Consider: Post Release.

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Might not love this games overall design, but I have to side with Apocal on the economy arguement. It is absolutely intricately simulated, theres no say about it. The notables, caravan systems and village production (also village to town trade) are very detailed. Of course, this cannot fully come to light for some of the players because huge sections of the game are severely lacking
 
Might not love this games overall design, but I have to side with Apocal on the economy arguement. It is absolutely intricately simulated, theres no say about it. The notables, caravan systems and village production (also village to town trade) are very detailed. Of course, this cannot fully come to light for some of the players because huge sections of the game are severely lacking

Villagers do not buy anything from the towns. They only sell to the town. It would be cool if villagers purchased stuff from towns based on what was actually happening to the village. But that doesn't happen, they only sell.

Invisible NPCS in each town, called Artisans, buy and produce trade goods each day. I have not seen any evidence that these artisans are specialized or custom, I think its just a general Artisan in each town.

Carvans don't behave with any sort of intelligence, they just buy low and sell high. Its not like if a town needs grain it sends a caravan out to trade for it, it just goes from town to town buying low and selling high. Carvans don't take orders so to speak. It would be cool if they did or even could.

Notables don't do anything with the economy that I have observed. Like I said, villagers don't buy from the town.

The economy would make a lot more sense if it was effected by weather or seasons or disease, if the entire world economy was effected by major wars, or shortages of items, maybe even if certain clothes (wool, silk, linen) were the fad in certain courts by nobles, you know, immersive stuff like that.

I honestly think you are giving them way more credit than what's due for the lackluster system we have. You literally only have to concern yourself with buy low sell high, nothing else comes into it, nothing else to think about. Its very simple.
 
As much as Taleworlds is a trendchasing company nowadays I really don't think the radial menu is intrinsically a console thing, nor is reduced complexity in game mechanics. Plenty of PC only games in recent years have been going on that trajectory because that's what the game psychologist journals tell them is effective. Anyway, in many ways bannerlord is a lot more complex than warband, with an esoteric leveling system I still don't really get, a hypercomplex combat system that literally nobody outside the company truly understands, and a food / garrison / siege system that I actually think could be good and that warband was missing. It's just that most of this complexity is on the edges of how most people interact with the game.
Perhaps the radial menu is not specifically done for consoles, but the whole design philosophy appears to be going that way. I still think the console path is highly plausible overall. Even if it has nothing to do with consoles, it's quite clear that it's about dumbing down the game to appeal to as much of an audience as possible. The ways you point out Bannerlord being more complex than Warband, don't quintessentially have anything to do with complexity in player choice or good game design, but rather, poor and sloppy game design and/or more modern technology and software.
ITS RANDOM - its does not appear tied to an ACTUAL need of the army its in. I'm not sure why you keep asserting that it is.
I am quite sure that many of the supposedly "advanced mechanics" are really just random dice rolls. Maybe this has changed since I experienced this (I doubt it) but diplomacy for instance seems to be completely random. I once had my faction declare war on two other factions (faction B and C), while already being in an existing war with a separate faction (faction A), when we were already losing by warring against faction A. Losing one war and starting two others doesn't sound like a good idea. I reloaded the game for a reason I can't remember, and they instead made peace with faction A, and didn't engage in any other war for a very long time. I reloaded that same save again, just to see what would happen, and our faction made peace with faction A and then declared war against another completely random faction D. Completely random, completely different outcomes based on nothing. Absolutely no diplomacy AI. Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't have diplomacy, war, and geopolitics decided by rolling a dice?
 
They could just go the route of having 2 separate versions, one for PC and one for Console.

Similar to how Minecraft has Java Edition and Bedrock. Nobody forces them to have the PC version be the exact same as Console.
 
They could just go the route of having 2 separate versions, one for PC and one for Console.

Similar to how Minecraft has Java Edition and Bedrock. Nobody forces them to have the PC version be the exact same as Console.
The thing is, Minecraft is now of Microsoft, which is somewhat bigger than Taleworlds.
 
