I will argue though that a lot of requests from the community are complementary to the systems in place if they don't enhance them period.
On the statement part, personally it's not so much that I want a complete detailed list of what is planned than I wish to have a general idea of what you want to work on (diplomacy for example is extremely vague, for all we know it could simply be the addition to show the middle finger to a lord/king in order to declare a war... do you mean alliances? Trade rights like in Warband? Improved AI decision making?)
... I spent most of Sunday on this and I need to get some other things done. So, for now, I will cut off here and try to find more time to discuss some of the individual feature / content bits in the future.
I certainly don't mean to be rude to @Duh_TaleWorlds, as I really appreciate his communication, but his post still amounted to nothing.
I agree that there are plenty of things that can be done to further improve the game. However, working alongside the community to achieve a desirable level of quality does not - to me - mean that a company needs to follow each and every community request.
This is unnecessary, of course you won't adhere to every request.
Also, I have to say, the way this Forum is laid out and sectioned is so bad it almost feels purposefully designed to harm feedback and break the community up. Does TW really think I'll check dozens of forum subsections to add my voice to good and interesting topics? This forum's suggestions subsection is particularly grievous.
Now, I do think that the product descriptions of Bannerlord go into a fair bit more detail than that. I also believe that most of us have some shared understanding of the core bits of what a Mount & Blade game offers - and that Bannerlord covers them to a degree that makes it recognizably Mount & Blade.
I cannot more vehemently disagree. Warband was very balanced between all the action and the true RPG aspect of the game. Bannerlord is almost 100% an action game. The only meaningful thing there is to do in the game is to fight...
So, to clarify - No, developers don't just all do their own thing. Armagan deeply cares about the project and tends to be involved, on some level, with the vast majority of development. Similarly, community feedback is taken into account, but it informs rather than makes decisions. (Which is, of course, not just down to vision, but also mundane challenges - sometimes an idea that sounded good on paper can't be made to work or has to be pushed back or even dropped due to other priorities.) You may not like or agree with all of the decisions being made and not all of them may necessarily turn out to be the right or best ones. But they must be made - and are made, from what I can tell, with the desire to create a better game.
Once again, I think you are missing the crux of the argument. Nothing in Bannerlord interlocks. I have gone into extensive detail about it here, a post from last August placed in the Suggestions section of the forum that got not a single acknowledgement from TW. Almost every single thing I commented on that post is valid today.
At the end of the day, it is a compromise between competing interests. Obviously, I understand that players want to know more. Especially when they care about a product. I also think that there has been progress in that regard. At the beginning of EA we had neither statements, nor video updates. These were introduced over time. Which I think is fair, because it is important to find the right balance between sharing information and prematurely building expectations - and that is a learning process.
What I think is fair is for TW to come out and confirm the things that are 100% to very likely to not make it into the game. Sequels are supposed to build on its predecessors, but Bannerlord is shaping up to be less of a sequel to Warband and more of a spiritual successor. That is not what we expected and it is freaking high time we can get some confirmation so we can move on.
Armagan deeply cares about the project and tends to be involved, on some level, with the vast majority of development
I certainly don't mean to be rude to @Duh_TaleWorlds, as I really appreciate his communication, but his post still amounted to nothing.
This is unnecessary, of course you won't adhere to every request.
Also, I have to say, the way this Forum is layout out and sectioned is so bad it almost feels purposefully designed to harm feedback and break the community up. Does TW really thinks I'll check dozens of forum subsections to add my voice to good and interesting topics? This forum's suggestions subsection is particularly grievous.
I cannot more vehemently disagree. Warband was very balanced between all the action and the true RPG aspect of the game. Bannerlord is almost 100% an action game. The only meaningful thing there is to do in the game is to fight...
Once again, I think you are missing the crux of the argument. Nothing in Bannerlord interlocks. I have gone into extensive detail about it here, a post from last August placed in the Suggestions section of the forum that got not a single acknowledgement from TW. Almost every single thing I commented on that post is valid today.
