***Community Feedback ROADMAP - What Taleworlds still needs to fix!***

Does this roadmap represent your basic wants for Bannerlord?

  • Yes

    Votes: 387 86.6%
  • No

    Votes: 60 13.4%

  • Total voters
    447

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8-9 years is what actual most games take to develop and that is considering they tend to all ready have an engine to run off of.
Do you like to invent convenient facts when the reality is inconvenient?
The real number for game development cycle is 3-5 years, if an engine is reused it's more like 2-3 years.
 
8-9 years is what actual most games take to develop and that is considering they tend to all ready have an engine to run off of.
I'm sorry but what? If this was true for "most" games then the game industry wouldn't be the giant titan that it is now. There would only be very very niche games. (Like this one)
 
8-9 years is what actual most games take to develop
Hahahahaha sorry in what world?

"the typical AAA game averages 18–36 months." - David Mullich, Game Design Adjunct Professor at ArtCenter College of Design
and that is considering they tend to all ready have an engine to run off of
It doesn't take nine years to build a game engine. Even a single amateur can build a game engine in 2 years, let alone 20 professional coders. The engine was already being shown off in a rudimentary state at least as early as 2014. A couple of extra years' delay would have been understandable, but not 9 years for a company with ~100 employees and no other active projects.
They scratched there original work and started over with a whole new engine
Apparently this is a widely repeated myth. Nobody has been able to post a source for it.
So folks also have to understand that the internal version may be way ahead of what we actually see out here in EA.
There will certainly be things which are not ready to release for testing, such as the terrain system which is waiting on scenes to be made to populate it, but don't get your hopes up as to the internal version being "way ahead".
I think the problem is with games releasing games EA is folks honestly don't know how long it takes to develop games from announcement
The actual truth here is that development has gone far longer than your average game, and this is mainly because Taleworlds is disorganized, as former employees have said in reviews on Glassdoor.


Taleworlds works as they go, lacking an overall long-term plan (further indicated by the fact it's been over a month since they said "we'll share our long-term plan soon!"- clearly they still have to work out what it actually is).
 
The actual truth here is that development has gone far longer than your average game, and this is mainly because Taleworlds is disorganized, as former employees have said in reviews on Glassdoor.

https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Reviews/TaleWorlds-Reviews-E443487.htm
Taleworlds works as they go, lacking an overall long-term plan (further indicated by the fact it's been over a month since they said "we'll share our long-term plan soon!"- clearly they still have to work out what it actually is).
Thank you for posting these reviews. Been looking for them for a while now. And it honestly sounds like they're going the same route as "Steam" where people basically go at their own rate. Which in turn makes communication and deadline an actual nightmare. Pros and Cons I against.

Though it seems Taleworlds is more strict in some areas.
 
Taleworlds works as they go, lacking an overall long-term plan (further indicated by the fact it's been over a month since they said "we'll share our long-term plan soon!"- clearly they still have to work out what it actually is).
yeah we're not getting another update on that until the community hits the "mob at the door" stage again. at that point they'll slap together something in a few minutes on friday afternoon and call it a day
 
8-9 years is what actual most games take to develop and that is considering they tend to all ready have an engine to run off of. They scratched there original work and started over with a whole new engine so it's honestly not an unrealistic time frame. I think the problem is with games releasing games EA is folks honestly don't know how long it takes to develop games from announcement and it's only on a story board to a finish product. When I beta tested Diablo II it started two years before it was even released (more like a year and half) and they only gave us like a small demo version of the game of what exactly they wanted us to test. When the game came out I was blown away as it pretty much looked like nothing from the stuff we tested. So folks also have to understand that the internal version may be way ahead of what we actually see out here in EA.
But the lack of development is only half the problem. The other half is that the devs are fundamentally divorced from the reality of what players want.

10 people in the MP sub-forum complained that spears were OP and they nerfed spears. That was a year ago. Now spears don't work for s*** and they especially don't work if you use shieldwall or pike square because of collision issues.