Might not love this games overall design, but I have to side with Apocal on the economy arguement. It is absolutely intricately simulated, theres no say about it. The notables, caravan systems and village production (also village to town trade) are very detailed. Of course, this cannot fully come to light for some of the players because huge sections of the game are severely lacking

Interesting choice though, as a company owner you’d have to carefully plan your resources over a limited period of time (in most cases) to get the best return on investment. So spending a lot of resources on a feature that goes by mostly unnoticed means it cant be spent on features that do get noticed. Pro’s and con’s and such..
 
I am quite sure that many of the supposedly "advanced mechanics" are really just random dice rolls. Maybe this has changed since I experienced this (I doubt it) but diplomacy for instance seems to be completely random.
Diplomacy has always been (explicitly) biased with RNG but there are enough non-random elements to make stuff like the Aserai-Khuzait NAP a thing in past versions.
 
Interesting choice though, as a company owner you’d have to carefully plan your resources over a limited period of time (in most cases) to get the best return on investment. So spending a lot of resources on a feature that goes by mostly unnoticed means it cant be spent on features that do get noticed. Pro’s and con’s and such..
Or just get a hype train going for 12 years and then release a half-baked incomplete shell of a game and rake in 90 million USD in profit. That works too.
 
They could just go the route of having 2 separate versions, one for PC and one for Console.

Similar to how Minecraft has Java Edition and Bedrock. Nobody forces them to have the PC version be the exact same as Console.
The thing is, Minecraft is now of Microsoft, which is somewhat bigger than Taleworlds.

Also the Bedrock edition isn't just a console version. It's a remake of the entire game from scratch in C++ because Notch is not a great coder and java is not a great language. Eventually the Java Edition will be phased out.

No other company has any real incentive to make different versions of mechanics for console and PC. Most people buy games without checking how the UI works or how well the port fits the platform, so all they need to do is have it be reasonably functional and nobody else will care.

Perhaps the radial menu is not specifically done for consoles, but the whole design philosophy appears to be going that way. I still think the console path is highly plausible overall. Even if it has nothing to do with consoles, it's quite clear that it's about dumbing down the game to appeal to as much of an audience as possible. The ways you point out Bannerlord being more complex than Warband, don't quintessentially have anything to do with complexity in player choice or good game design, but rather, poor and sloppy game design and/or more modern technology and software.

The reason I'm skeptical that they're deliberately trying to dumb down the game is that the levelling system is now way more of a complicated unintuitive mess, and the combat system is so byzantine that during the closed beta nobody could figure out why the timing for different attacks seemed random.

A fully randomised system and an overcomplicated obfuscated system are basically impossible to distinguish.

However it's entire possible that in some way we're both right, and that there is a disagreement between developers whether to make the game "simpler for consoles" or whether to make it more of a simulation, because it definitely feels like there's a bit of both.
 
I don't think they have any particular goals in mind tbh. "Let's dumb it down for consoles" implies a level of project organization and managerial competence that TW has not, in any way, demonstrated.
 
However it's entire possible that in some way we're both right, and that there is a disagreement between developers whether to make the game "simpler for consoles" or whether to make it more of a simulation, because it definitely feels like there's a bit of both.
Add to this how the main quest seems to be tucked on and neglected. It's the most glaring anti-sandbox part that goes against the philosophy of other game design decisions. As if too many people decided what should be in the game.
 
And lots of times you will see bandit bases with no quest to eliminate the bandit base.
yeah this one is annoying, they'll be like 3 bases right next to villages and nobody cares. I don't know if the quest spawns it's own base or not, but the game just checks how many bases and parties there are and makes more every day, the less there are the more it make, the more, the less it make. Granted that was awhile ago I read that, but I doubt it has changed.

At some point I hope it gets changed to have actually causes and preventions and also the spawning of bandits/looters should coincide with some kind of population loss of villages or towns, like the people got mad and turned criminal.

I don't know about all the quests but it really annoys me when multiple villages have "need help with brigands" but there's no ****ing brigands near bye. I'm inclined to think there is some basic trigger that allows some quests to appear over others as I do notice often clusters of the same quest at once in an area very often. Also, long long spells of no quests, everything is honky dory in your area and so you're rewarded by not being able to boost you relation for a year or more.
 