What I think is fair is for TW to come out and confirm the things that are 100% to very likely to not make it into the game. Sequels are supposed to build on its predecessors, but Bannerlord is shaping up to be less of a sequel to Warband and more of a spiritual successor. That is not what we expected and it is freaking high time we can get some confirmation so we can move on.
Then where the hell is he? He sure didn't mind being public before he got a boat load of cash from this game.
I feel that it is important to clarify a couple of things before going on to responding to the OP. Fırst, this is my personal take on the topic (and some related matters). It isn't a company statement and this will not provide you with a list of final product specifications. I will also primarily focus on things that I have some knowledge of (the single player campaign). Finally, I may note if I find a particular feature more or less necessary or likely alongside some thoughts on the why, but that does not mean it is confirmed or, conversely, excluded / rejected.
To add unto that, I have been with this community for over a decade, coming in as a player, continuing as a modder, then a modding and global moderator and now a developer. That is to say - I am aware of at least some of the realities on both sides and hold both dear.
With that out of the way... I will split the reply into 2 segments. The first will engage with some of the more abstract ideas & sentiments while the second will try to go over at least some of the listed features. That way, people can pick and choose what they want to sift through.
Ideas & Sentiments
I agree that there are plenty of things that can be done to further improve the game. However, working alongside the community to achieve a desirable level of quality does not - to me - mean that a company needs to follow each and every community request.
To begin with, there is no one community nor is there one specific opinion about what features there should be, how they should work in detail and which of them are of what urgency / value. (To give an example, the latter is readily observable in any patch that is perceived to tilt more towards SP or MP content than it "should".)
Naturally, that does not mean that broader trends can't be observed or used. But even at that level, there can obviously be quite distinct, even conflicting opinions across different groups of players. So, to cut a long story short, it is necessary for any developer to make choices in regards to what feedback they can and want to use. Not all ideas are realizable and not all ideas are in harmony.
This is where a central vision comes into play. Which, to me, describes the abstract principles & preferences of a lead developer which guide more specific decisions (f.e. we try to avoid mechanics that purely or primarily require real time for an ingame benefit). So a vision is not an exhaustive feature list or a detailed description of a final product. And the level of detail can vary wildly between vision statements. As MV noted elsewhere
Now, I do think that the product descriptions of Bannerlord go into a fair bit more detail than that. I also believe that most of us have some shared understanding of the core bits of what a Mount & Blade game offers - and that Bannerlord covers them to a degree that makes it recognizably Mount & Blade.
So, to clarify - No, developers don't just all do their own thing. Armagan deeply cares about the project and tends to be involved, on some level, with the vast majority of development. Similarly, community feedback is taken into account, but it informs rather than makes decisions. (Which is, of course, not just down to vision, but also mundane challenges - sometimes an idea that sounded good on paper can't be made to work or has to be pushed back or even dropped due to other priorities.) You may not like or agree with all of the decisions being made and not all of them may necessarily turn out to be the right or best ones. But they must be made - and are made, from what I can tell, with the desire to create a better game.
I feel that part of the frustration comes from a lack of understanding / certainty about community feedback. So I will try to shine some light on the processes. To begin with, we gain and process information from players in a variety of ways. The most straight forward ones are probably our dump-uploader and technical support section. Anything that comes in through these avenues has a very high probability to be investigated. Naturally, it isn't just blind activity either - we try to prioritize problems along the lines of prominence, so that anything that impacts many players is resolved as soon as possible. I think this is particularly evident during the first few months of the Early Access where many patches focused on stabilizing the game. I know there are posts that don't much care for bug fixes or performance improvements, but to me, it was and is the right call to make sure that as many people as possible are able to play the game that they purchased.
The next most apparent avenue is the beta branch, which allows for a closer collaboration between developers and the community - and has verifiably led to good feature adjustments (the most recent example that comes to mind for me is the pillaging feature). Patches in general are, of course, always an opportunity for constructive discussion and so are the releases of our priority statements (where I believe a fair few questions are answered when players post them). Less overt, but also important, are things like the closed (and open) tests that are conducted with members of the multiplayer community as well as our direct lines of discussion with community volunteers or, for instance, the closed testing and workshops we did with some of our modders ahead of the release of the modding tools.
