Dev Blog 16/08/18

[parsehtml]<p><img class="frame" src="https://www.taleworlds.com/Images/News/blog_post_53_taleworldswebsite.jpg" alt="" /></p> <p>Gamescom is just around the corner and we are sure that many of you are eager to hear about what we will be showing at the event. Instead of stringing you along and leaving it as a surprise, we thought we would take a different approach this year by being upfront with you about what we will be presenting in Cologne.</p></br> [/parsehtml]Read more at: http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/73

 

[ArnulfFloyd]

Companions deserting will increase difficulty and micromanagement

 

[Lord Engineer (Castor)]

Probably, but I don't think it would be a major spike in difficulty or micromanagement. It would be more like make bad decisions (A.K.A. pick bad companions), get bad results (desertion).

 

[JuanNieve]

I hope we can capture the companions of other lords and pass them to our side

 

[NPC99]

I hope we can capture the companions of other lords and pass them to our side

I gave up recruiting from my prisoners in Warband because they always deserted fairly quickly making the morale reduction pointless. I expect we’ll get something similar recruiting enemy companions in BL

 

[Dalion]

Companion quarrels are annoying and hinder me with annoying popups and losing valuble soldiers.

Not only because they're annoying but also because it barely has any logic behind. You have a 200+ army from all around the world: soldiers, mercenaries, recruits, farmers, maybe even rescued prisoners and they are totally fine with each other and won't bother you with complains as long as you pay wages and have some food but then... You hire two people from nearby town (Matheld & Ymira for example) and they start a quarrel because of... a piece of loot? Seriously? Or someone like Jeremus complaining after a village raid when you have 40 farmers in your party that are totally ok with it? I mean if all of my 100+ men are glad that we won, one guy shouldn't be popping up with "heavy casualties" complaint only because his hp are in percentages....

 

[Crowcorrector]

Companion quarrels are annoying and hinder me with annoying popups and losing valuble soldiers.

Not only because they're annoying but also because it barely has any logic behind. You have a 200+ army from all around the world: soldiers, mercenaries, recruits, farmers, maybe even rescued prisoners and they are totally fine with each other and won't bother you with complains as long as you pay wages and have some food but then... You hire two people from nearby town (Matheld & Ymira for example) and they start a quarrel because of... a piece of loot? Seriously? Or someone like Jeremus complaining after a village raid when you have 40 farmers in your party that are totally ok with it? I mean if all of my 100+ men are glad that we won, one guy shouldn't be popping up with "heavy casualties" complaint only because his hp are in percentages....

Well in my mind the companions are officers in my army.  All the soldiers intermingle but the companions have ahigher interaction between eachother.  In macro scale I'm the Major of the company, the companions are the leutenants and captains, who have to work together to coordinate the soldiers... hence disagreements betweem them affect me as the commander

 

[Dalion]

In macro scale I'm the Major of the company, the companions are the leutenants and captains, who have to work together to coordinate the soldiers... hence disagreements betweem them affect me as the commander

True but don't the real officer know that attacking a caravan in a war period has actually a purpose and its not a common bandit raid? I could be ok with their personal quarrels sometimes but why should a merchant daughter that joined you for free even question a party leader decision?

 

[FBohler]

- In the first place, making an early build sellable is quite a diversion from the main goal (full game release);

I don't think it's a diversion, rather one step prior on the same path of a full release.

- It's going to cater most part of the long waiting die-hard community, who bought EA original M&B as well, which is a tiny part of the broader audience nowadays

What's the problem with this? The hardcore fans are those most likely to give the most valuable feedback.

- While gathering user feedback is nice and everything, it's going to stretch the schedule even more to add and tweak both new and existing features based on fan feedback.

This is something that will be done regardless. Early access enables the developers to perform those changes before the game is released in its full form.

Making an unfinished game totally playable isn't part of the development pipeline. It may become playable only in later stages of the development, for balancing sake.

While feedback may be valuable, I don't think it's worth to make an EA build just to get user feedback, they can go straight for full release and then patch balance and improvements gathered from user feedback. Don't you agree with me that any change made to the game in this stage must not be more substantial than a minor feature or balancing/technical issues.

On your third point, implementing said changes would take time and resources, pushing the delivery of the final product further away.

 

[Bjorn The Broken]

Companions are not soldiers nor peasants. You have every access how to level them up in the way how you want them to be so it is very reasonable to have these side effects for companions in WB.

 

[Silen]

Making an unfinished game totally playable isn't part of the development pipeline. It may become playable only in later stages of the development, for balancing sake.

A game may very well be playable way before its completion, whether intended to be done with an early access in mind or not, depending on what is left to finish it. I don't see how it would delay the development. Making the game playable is something that will be done, with or without early access, with the latter most likely made available once the game is indeed in a playable state already.

Don't you agree with me that any change made to the game in this stage must not be more substantial than a minor feature or balancing/technical issues.

We don't know at what stage of production Taleworlds will release early access. What I consider a likely scenario is making it available once balancing and minor tweaks are all that is left to do before calling it done. Bear in mind that we have no clue of what form of early access they will go for. We don't even know if it will include both multiplayer and singleplayer, and what parts of them.