Meanwhile, Duh said a little less than 2 months ago that there are no plans to implement any more singleplayer features from WB or features they bragged about in dev blogs for years - despite most players assuming that they'd be in the game.

But, most egregiously, sieges have been broken from Day One and - in over a year of EA development - devs have been busily tweaking weapon stats and unit loadouts and sheep textures while totally ignoring busted sieges. They're constantly playing whack-a-mole with CTD bugs because they introduce new CTD bugs with every release.

It's not just the time, it's the quality. TW has been showing neither.
 
8-9 years is what actual most games take to develop and that is considering they tend to all ready have an engine to run off of. They scratched there original work and started over with a whole new engine so it's honestly not an unrealistic time frame. I think the problem is with games releasing games EA is folks honestly don't know how long it takes to develop games from announcement and it's only on a story board to a finish product. When I beta tested Diablo II it started two years before it was even released (more like a year and half) and they only gave us like a small demo version of the game of what exactly they wanted us to test. When the game came out I was blown away as it pretty much looked like nothing from the stuff we tested. So folks also have to understand that the internal version may be way ahead of what we actually see out here in EA.
Man don't come here and teach me about game development, I have my own game released so I actually know stuff about this.
Edit: Should mention it's not a game at the same scale as Bannerlord obviously, but I still know when things are complicated to do or developers are just being lazy.
 
But it's not even a GOOD battle-sim because it fails to reasonably approximate like... any historical combat ever. If your medieval combat sim cannot simulate shieldwalls or pike squares or archer volleys or polearm combat or SIEGES... like WTF are you even doing?

What is BL even supposed to be?

Agree. I wonder the same thing. I can't help to compare it to Total War and Creative Assembly. Their first games made the best ever battles with historical focus, but somehow that was lost during their success and their focus became something completely different - something that alienated the core players that made their success in the first place. But, they make a ton of money on their games with a very different focus and target group, so it's not like I can blame them. They found out that the total war games were not battle simulator games first and foremost, it was.. well, what can you call the fantasy ones? I dunno, Hero Fantasy RTS Tower Defense games?

I was late to the party with M&B but I played it after a decade of total war games (RTW, M2, ETW) and being in the driver seat in the actual battles rather than some anonymous godlike entity, as I would be in a total war game, was really interesting. It was a unique combination, being the hero, but also commanding troops, having cities etc. Not as grand as a TW game, but fresh and unique. Being so late to M&B though I have few hours in it compared to most in this very forum, I assume.

In Bannerlord, if it's primarily a battle simulator, there lies a significant challenge. Comparing to a TW game might be silly to some of you, but in ie Rome Total War playing different factions meant each playthrough was rather unique. It was so different each playthrough wasn't very repetitive. At least not for me, I have probably thousands of hours of RTW (before Steam kept count). But if Bannerlord is primarily a battle sim it needs a massive overhaul of faction diversity and playstyles to keep being entertaining between playthroughs.

I played around 4-5 characters in BL in the first months of EA, maybe around 150 hours or so. I remember when I stopped playing, it was during a battanian playthrough focusing on battanian war styles, ie foot soldiers, archery, only recruiting battanian units etc, but even so it just felt very similar to my previous playthrough (vlandian), and the one before that. And the one before. I remember so well how I had to FIGHT my urge of getting up on a horse and just do the ol' horse archery schtick again since the running speed level up so incredibly slow and my level 1 peasant outran my level 20 warlord, hah! There isn't significant differences enough to warrant more than one playthrough. Perhaps that's what BL is at the end of the day? The first run was magnificent (khuzait, horse archer), the second was very good too (azerai, trader/horse archer/own kingdom), the third was.. ok? Vlandian heavy cav and cross bow, the fourth was battanian I think or maybe there was one in between. Matters not, what matters is there won't be a next one, there is no point as I know there will be no real change to the way I or the game plays out.
 
