Bannerlord Singleplayer and Bannerlord Multiplayer are two separate games that just happen to use the same engine.

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This is how I rationalize the extreme differences in quality, attention to detail, design philosophy and dev hours. Hell with the recent update singleplayer even does a better job at tracking player character deaths.

It begs the question why Taleworlds doesnt just sell the rights to their engine to a 3rd party dev team to just make a standalone multiplayer experience. Precedence has been set with games like Caribbean and WF&S. I dont need to crunch that many numbers to tell you Taleworlds would make more money doing this than they will with whatever the heck they have planned for the 45 people who still play Bannerlord MP.
 
Imagine you start a company that makes vehicles. It turns out people really like your cars and trucks, but bikes not so much. Sure some people bought them and even advise you how you could improve them but you already made huge profits of the first two products and it's simply not worth it to take care of that small but demanding portion of customers...

This is exactly the situation with Bannerlord. There is some old screenshot from discord of conversation with a dev that explains mp crowd is tiny enough to simply not matter (they even mentioned that shutting down mp altogether wouldn't mean much in terms of financial loses). Even now the game is Very Positive on steam and you all know it's because of SP.

Personally I think that is all there is to it, unfortunately. SP feature came out better so the resources are focused on it. MP came out worse, so it's left to die out. That's it.

The real "cruelty" here is something different though. It's actually the existence of this forum.
Think about it: there are pages to no end of all levels of insults towards the developers with close to no response either on the forums or in form of actual development of things mp people want. The things that actually get implemented with the little resources left for mp seem to be really disconnected from the rude feedback. In every other game forum insults of this caliber would be moderated into oblivion, but here they are not. Try say something racist or sexist though and the reaction will be swift.

Why is that? It's simple:

The very lax moderation in regards to insulting developers is to provide a discrete place for venting frustration of unfortunate players that ended up in the "unimportant" portion of customers. I think TW deliberately allows flaming on this forum that most customers doesn't even know about so that the game doesn't get bad comments on for example steam or reddit or whatever main mass of players uses. It's a place for all you MP passionate gamers to cry till you die and you do it out of sight of other people that actually enjoy the main features of the game.

Now you know what you all gonna do?

"LLALALALALALALALALLALAA didn't hear that, TW when will you implement XYZ omg u suck as devs"
 
Imagine you start a company that makes vehicles. It turns out people really like your cars and trucks, but bikes not so much. Sure some people bought them and even advise you how you could improve them but you already made huge profits of the first two products and it's simply not worth it to take care of that small but demanding portion of customers...

This is exactly the situation with Bannerlord. There is some old screenshot from discord of conversation with a dev that explains mp crowd is tiny enough to simply not matter (they even mentioned that shutting down mp altogether wouldn't mean much in terms of financial loses). Even now the game is Very Positive on steam and you all know it's because of SP.

Personally I think that is all there is to it, unfortunately. SP feature came out better so the resources are focused on it. MP came out worse, so it's left to die out. That's it.

The real "cruelty" here is something different though. It's actually the existence of this forum.
Think about it: there are pages to no end of all levels of insults towards the developers with close to no response either on the forums or in form of actual development of things mp people want. The things that actually get implemented with the little resources left for mp seem to be really disconnected from the rude feedback. In every other game forum insults of this caliber would be moderated into oblivion, but here they are not. Try say something racist or sexist though and the reaction will be swift.

Why is that? It's simple:

The very lax moderation in regards to insulting developers is to provide a discrete place for venting frustration of unfortunate players that ended up in the "unimportant" portion of customers. I think TW deliberately allows flaming on this forum that most customers doesn't even know about so that the game doesn't get bad comments on for example steam or reddit or whatever main mass of players uses. It's a place for all you MP passionate gamers to cry till you die and you do it out of sight of other people that actually enjoy the main features of the game.

Now you know what you all gonna do?

"LLALALALALALALALALLALAA didn't hear that, TW when will you implement XYZ omg u suck as devs"
Wise words my friend.
 
...mp crowd is tiny enough to simply not matter (they even mentioned that shutting down mp altogether wouldn't mean much in terms of financial loses).
This is probably true short term, but I think it is unwise long term. Multiplayer is usually what garners long staying followings. Singleplayer can only be played trough so much before all the magic is gone and all you see is the same repetive actions over and over again. Multiplayer can always be fresh even with the simplest rules since the opponents are human and the experiense is always different. Think about chess, it has dumb simple rules, but interhuman competition keeps reinventing the game and new players keeps joining. Other games have also had growth and/or rekindlings trough dedicated multiplayer followings long after their singleplayer lifetime had ended (SSB Melee is a good example). This also draws in new fans both for the current game and for upcoming releases.

All that being said; it is probably still smart to dedicate well over 50% of resources to single player since that's where new players first meet the game. Multiplayer is where people go when they want more after quite a long time playing the campain. If the single player sucks, people will simply play another game. As the singleplayer is still really lacking and sometimes utterly dysfunctional I can understand the current focus on that as it is likely the more pressing matter to retain players.
 
Compared to what we got in Warband, mp in Bannerlord recieved and continues to recieve a lot of love. Calling it "left to die out" is a stretch, considering we get regular MP updates, albeit not to the extent we would like.
Warband multiplayer got updates well into warbands lifecycle, along with launching with WAY more content to begin with.
 
Never knew removing deaths was an indication of love.
Well yeah, even if you don't like it, they most likely thought it was for the best.

Warband multiplayer got updates well into warbands lifecycle, along with launching with WAY more content to begin with.
Yeah but it didn't have in-built matchmaking, clan system, voice chat - we're getting much more features and a lot more are yet to come.
 
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