Beyond that, both individual developers (of whom not everyone may feel comfortable posting) as well as the community staff read through and take notes from our various community platforms and other outlets. This is processed both in unstructured, individual discussions as well as regular, dedicated meetings where we go over suggestions. Similarly, what we observe in the community discussions informs our internal prioritization as well. Which brings us to
The statements and video updates share a significant portion of the (short and long term) works that are actively in progress and have a reasonable degree of confidence that changes made to them during development won't betray the expectations that they generate. To me, this is a healthier approach than oversharing in a way that risks false expectations and thereby increases the very frustrations that are present in this thread (and the OP).
We most assuredly do have a vast backlog of tasks, but, for me, providing a public "final feature list" while the game is still heavily in development seems like it would either be misleading or constrain our ability to make adjustments. The current method allows us to share some information while retaining the agility to reevaluate our priorities as content is shared and new issues and feedback come up.
At the end of the day, it is a compromise between competing interests. Obviously, I understand that players want to know more. Especially when they care about a product. I also think that there has been progress in that regard. At the beginning of EA we had neither statements, nor video updates. These were introduced over time. Which I think is fair, because it is important to find the right balance between sharing information and prematurely building expectations - and that is a learning process.
Personally, I believe an opportunity for improvement could be slightly more elaborate statements. I know that a few players were irritated that we retained some prior bulletin points as we updated the SP statement. Of course, that is a necessity if the work on them continues - but it may be more engaging if we elaborated more on the status of the work. For instance, the Lord's Hall Fight has been with us for a while. At the end of December, we showcased the mission in a video update after we were reasonably happy with the prototype. Since then, we have been working on creating all the necessary scenes for other locations, hooking up the different stages within the campaign context (assault first, LH fight after), testing it, fixing various code and scene related problems and now we are looking at improving the AI to better handle the close-quarter context. So, very different stages of development - but still an ongoing work.
This is a difficult topic to discuss, because, of course, I agree that one should share and advertise what is in the game. (Just see the prior segment.) I also don’t know the detailed history given that I started working with the campaign in the Spring of 2019. So the best I can do is share some of my personal thoughts on the matter.
I do not believe that any of these statements were made with malicious intent. To me, it seems likely that TaleWorlds was simply trying to engage their community as they were developing the game. Could they have been more careful with what they were sharing? Probably. But then, it is incredibly difficult to project what will happen over the course of 8-10 years, so the only guarantee would be not to share. Could they have used more careful language? Probably. But then, I'm pretty sure that @Terco_Viejo is already at risk to suffer a stroke from all the mights, mays and maybes that I throw his way. And let's be honest, even if every sentence was labelled with a "Work in Progress / Subject to Change'' disclaimer (which probably most blogs have at least on their screenshots), it still builds expectations. And it's not really what this is about I think.
You and many other people care about the game and want to see it be the best that it can be. And many of the things listed in this topic are well liked by a number of folks. But there is no guarantee that I can give you that they will be in the base game in the way they were described some years ago - or at all. It is perfectly understandable that that is frustrating to you.
But, at the same time, I do want to point out that the development is ongoing. That is to say that some of these points as well as features & content not mentioned here may yet be included in the game. To me, our priority must, however, be with properly finalizing the features that are already in the game - while we also work on introducing new content.
... I spent most of Sunday on this and I need to get some other things done. So, for now, I will cut off here and try to find more time to discuss some of the individual feature / content bits in the future.
Thank you for taking time to give a honest feedback.
We can see that you had to choose carefully your words, because some members of the "community" will jump on any opportunity to start again with the "we are not listened, I can do better than you" drama.
Keep on the good work, Bannerlord is a fun game.
Yeah I'll have to agree with @eddiemccandless and @guiskj, nothing personal against you Duh and I highly respect you're doing this while being off.
But it does feel a bit too "easy" to just say things were too complicated so half the stuff from the devblogs had to be scrapped. And the same goes for pretty much all the missing features from Warband and its DLC's, you guys already did it once with like a 1/10 of the current manpower so why can't they be added to Bannerlord ?
