After many years of playing no Taleworld's titles, I have come back to purchase and play Bannerlord. Steams says I'm up to 283 hours. After several restarts I've settled into a playthrough which I hope to stick with for the long haul, and perhaps conquer the map from the Campaign start (Bannerlord difficulty, Ironman mode, 1.1 version). I've seen very few "bugs," and overall the game is a fantastic expansion on the M&B series. I've had only two CTDs. I have yet to do much in the way of sieging or large field battles though, so I have not seen the full range of situations the game can offer. There are of course areas which are a bit barebones, but that is not what I'm posting about. What I am going to focus on here are very basic design issues, largely having to do with UI and UX which IMO should be demarcated as vitally important simply because they will please almost everyone, annoy almost no one and extend the play time of many who are "hard-core" players who spend hundreds of hours playing. I have not explored any mods yet, and I hope to finish the game at least once completely vanilla before modding the game. IMO, the features I will note here should be part of the vanilla game, even if they are already available from mods.
1. Capacity to instruct EXACTLY which soldier goes into each formation. Having precise control over soldier types would be nice, but to be honest, just giving us a list of EVERY soldier in a force and the ability to select, multi-select, rubber band, drag-and-drop them into the formation shouldn't be asking that much. This is 2023, and this sort of UI technology was already well established 15 or 20 years ago. The current "coarse" system you have may be fine for NPC forces, but the player needs to have COMPLETE CONTROL.
2. Features in the Smithy pane which allow actions which presently might take 20 or 40 mouse clicks to be completed in only two to four mouse-clicks. Again: 15 to 20 year old standards for UI/UX. It is understandable that this was not put on top priority previously, but at this point, you have players complaining about stuff like this, and effectively eschewing certain aspects of game play or even eschewing playing the game entirely (and even worse, going into communities to derogate the game) simply because of little annoyances like having to click hundreds of times when the app could provide an "All" or an "Until Exhausted" or an "Ctrl + Left Mouse" to do in increments of 10 and a "Shift + Left Mouse" to do in increments of 100 . . .
3. Much more control over parties that are led by NPCs in one's clan. "Defensive/Offensive/Neutral" feels like filler, and there seems to be almost zero benefit to allocating troops to an NPC clan member in a second party. Even calling them to an army seems to be questionable based on some commenters.
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Those to me are the things that stick out as "most annoying" after 283 hours of vanilla play. There are quite a few other "Quality of Life" changes, as well as some basic game design changes that I would like to see. But those tend to be less serious, or else more matters of opinion. If the above issues are implemented as "additional options" to current UX (and don't break any existing features or functionalities) then I don't see how you can go wrong to address these issues.
I will however, include a link to a Steam Discussion I started called "Little Things that Annoy" which lists these things among others, and has a few respondents (so you can see, it isn't just me).
Join me in listing the little things about the game that annoy. Lets keep straight up rants about how terrible the game is completely out of this thread please. If you like the game, and think it is overall "good," but have some "little things" that annoy, jump in. 1. If you kill an archer in...
steamcommunity.com
On the whole: great game! Well done TaleWorlds!