While feedback may be valuable, I don't think it's worth to make an EA build just to get user feedback, they can go straight for full release and then patch balance and improvements gathered from user feedback.

On your third point, implementing said changes would take time and resources, pushing the delivery of the final product further away.

Tweaking the game based on user feedback will be done with or without an early access. It will still take a certain amount of time and resources, except in case of EA those changes would've been made already once the game's full version released, giving those who did not participate a more or less complete experience right on delivery.

However I'm no game developer and I could very well be wrong here with my assumptions, but ultimately if Taleworlds deemed it inconvenient, I doubt they would opt for it.

 

[kalarhan]

Tweaking the game based on user feedback will be done with or without an early access

another aspect is how much the company is willing to invest on such changes. Before release they have the full team working as fast as possible to make it to release. After release, most games have only skeleton crews that are not capable (resources-wise) of doing any major changes. Most devs would be working either on a expansion/DLC or the next big thingy (or in some cases, just not be part of the company anymore).

we have no idea how TW will handle the pos-release of Bannerlord and for how long they will keep their full team on it.

 

[vicwiz007]

Just as we don't usually appreciate what we have until we lose it, the same principle may apply to companions. In Warband, the careless attitude that we have towards companions might be explained by the fact that they never die. The prospect of losing your best and most loyal friend in battle can incentivize the players to care more about that aspect. I'm not a fan of long paragraphs explaining where he is from and who his ancestors were, but small and randomly generated narratives could be fun for role-playing purposes.

Well there is the problem- You can't have a finite number of preset companions if they can die because eventually thered just be none, so hopefully the generated ones can strike a good balance. You should care if they die but they also need to be at least a little unique, which as I said earlier can be done with the events system, grudges, and whatever else.

@Callum I have an idea on hiring companions: implement scammers. Remember how in Warband you paid sums like 300-400 denars for hiring a companion because he needed money for something? It would be interesting to have a risk factor when deciding on whether to pay or not to pay. That would definitely make you more careful when reading someone's backstory. This feature can be tied to the gang system in towns: maybe that one who plays the poor broken guy looking for adventures is in fact a gang member who needs to be taken care of.

This I like! Especially since we've been told crime is a great early game money maker, it will make it harder to do so if you need to find a scummy person you can actually trust to run the crime for you.

 

[Lord Engineer (Castor)]

@Callum I have an idea on hiring companions: implement scammers. Remember how in Warband you paid sums like 300-400 denars for hiring a companion because he needed money for something? It would be interesting to have a risk factor when deciding on whether to pay or not to pay. That would definitely make you more careful when reading someone's backstory. This feature can be tied to the gang system in towns: maybe that one who plays the poor broken guy looking for adventures is in fact a gang member who needs to be taken care of.

This I like! Especially since we've been told crime is a great early game money maker, it will make it harder to do so if you need to find a scummy person you can actually trust to run the crime for you.

I've already expressed my interest in this sort of thing but I'll do it again. I would love to see a feature like this implemented, not everyone should be so trustworthy and hiring a criminal to run crimes for you sounds exactly like the sort of thing that a person does whilst building their criminal empire. It could add another element of role playing to the game.

Don't get me wrong I love Mount & Blade, obviously, but in the previous games it was sort of lacking in some of the roleplaying aspects and I would like to see that improved upon.

 

[DtheHun]

I gave up recruiting from my prisoners in Warband because they always deserted fairly quickly making the morale reduction pointless. I expect we’ll get something similar recruiting enemy companions in BL

If I remember well, they don't esape from guard if you garrison them before midnight.

 

[ArnulfFloyd]

If many looking to minor things, I thinks about campaign mechanics(not family and RP), we can massacre, burn and enslave settlements Sieges? Boiling oil will kill me if I get near gatehouse

 

[RoboSenshi]

Anyone know when we can expect videos of the demos to start coming out?

Finally

隐藏

 

[Volkodav]

Is there going to be a livestream of Bannerlord gameplay on TaleWorld's Twitch account?

 

[Whatever makes you happy]

wrong again - only 2 town scenes per faction will be accessible per Armagan.

He didn't say anything about villages. I'd genuinely be surprised if all village scenes were in the demo but, at the same time, it's weird that he only talked about towns.

 

[NPC99]

wrong again - only 2 town scenes per faction will be accessible per Armagan.

He didn't say anything about villages. I'd genuinely be surprised if all village scenes were in the demo but, at the same time, it's weird that he only talked about towns.

Towns are more complicated, covering larger areas, having arenas, criminal alleys, markets, enterprises, sieges etc. I suspect villages are more modular (particularly their three levels of castle).

 

[vicwiz007]

@Lord Engineer
Oh no man i get it entirely. I went back and looked at vanilla warband (and even mods really) and theres actually not much to do at all... its just running around looting and recruiting, doing monotonous quests for lords etc etc rinse and repeat. You know i can go on and on, but somehow it is a game so many of us loved for all these years. It was basically just a very good concept and great modding platform lol

Idk why i say this here, but its just that seeing BL news and whatnot makes me look at warband worse.