Dev Follow-up After a Blog Post

[Terco_Viejo]

Yeah wouldn't that be nice? I will share this quote from Callum https://steamcommunity.com/app/261550/discussions/0/1743353164079829735/ (third comment from bottom).

The only reasons I can think of to explain the silence is having nothing to add, or not being allowed to. Honestly, it takes just a few minutes to comment, so when your job revolves around community engagement, it's hard to imagine any other reason for the silence. He does comment on Steam forums rarely, but it's usually just a response to some troll or complaint.

隐藏: Here you already know who has the frying pan by the handle...

Edit: Two seconds after posting my comment I find that Callum has posted up LOL...independently that event will not make me change my mind. 
Callum we love you the same...even if you don't visit us as often as we would like.

 

[Rabies]

It isn't possible to hold just a village as a fief in Bannerlord (all villages are attached to towns and castles). You can choose a settlement project in a town or castle you hold and (depending on the upgrade) that will directly affect the village(s) connected to that settlement.

What about specific village production features, such as mines or pastures or stables?

Has that feature been ditched altogether, or are they still present as village specialities, but now fixed to each village from the start and not decided on by the player?

 

[Shaxx]

So if 2077 is released prior to Bannerlord, CDPR will have released two triple A titles inside the development span of Bannerlord and will be yet another legendary metric of failure to make you grab your sides in laughter.

Does your metric include CDPR having more than three times as many people and a huge government subsidy?

CDPR is currently eight times larger, closer to the start of the year they were five times larger. You see when you release games people buy them with currency, which you can then use to pay more developers to make your next game sooner, bigger or better than the previous one as desired.

CDPR use to be quite small and very similar in size to TaleWorlds employee wise in 2011 when they released the Witcher 2, keeping the scope of Witcher 3 in check and releasing in 2015 they got a large influx of income to ramp up their future game development and Cyberpunk 2077 is set to release in 2020/2019.

And Turkey also offers subsidies to companies like TaleWorlds but they have officially stated they do not take it, which I think is as about as true as how they like to tout that game has only been in development since 2012/2013 despite evidence to the contrary.

CDPR doesn't remade the game from scratch.

Taleworlds still uses things from Warband in Bannerlord, even in the most recent Gamescomm footage they clearly use some of the same animations for walking/running on foot from Warband. There were similar complaints towards footage from even earlier/previous gaming conventions where people also noticed that fighting on horseback had some very noticeable copy/paste animations. TaleWorlds made note of said feedback and endeavored to finally create some new ones for Bannerlord to quell the outcry over something they thought no one would notice.

Each Bannerlord attempt count as an AAA title released. Only difference is that it didn't sold copies but the work is quite similar.

This is the real reason for the delay, it is not the new* engine, it is the constant 'attempts' at making different parts of the game that are thrown out and started over again or dropped entirely along with feature-creep.

The leveling/skill system reportedly was fully fleshed out and scrapped 3 different times, the effort and time put into castle-building/village management just to be redacted, a console port attempt for release they gave up on, certain multiplayer functionality invested in then dropped, DirectX9 being the primary API the game was made to use which is now no long even planned to be supported on release and so on and so forth.

This is also seen in their blogs as they have described several times the remaking of finished features for somewhat improved alternatives.

On some level this happens with every game's production but it typically just never hits the public sphere, the fact that it has here and that game's production is soon to be encroaching 10 years in development it is obvious that this is a very real problem for them and these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Probably something to do with Taleworlds using a new engine, whereas CDPR are using the REDengine for Cyberpunk. It simply isn't comparable.

Right, because the Witcher 3 had so many cars and machine guns, an easy port, copy/paste no problem, basically the same game.

Just because Taleworlds are calling this engine something else does not mean it isn't just an updated version of their old one just like CDPR did in their Witcher games. This is what Bethesda did with their Gamebyro engine, slapped on a different name on it and called it 'new'.

I think the main point of this topic is not so much regarding the villages blog, but more about the silence from devs after posting a blog. It is very rare to see a dev respond to any of the blogs once they are posted. Most of the time a lot of people are posting questions and speculations, but no confirmations from the devs.

It is clear at this point that when the decision came down to start releasing weekly blogs that was when the decision was made to delay the game's release for several years and the blogs were simply meant to be a low effort olive branch to keep the community at bay. Of course the blogs came off as 'release is soon' rather than anything else, so they did a real nice job there.

As we get closer to the release we will definitely be engaging with you more, and the weekly blogs were just the first step for us in doing that. We plan to do much more in the future in terms of direct engagement with the community, especially after you get to play the game and can provide us with feedback based on your experiences.

I think we just got a release window... as engaging more closer to release we can extrapolate based on current engagement that release is what, 2021?  

