So let me start off with this is a post about why I think co-op campaign will be in Bannerlord! I might have gone a bit overboard in terms of "evidence" but I do think a pattern is showing.
So after these points how will the campaign then work you might ask, as to which I think some other previously learned information tells us.
At last I want to state that overall if you think about them having co-op campaign all of the things in terms of development do make more sense. It seems that they mostly the last year or two really stepped up working on the game, which suggest they needed to figure out "something" before working more on the campaign. Anything besides co-op campaign wouldn't make sense in this context since they already knew how to do 80% of the stuff from Warband, and clans and families wouldn't slow down development of the rest of the campaign since it wouldn't be networked were it singleplayer. Also weirdly enough the engine limitations / reworks they had to do works really well with them designing how the players interact with town scenes, since from earlier footage it didn't seem to be the case.
I have the feeling they're keeping this up their sleeve and releasing it to create hype levels never seen before close to release.
EDIT: Seems now they've announced that they will add Co-op in a patch after the release so I was right!
- At first let me start off with what we've seen from Gamescon footage: The cities/towns can now be accessed in a menu instead of having to go into the scene. Think about this for a moment, why would they actually make that?
- While we can all agree that Bannerlord is in every way so far an upgrade from Warband, why did they actually run into limitations with their old engine? We haven't seen any mechanics so far that differs so much from Warband that it seems imposible with the engine used in the earliest footage of Bannerlord. Only major limitation I can think of would have to be in terms of networking
- 7 Years of development doesn't seem that weird if they had to make everything networked and properly synced etc. It would explain a whole lot of things actually
- In the recent Gamescon interview we got the reply "it's difficult to say the percentage but we had a great period for getting ready for gamescom and we 've finished a lot of the early game stuff, so we need to do the same for the mid game, and late game, and multiplayer". But we've already seen captain mode, and multiplayer was some of the earliest footage we got. So by multiplayer could he actually mean co-op?
- At the same time it seems they developed multiplayer before the campaign, which would make a whole lot of sense if the goal was to have the campaign be multiplayer.
- When Captain Lust was still a community manager back then and ran his Ask.fm he was asked if there were any major features that was kept secret, to which he replied "yes". So far while we've seen a lot of nice things like clans, families etc. They haven't really been kept secret and at the same time it can be argued that they don't count as "major" features. Add to that at the early development he posted artwork of 2 warriors saying it was hinting something
- From different comments we know Armagan wants Bannerlord to be "perfect", he knows that co-op is the most requested feature so him insisting to add it seems likely
So after these points how will the campaign then work you might ask, as to which I think some other previously learned information tells us.
- We learned a little while ago that when battles start they now include the AI lords within a certain range, and we don't have to wait for them to all join first. This would counter endless battles since AI lords not in the given range when the battle starts won't be able to join it.
- The time problem: This is the most discussed thing about co-op campaign but everything real-time with these new features like no endless battles and the ability to handle almost everything in the town menu is very viable. Should you even enter a scene worst case scenario you get a message your fief is under siege, you press tab and leave it in 10 seconds.
- It's co-op and not mmo, hence supposed to be played with friends you can work together with. So should you for some reason be in a lengthy battle while your fief is under attack your friend(s) can go defend it, or you can remember to next time leave a larger garrison.
At last I want to state that overall if you think about them having co-op campaign all of the things in terms of development do make more sense. It seems that they mostly the last year or two really stepped up working on the game, which suggest they needed to figure out "something" before working more on the campaign. Anything besides co-op campaign wouldn't make sense in this context since they already knew how to do 80% of the stuff from Warband, and clans and families wouldn't slow down development of the rest of the campaign since it wouldn't be networked were it singleplayer. Also weirdly enough the engine limitations / reworks they had to do works really well with them designing how the players interact with town scenes, since from earlier footage it didn't seem to be the case.
I have the feeling they're keeping this up their sleeve and releasing it to create hype levels never seen before close to release.
EDIT: Seems now they've announced that they will add Co-op in a patch after the release so I was right!