Thank you for taking time to give a honest feedback.
We can see that you had to choose carefully your words, because some members of the "community" will jump on any opportunity to start again with the "we are not listened, I can do better than you" drama.
Keep on the good work, Bannerlord is a fun game.
Thank you for taking time to give a honest feedback.
We can see that you had to choose carefully your words, because some members of the "community" will jump on any opportunity to start again with the "we are not listened, I can do better than you" drama.
Keep on the good work, Bannerlord is a fun game.
I certainly don't mean to be rude to @Duh_TaleWorlds, as I really appreciate his communication, but his post still amounted to nothing.
This is unnecessary, of course you won't adhere to every request.
Also, I have to say, the way this Forum is laid out and sectioned is so bad it almost feels purposefully designed to harm feedback and break the community up. Does TW really think I'll check dozens of forum subsections to add my voice to good and interesting topics? This forum's suggestions subsection is particularly grievous.
I cannot more vehemently disagree. Warband was very balanced between all the action and the true RPG aspect of the game. Bannerlord is almost 100% an action game. The only meaningful thing there is to do in the game is to fight...
Once again, I think you are missing the crux of the argument. Nothing in Bannerlord interlocks. I have gone into extensive detail about it here, a post from last August placed in the Suggestions section of the forum that got not a single acknowledgement from TW. Almost every single thing I commented on that post is valid today.
What I think is fair is for TW to come out and confirm the things that are 100% to very likely to not make it into the game. Sequels are supposed to build on its predecessors, but Bannerlord is shaping up to be less of a sequel to Warband and more of a spiritual successor. That is not what we expected and it is freaking high time we can get some confirmation so we can move on.
Then where the hell is he? He sure didn't mind being public before he got a boat load of cash from this game.
This is all correct. A response in general is appreciated but the response itself is really a lot of words to say nothing of importance other than a vague "we like what we're doing with the game so be more patient plz"
I certainly don't mean to be rude to @Duh_TaleWorlds, as I really appreciate his communication, but his post still amounted to nothing.
This is unnecessary, of course you won't adhere to every request.
Also, I have to say, the way this Forum is laid out and sectioned is so bad it almost feels purposefully designed to harm feedback and break the community up. Does TW really think I'll check dozens of forum subsections to add my voice to good and interesting topics? This forum's suggestions subsection is particularly grievous.
I cannot more vehemently disagree. Warband was very balanced between all the action and the true RPG aspect of the game. Bannerlord is almost 100% an action game. The only meaningful thing there is to do in the game is to fight...
Once again, I think you are missing the crux of the argument. Nothing in Bannerlord interlocks. I have gone into extensive detail about it here, a post from last August placed in the Suggestions section of the forum that got not a single acknowledgement from TW. Almost every single thing I commented on that post is valid today.
What I think is fair is for TW to come out and confirm the things that are 100% to very likely to not make it into the game. Sequels are supposed to build on its predecessors, but Bannerlord is shaping up to be less of a sequel to Warband and more of a spiritual successor. That is not what we expected and it is freaking high time we can get some confirmation so we can move on.
Then where the hell is he? He sure didn't mind being public before he got a boat load of cash from this game.
Thank you for correction!
Ok let's hope it doesn't turn in any kind of drama then. Being constructive is the only way to move on.
Oh, and no I'm not working for Taleworlds by the way.
It seems you are not good at guessing such things, spare your time.
Thank you for correction!
Ok let's hope it doesn't turn in any kind of drama then. Being constructive is the only way to move on.
Oh, and no I'm not working for Taleworlds by the way.
It seems you are not good at guessing such things, spare your time.
This is all correct. A response in general is appreciated but the response itself is really a lot of words to say nothing of importance other than a vague "we like what we're doing with the game so be more patient plz"
governments killed jobs and introduced lockdowns due to covid. that's why we have so much time.
oh, and there's nothing to play too. and the winds of winter isn't coming any time soon™.
life is suffering...
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