But it's not even a GOOD battle-sim because it fails to reasonably approximate like... any historical combat ever. If your medieval combat sim cannot simulate shieldwalls or pike squares or archer volleys or polearm combat or SIEGES... like WTF are you even doing?

What is BL even supposed to be?
+1
 
8-9 years is what actual most games take to develop and that is considering they tend to all ready have an engine to run off of.
As a general rule it is a good habit to look for sources to back up this kind of statement. If nothing else that way you are less likely to say something nonsensical. There's literally lists of "X games that took forever to finish" that you can find where about half of the games presented as having an outrageously high development time still took less than that amount of time to develop. Here's one.


It kind of makes it difficult to take anything else you say seriously when you lead with something like this.
 
Agree. I wonder the same thing. I can't help to compare it to Total War and Creative Assembly. Their first games made the best ever battles with historical focus, but somehow that was lost during their success and their focus became something completely different - something that alienated the core players that made their success in the first place. But, they make a ton of money on their games with a very different focus and target group, so it's not like I can blame them. They found out that the total war games were not battle simulator games first and foremost, it was.. well, what can you call the fantasy ones? I dunno, Hero Fantasy RTS Tower Defense games?

I was late to the party with M&B but I played it after a decade of total war games (RTW, M2, ETW) and being in the driver seat in the actual battles rather than some anonymous godlike entity, as I would be in a total war game, was really interesting. It was a unique combination, being the hero, but also commanding troops, having cities etc. Not as grand as a TW game, but fresh and unique. Being so late to M&B though I have few hours in it compared to most in this very forum, I assume.

In Bannerlord, if it's primarily a battle simulator, there lies a significant challenge. Comparing to a TW game might be silly to some of you, but in ie Rome Total War playing different factions meant each playthrough was rather unique. It was so different each playthrough wasn't very repetitive. At least not for me, I have probably thousands of hours of RTW (before Steam kept count). But if Bannerlord is primarily a battle sim it needs a massive overhaul of faction diversity and playstyles to keep being entertaining between playthroughs.

I played around 4-5 characters in BL in the first months of EA, maybe around 150 hours or so. I remember when I stopped playing, it was during a battanian playthrough focusing on battanian war styles, ie foot soldiers, archery, only recruiting battanian units etc, but even so it just felt very similar to my previous playthrough (vlandian), and the one before that. And the one before. I remember so well how I had to FIGHT my urge of getting up on a horse and just do the ol' horse archery schtick again since the running speed level up so incredibly slow and my level 1 peasant outran my level 20 warlord, hah! There isn't significant differences enough to warrant more than one playthrough. Perhaps that's what BL is at the end of the day? The first run was magnificent (khuzait, horse archer), the second was very good too (azerai, trader/horse archer/own kingdom), the third was.. ok? Vlandian heavy cav and cross bow, the fourth was battanian I think or maybe there was one in between. Matters not, what matters is there won't be a next one, there is no point as I know there will be no real change to the way I or the game plays out.
I know that exact feel.

I got into both Warband and Rome: Total War II back in 2014. Loved the hell out of both, though vanilla Warband had serious issues that are comparable to BL but not remotely as bad.

Then Floris mod and Brytenwalda and Viking Conquest fixed all those issues (including making shieldwalls and pike squares functional), which made it all the more infuriating when BL dropped without learning any lessons from those extremely popular mods and expansions.

Rome TW rewarded intelligent tactics, especially taking into account formation and stamina and morale. I had some beefs: IIRC, Rome TW never allowed legionaries to brace pila against cavalry (as happened historically). But competent players could win battles outnumbered by 2:1 or more through clever use of terrain and flanking to trigger an escalating series of routs which would lead to massacres. And charging a phalanx head-on was always a massacre for any unit, which is historical reality.