 

[vicwiz007]

Yeah wouldn't that be nice? I will share this quote from Callum https://steamcommunity.com/app/261550/discussions/0/1743353164079829735/ (third comment from bottom).

The only reasons I can think of to explain the silence is having nothing to add, or not being allowed to. Honestly, it takes just a few minutes to comment, so when your job revolves around community engagement, it's hard to imagine any other reason for the silence. He does comment on Steam forums rarely, but it's usually just a response to some troll or complaint.

隐藏: Here you already know who has the frying pan by the handle...

Edit: Two seconds after posting my comment I find that Callum has posted up LOL...independently that event will not make me change my mind. 
Callum we love you the same...even if you don't visit us as often as we would like.

Lmao yeah and of course he replies right after i say that 

tbh though it hasnt changed my mind either. Most of the questions do not require much detail, such as the one just answered. It was just two sentences, and I fear it would not have been answered at all had he not seen all this criticism. The "we don't want to spoil too much" thing to me is a poor excuse, just as it was for the dev blogs lack of quality, when 99% of the community wanted more but the one guy in the back of the room cried that they gave away too much when he didnt have to read them in the first place. Just as he doesnt have to read any of the forums! It was a dark time for dev blogs, but theyve improved.

It's like complaining that a movie plot was spoiled after you watched a review with a spoiler warning at the beginning. So then that leaves me with Armagan, the puppet master...

 

[Shaxx]

The "we don't want to spoil too much" thing to me is a poor excuse,

I for one hate the fact that they via their blogs spoiled the inclusion of mounts and blades being in the game.

 

[Terco_Viejo]

What about specific village production features, such as mines or pastures or stables?

Has that feature been ditched altogether, or are they still present as village specialities, but now fixed to each village from the start and not decided on by the player?

I don't think so, take a look at these images I've edited for you.

隐藏: image analysis

Here's the old administration panel along with the settlement variants we've seen in the Gamescom videos...
We found different types of crops, farms (cows), horse breeding, mines and logging.

In this one we see the city of Quyaz with its respective villages (plausible) and the Castle of Ain Baliq.
Tasheba: fishery
Fanab and Hiblet: logging industry
Bay: farm, fruit trees?
Ain baliq: horse breeding

It seems that there are different configurations to decide what type of production we want for our village...as seen in the images. What misleads me is how these improvements will be applied because in the image of the last devblog there is nothing about it....but referring to the city itself (Zeonica)

 

[Rabies]

What about specific village production features, such as mines or pastures or stables?

Has that feature been ditched altogether, or are they still present as village specialities, but now fixed to each village from the start and not decided on by the player?

I don't think so, take a look at these images I've edited for you.

隐藏: image analysis

Here's the old administration panel along with the settlement variants we've seen in the Gamescom videos...
We found different types of crops, farms (cows), horse breeding, mines and logging.

In this one we see the city of Quyaz with its respective villages (plausible) and the Castle of Ain Baliq.
Tasheba: fishery
Fanab and Hiblet: logging industry
Bay: farm, fruit trees?
Ain baliq: horse breeding

It seems that there are different configurations to decide what type of production we want for our village...as seen in the images. What misleads me is how these improvements will be applied because in the image of the last devblog there is nothing about it....but referring to the city itself (Zeonica)

Man! The old version looks so much richer in options and features! I'm sure there is a very good reason or them to have taken village management out, but it does seem like a real shame.

My best guess is that villages will have pre-defined specialities, rather than player-chosen ones, and they won't be able to be upgraded specifically. They will get little production/wealth bonuses applied from upgrades you build in the town or castle they're attached to, but they'll effectively be static features in the villages themselves?

 

[Phalnax811]

It isn't possible to hold just a village as a fief in Bannerlord (all villages are attached to towns and castles). You can choose a settlement project in a town or castle you hold and (depending on the upgrade) that will directly affect the village(s) connected to that settlement.

As for the lack of follow up on blog posts, it is a mixture of things that prevent me from engaging in a deep discussion about any particular subject, but for the most part it is because we want to give you an overview of a feature, but at the same time, we don't want to spoil too much of the game and would much rather leave parts of it for you to discover yourself. A lot of the questions are very direct and would require extremely detailed responses, which leads me back to the first point.

As we get closer to the release we will definitely be engaging with you more, and the weekly blogs were just the first step for us in doing that. We plan to do much more in the future in terms of direct engagement with the community, especially after you get to play the game and can provide us with feedback based on your experiences.

Thank you for the response.

'As we get closer to the release' ....I think that is key. Every year, people think that this is the year we are finally close to a release and want them details about certain things/features/changes.  Some may not and will want to wait to play the game but we don't know if we are close to release or not :/