Is that your piece of evidence ? A freaking UI change ?
LOL no... Just one piece of the puzzle, but taken together with just about everything else...

That's easy: I knew he didn't say the game was "complete." Playable is subjective but complete is a lot less so. As for the other? You literally had to cut out the sentence half of my sentence to reach this conclusion:

Four new features, zero big/drastic changes.

And you cutting out half my sentence was honest?
If you look at what your statements are responding to... It's all about context as @JustinTime49 has said. You were arguing against my arguments with statements that were made to contradict what I was saying - yet there was nothing there of substance, it was very contradictory and it seems I wasn't the only one struggling to figure out what you were saying.

But it doesn't matter - my point was that top brass at TW were already giving us crumbs as to what the game was and is without outright saying it... No, it's not completely complete, but expecting anything more than balancing and bug fixes is illogical pie-in-the-sky stuff at this point.
 
You were arguing against my arguments with statements that were made to contradict what I was saying - yet there was nothing there of substance, it was very contradictory and it seems I wasn't the only one struggling to figure out what you were saying.
There was no contradiction there, and you knew there wasn't, which is why you cut that quote short.
 
LOL no... Just one piece of the puzzle, but taken together with just about everything else...

So basically your interpretation, now jump onto conclusions you want if that make you feel better, that's my whole point afterall, I'm just pointing the amount of evidences we got are iffy.
 
So basically your interpretation, now jump onto conclusions you want if that make you feel better, that's my whole point afterall, I'm just pointing the amount of evidences we got are iffy.
This game is clearly marketed to the causal (Xbox) gamer, not sure why this is so difficult for you all.
 
I'm a virulent detractor of this game, but @Kentucky 『 HEIGUI 』 James and @Apocal are right about the economic/quest systems being complex.

The problem isn't that the systems aren't there. The problem is that the systems are busted.

The average player will never notice that quests are contingent on triggering factors like bandit camps - because bandit camps respawn too fast for you to even notice. There's practically no difference between the quest spawning the camp and the camp spawning the quest because they happen with such ridiculous speed.

Similarly, the economic system looks less sophisticated than it was in Warband because the tolerances of the price system are busted (with overly-strong price elasticity and poor/no substitution effect and AFAIK no stickiness from chronic shortages). Also it's all driven by the prosperity mechanic, which is not remotely balanced to the prevailing market conditions even at game start.

But they're also wrong about all this being evidence against BL being dumbed down for a console port. There's plenty of evidence from commented out code that BL used to be more complex further back in the dev process and this could be a relic of that time - or it could just be something a TW exec thought was important for completely arbitrary reasons.

My hypothesis: Somebody coded a complex economy system at a time when TW considered that important. Eventually the winds shifted to dumbing down the game for a console port and - since it doesn't sound too resource-intensive and it's not visible enough for console players to notice anyway - nobody bothered to either take it out or maintain it. It's just a vestigial organ at this point.

Perhaps the same logic applies to the janky leveling system. Also whatever's going on with smithing. Also the personality system and conversations with notables and the persuasion mini-game.

These systems all exist in the game but haven't been touched since EA launch because nobody at TW cares about them one way or the other - right up to the moment where somebody claims something is an "exploit", at which point TW applies the nerf bat.

ALSO: mexxico explicitly told us that he was working on dumbing down AI for consoles. Do I really need to dig up and link that old thread?
 
My hypothesis: Somebody coded a complex economy system at a time when TW considered that important. Eventually the winds shifted to dumbing down the game for a console port and - since it doesn't sound too resource-intensive and it's not visible enough for console players to notice anyway - nobody bothered to either take it out or maintain it. It's just a vestigial organ at this point.
It isn't vestigial. mexxico has spent weeks (maybe months) tweaking and balancing it since the start of EA. The price elasticity stuff is all him.
No need to dig that much... Link
I know the post but your link is bad.
 
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