Vanilla Warband's meta was all-cavalry + F1 + F3, which was moderately boring. Floris and Viking Conquest spiced that up by improving the defensive power of shieldwalls - which is historically accurate since light cavalry vs spear hedges was always suicide (assuming you can convince a horse to charge one in the first place). Keeping the game a historically-accurate mostly-infantry in VC REALLY improved the gameplay.

BL is just straight-up garbage from a tactics or realism perspective. The only "tactics" you can use are either babysitting the archers so they don't hide in a ditch or personally murdering half the enemy army.

Right now you don't even need to press F1 + F3... F6 will just turn your army over to the AI. Honestly, that's a moderate improvement over vanilla WB but not remotely an improvement over mods that allowed to you to actually structure your formations.

Pert of the problem is that things like stamina and turning rate don't exist in the game. I understand that a lot of gamers hate stamina bars and don't want their units to turn like tanks, but auto-succeed parries for blocking in the right direction or nerfing polearms to make up for the fact that they can 360-no-scope you isn't a better solution.
 
Do you like to invent convenient facts when the reality is inconvenient?
The real number for game development cycle is 3-5 years, if an engine is reused it's more like 2-3 years.
Red Dead Redemption 2 took 8 years
Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 2 years (yep cookie cutter games only take 2-3 years)
Kingdom Com took 5 years

I can go on with games that took 2-8 years, but are you looking at from when it was announced or when they actually started development? Oh those games how many scraped the projected and started all over with a new engine from scratch? Let them take as long as they want, they aren't a AAA studio, but hay ya'll haters are going to hate as long as you can say something.

Maybe it's time for some of ya'll to come to terms it's not going to be a perfect game like ya'll wants, that it will take the modders to make it such. As stated above it was mods like VC and others that made Warband the game that many of us love and still play. TW is just giving them the framework to work on.


As I stated before the mass majority of the post I been reading is just a bunch of cry babies complaining over and over. No wonder why the devs don't want to give you more feed back cause most of the folks one here just want to *****. If the sky was blue they would ***** it wasn't green.
 
Red Dead Redemption 2 took 8 years
Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 2 years (yep cookie cutter games only take 2-3 years)
Kingdom Com took 5 years

I can go on with games that took 2-8 years, but are you looking at from when it was announced or when they actually started development? Oh those games how many scraped the projected and started all over with a new engine from scratch? Let them take as long as they want, they aren't a AAA studio, but hay ya'll haters are going to hate as long as you can say something.

Maybe it's time for some of ya'll to come to terms it's not going to be a perfect game like ya'll wants, that it will take the modders to make it such. As stated above it was mods like VC and others that made Warband the game that many of us love and still play. TW is just giving them the framework to work on.


As I stated before the mass majority of the post I been reading is just a bunch of cry babies complaining over and over. No wonder why the devs don't want to give you more feed back cause most of the folks one here just want to *****. If the sky was blue they would ***** it wasn't green.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is regarded as one of the greatest games of all time, with a fully-fleshed-out world and a great story.

Kingdom Come is a lovingly-detailed RPG of the same stripe with historically-accurate setting + combat + story. It shipped with bugs, but they were all ironed out within a year of release AND they rolled out awesome DLC.

Both of these games had actual dense storylines and voice actors and well-researched background.

Bannerlord has arguably a worse combat engine than Warband, let alone Kingdom Come or Mordhau. The one thing it does better than Warband is sieges, which have been broken from Day One. Bannerlord has a few dozen named characters with about a paragraph of literal in-game wiki text for each of them and - for maybe a couple dozen of them - a couple paragraphs of dialogue. Warband also had full support for modders, which TW has not yet seen fit to do. TW hasn't even seen fit to respond more than once in the TWO MONTHS since the modding community signed an open letter begging for help.

As far as videogames go, it's f***ing lunacy to compare Bannerlord to Red Dead or Kingdome Come. It's an insult to our intelligence.

