harder now than in 2008 because of how graphics work now. Its so complex to mod for modern games that former modders are just making their own games now.

that was the idea yes, no one would play a bannerlord mod whose models are comparable to early warband total conversion models
same for code, no one wants to play a mod that doesn't improve the base gameplay

 

[guiskj]

I see Bannerlord the same way I see RPG Maker bundled with a demo game. That's the only way I can feel good about my purchase.

One day I hope to have enough time to rip nearly everything out, keep the World Map and the Mission Combat, and then redo everything else with an eye for simplicity and player agency.

One day... One day.

 

[guiskj]

I've been lurking these forums for some time now, but this post made me register just to say I agree with pretty much everything OP said.

I obviously don't know the inner workings of TW, but it feels like Bannerlord's project lead is either very inexperienced or just simply does not exist. There are so many absurd, illogical design decision in the game it becomes kinda creepy. It seems to me like they just threw a lot of half-baked ideas into the mixer and pushed the button without even giving them a second pass. Just a couple of obvious pointers:

• Why do you have a full-fledged dynasty mechanic with children and everything when the game's pace is not even remotely close to allow this mechanic to work? You can experience all game's features (battles, leveling system, party management, fief management, kingdom management) in just a couple of in-game years, but children require unfathomable 18 years to grow up. I never came even remotely close to see my kids become of age.
• Why do you have a food supply system when pack animals provide effectively unlimited inventory space? In my last play-through I had a personal party of 500 and still carried enough food to last 3 in-game years. Excluding the need to constantly buy date fruit to have enough variety, this mechanic in completely pointless because the player is never even remotely close to run out. All it does is wasting developers' time because they have to make sure Bannerlord's idiotic AI parties carry enough food to not starve.
• Why do we have a full-blown simulated economy if it barely influences war and the player has pretty much 0 ways to interact with it outside of "buy low, sell high"? They obviously spent a lot of time implementing this system and balancing it, but the end result is completely pointless. For unknown reasons the economy is not simulated for weapons and armor - no, this stuff magically appears out of thin air when recruiting/upgrading troops. Therefore, you can spend all day raiding wood and iron villages of your enemies, but it will not matter even the slightest. They are still gonna vomit armies after armies of fully-equipped soldiers. As for player's interaction - you would think that simulated economy means the ability to establish trade routes or just the most basic ability to tell your caravans to not trade with a specific kingdom to limit their economy, but nope.
• Why do you remove the ability to issue commands to allied parties if your AI is completely braindead? At least in Warband we had some mechanism of circumventing AI inability to do anything even remotely intelligent, but in Bannerlord there's nothing.
• Why do you have hundreds of perks when there are approx only 5 that are even remotely interesting? Why create a barrage of completely pointless effects that are so small that you don't even notice they're there. There's a good reason why "2% increase" became a meme in Bannerlord's community. Why not make every skill go from 0 to 100 and think of like 5 interesting perks for each?
• Why do you implement your "encyclopedia for of war" system in the update featuring the new gang alleyway mechanic? This is the first time we actually have to pick companions with specific skills and traits for what is clearly an early-game activity, but you make it almost impossible unless you just know in advance which companions have high roguery. Or you can just mindlessly travel from city to city "discovering" all companions I guess. What could possibly be the reason for these two features being introduced in the same update?

And I can go on and on for all day long.

The worst part about all this is the fact that I cannot even blame them for trying to artificially bloat the game's feature list for the Steam page because some mechanics like simulated economy clearly took a lot of time, effort and care. It's more like nobody at TW doesn't possess even the slightest idea of what they're doing with Bannerlord. Which is a real bummer because the idea is fantastic and the game doesn't have any real competitors, so it really sucks that the implementation is... this.

+1

This was my own take, back in August 2020... For whatever that's worth.

Designing Bannerlord

The goal of this post is to provide constructive criticism to TaleWorlds as we analyse a game that we are all obviously failry invested in. Providing this feedback is the strength of early access. I originally posted something similar as a response to another post but thought it deserved its...

forums.taleworlds.com

 

[RJ_Sera]

• Why do you have hundreds of perks when there are approx only 5 that are even remotely interesting? Why create a barrage of completely pointless effects that are so small that you don't even notice they're there. There's a good reason why "2% increase" became a meme in Bannerlord's community. Why not make every skill go from 0 to 100 and think of like 5 interesting perks for each?

Don't want to be blunt here but the skill system really dumb atm, agree with your point completely. There are lots of perks that we need to remember to plan out our character. In TW:Warhammer there are hundreds of troop units there and it's easier to remember than bannerlord's perks coz they are interesting, remarkable. 5% movement speed here and 2% at some where else, why don't just stack them up and put in one place where we can unlock at some point. The grinding system also a bad idea, training companion skills is next to impossible then some trick from youtube pop up "starve your troops and recover their health to gain medicine exp" even wiki provide that trick too, what are they doing with this game, cheesy way to level up

 

[geala]

Broken? Please, come on. The kingdom I'm serving is at war with three factions, and the king and lords are so brave that there is no willingness to make peace with at least one faction (zero support). Instead they send all of our (two undermanned) armies again and again to one unimportant castle to conquer, till they get captured. I think they wait till the other factions are bored by conquering other fiefs, maybe.

How can anyone dare to name such a masterpiece of cunning broken?