Bannerlord is comparable in scope and function to Modern Warfare... it ALSO was produced with a new game engine AND had a better story than Bannerlord with voice actors AND was - as you pointed out - completed in 2 years.

Stop white knighting the devs. They don't need you or care about you. You are not accomplishing anything by flaming actual fans of this game. If you don't want the game to be good, then please feel free to GO AWAY and your wish will be granted. You are a living cancer in the rectum of the internet.
 
Red Dead Redemption 2 took 8 years
Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 2 years (yep cookie cutter games only take 2-3 years)
Kingdom Com took 5 years

I can go on with games that took 2-8 years, but are you looking at from when it was announced or when they actually started development? Oh those games how many scraped the projected and started all over with a new engine from scratch? Let them take as long as they want, they aren't a AAA studio, but hay ya'll haters are going to hate as long as you can say something.

Maybe it's time for some of ya'll to come to terms it's not going to be a perfect game like ya'll wants, that it will take the modders to make it such. As stated above it was mods like VC and others that made Warband the game that many of us love and still play. TW is just giving them the framework to work on.


As I stated before the mass majority of the post I been reading is just a bunch of cry babies complaining over and over. No wonder why the devs don't want to give you more feed back cause most of the folks one here just want to *****. If the sky was blue they would ***** it wasn't green.
LMAO you really brought up call of duty my god

that's how i know reddit directed you here

next you'll tell us all to go play fortnite right?
 
Come on now, no reason to start insulting people over the games they may or may not play.
I was referring to redditors' tendency to refer to Call of Duty and Fortnite as some kind of ancient evil that plagues all of gaming. You see it all the time on reddit: "Go play fortnite/Call of Duty you kid/casual"
 
I was referring to redditors' tendency to refer to Call of Duty and Fortnite as some kind of ancient evil that plagues all of gaming. You see it all the time on reddit: "Go play fortnite/Call of Duty you kid/casual"
That happens around here plenty. It is a general PC gaming thing, not something Reddit-centered.
 
I was referring to redditors' tendency to refer to Call of Duty and Fortnite as some kind of ancient evil that plagues all of gaming. You see it all the time on reddit: "Go play fortnite/Call of Duty you kid/casual"
Apologies then, looking back I clearly misread your post.
 
Red Dead Redemption 2 took 8 years
Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 2 years (yep cookie cutter games only take 2-3 years)
Kingdom Com took 5 years
You said "most games take 8-9 years". Now you're listing a single game that supports your argument.

Just admit it, most games take 2 years. I have already quoted an expert on this and you ignored it.
Maybe it's time for some of ya'll to come to terms it's not going to be a perfect game like ya'll wants
The OP isn't asking for a "perfect game". In fact, I literally said: "Taleworlds can't make everyone's perfect game."

The post only asks for the game to have everything good that Warband had, and everything that Taleworlds themselves promised prior to release to be in the game and useful.
As stated above it was mods like VC and others that made Warband the game that many of us love and still play
Mods weren't needed to make Warband have all of its vanilla features.
As I stated before the mass majority of the post I been reading is just a bunch of cry babies complaining over and over.

No wonder why the devs don't want to give you more feed back cause most of the folks one here just want to *****. If the sky was blue they would ***** it wasn't green.

but hay ya'll haters are going to hate as long as you can say something.
Most people here are not complaining for the sake of complaining.

Bannerlord is missing a significant number of good features from the last game in the series, and still missing a lot of features that were promised to be in the game. And even the features that are in the game are almost all broken in some way.

Comparatively little progress has been made during a year of Early Access, in the time other games studios of this size could make half a game. Taleworlds' communication about these delays and their plans has been extremely vague and slow, to the people who have collectively given them hundreds of millions of dollars. They don't deserve you defending them for free.

Personally I am happy to wait so long as things continually improve, but Taleworlds needs to work faster, be better at communicating, and get themselves a clear plan. That is not an unreasonable request after nearly a decade of messy development.
 
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