 

[SadMoney]

I decided to give 1.2 beta a go and see if kingdom destruction made the game any better.
Surprise-surprise, not really. Kingdom destruction completely breaks tribute calculations, making them somehow even worse than before, which is honestly pretty hard to believe.

As soon as I defeated the second-to-last rival kingdom (Khuzaits), the last remaining enemy (Southern Empire) immediately proposed peace and offered to pay us 27 million denars per day. This is no a typo, not a joke. My clan received 2 million daily and I finished the world conquest with 160 million in a bank.
After a mere month Southern Empire completely collapsed. They had only militia left. No garrisons, no standing armies. Their parties were running around with 0 troops because lords could not afford food and were starving to death. But the best part? As soon as I declared war tribute payments on peace proposal screen changed to we paying them... 70 million per day.

JFC, how hard it is to remove tribute payments completely? It's clear as day that this mechanic is not working. It never did and it never will. Just bite the bullet and do it, TaleWorlds. This is honestly embaracing.

This was my own take, back in August 2020... For whatever that's worth.

I like how all these glaring issues you've mentioned 3.5 years ago are still present. It would be hilarious if it wouldn't be so depressing.

 

[Nogand]

I think the fact that the only consistently good Youtube channel for Bannerlord, Strat Gaming, has never played Warband says it all.

 

[Tabbot]

really ? speed is your point ?
The game is from 2020, not 2008. the standard for mods has insanely increased. Models are harder to make since of higher quality, there is no common framework for mods like warband's diplomacy, code breaks every big update, new features get added that require a complete rework of parts for what has been done, etc...
You wouldn't even play a mod made in the same timespan as brytenwalda in bannerlord, simply because it would be like the current total overhauls we have : either incomplete, buggy, or adding nothing to the game

the standards "increased" basically in proportion to the tools generally available meaning that they're kind of matched. (Compare GIMP or Blender in 2010 to now and you'll see it's night and day)

the bigger issue is that there seems to be glacially slow development cycle and questionable vision in terms of direction for development.

 

[sh1ny4]

the standards "increased" basically in proportion to the tools generally available meaning that they're kind of matched. (Compare GIMP or Blender in 2010 to now and you'll see it's night and day)

the bigger issue is that there seems to be glacially slow development cycle and questionable vision in terms of direction for development.

the standard has increased much faster, and if doing one item is easier than before it's also expected to have a lot more items than before. And the time to work on mods hasn't increased

 

[Spookykid]

Warband is soulless compared to bannerlord if you’re comparing vanilla games, in warband you really only choose the same companions over and over.

bannerlord is a great game it’s like an updated warband with alot better fighting mechanics.

I think you wanted a different game.

your problem is you don’t remember vanilla warband and would most likely hate it.

When bannerlord had a decades worth of mods than we can discuss but let’s face it bannerlord was and is a huge success.

Maybe you just need to take a break I get burnt out every 500 hours and take a break and come back after x amount of time and the cool thing is bannerlord gets updates to vanilla.

Warband didn’t even have a story bannerlord Atleast offers you a story.

 

[Tabbot]

Warband is soulless compared to bannerlord if you’re comparing vanilla games, in warband you really only choose the same companions over and over.

bannerlord is a great game it’s like an updated warband with alot better fighting mechanics.

I think you wanted a different game.

your problem is you don’t remember vanilla warband and would most likely hate it.

When bannerlord had a decades worth of mods than we can discuss but let’s face it bannerlord was and is a huge success.

Maybe you just need to take a break I get burnt out every 500 hours and take a break and come back after x amount of time and the cool thing is bannerlord gets updates to vanilla.

Warband didn’t even have a story bannerlord Atleast offers you a story.

It's not that simple:

yes Warband is itself kind of empty in many ways, but you've also got to consider how many of the improvements from Viking Conquest, or the numerous mods that Warband recieved were improvements to the underlying systems of gameplay.

to put it another way there's a lot of stuff that warband mods fixed that were pretty simple or fairly small changes, it makes little sense that the developers wouldn't also be able to make these changes. I guess in part it's because of pride; not wanting to be seen copying the work of amateurs. Copy enough mods and you get a double edged sword situation where they accuse you of copying

 

[Apocal]

JFC, how hard it is to remove tribute payments completely? It's clear as day that this mechanic is not working. It never did and it never will. Just bite the bullet and do it, TaleWorlds. This is honestly embaracing.

It used to work but it was kinda grafted-on and hasn't really been iterated on (that I can tell) so now that there have been other balance changes, it has become truly zany.

OTOH, maybe it is working because two years ago we were asking for tribute to essentially nuke factions' income.

 

[JunKeteer]

It used to work but it was kinda grafted-on and hasn't really been iterated on (that I can tell) so now that there have been other balance changes, it has become truly zany.

OTOH, maybe it is working because two years ago we were asking for tribute to essentially nuke factions' income.

Whole game is just layer after layer of bandage fixes to that first EA release; a few through us, many others by TW themselves.

 

[CrazyElf]

Warband didnt come out of nowhere either. It's basically an expansion of the original MnB from c. 2005. Modders had a lot of the same problems back then as well, updates would break mods all the time and there weren't enough tools to make modding easy.

Unfortunately this means that it will be years before a fix for Bannerlord is made. That will be after the patches stop and when modders will have had a couple of years with a stable game (where patches don't break mods every update) to address the underlying problems with the game