does it feel like this game lacks a soul?

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To be honest, I feel that way with all Sandbox type games. In my opinion, the "Soul" of a Sandbox game tends to be what you give it. For example, I assign all sorts of roleplay reasons to why my character does things. Right now for example, I am about as perfectly positioned to form my Kingdom as you could be. I have 2 Cities and 4 castles all clustered in a near perfect position, however, my current liege hasn't given me a reason to tell him to screw up and start my own Kingdom so from a roleplay perspective I am prevented form doing this. To put it simple, you have to create my own story or "Soul" in a Sandbox and I don't think everyone is capable of doing that.
Would not find better words myself. By the way... this forum is a supernova of verbal confrontations between Storytelling and Sandbox enthusiasts.

P.S. I tried Valheim on single player recently...and however i very much like this game from esthetic point of view and possibilities of shaping the reality - the world itself seems empty of non-hostile creatures and soulless in a way descirbed in this thread. Simply lacks NPCs. Bannerlord is not that bad compared to Valheim imo. You have lords, their own agenda, settlement inhabitants with their quests, bandits, could be worse.. It is however far away from Rimworld - Social top of any sandbox game i have ever played before.
 
Rimworld is designed as a storytelling sandbox. Frankly, I think that makes Tynan a genius in terms of game design. The more I read this thread, the more I believe that what Bannerlord needs is more dynamism. I'd have been happier with a Bannerlord playthrough set exclusively in Vlandia if they made the systems of interaction more responsive. I don't know what they're focusing on right now, but I think they've lost sight of what makes games fun.
 
Was Jeremus an 'unforgettable icon' because his backstory was significantly more interesting? - or because he appeared in every playthrough, for every player and therefore was a 'shared' experience?

Regardless - the best solution will clearly be for a combination of generated and crafted companions, with the latter provided by mods if not vanilla.
Oh no, I never praised Warbands writing (even though here and there there is more to do involving dialog) but its in part the "shared experience" and in part - and this is more important to me - the feeling that these people exist in this world and there is someone who is interested in their own causes (even though it's only through a dialog and not in actions shamefully) rather than just you. That's why companions felt like people living around and in Bannerlord they're just bots with the purpose of living for you. I remember playing Pendor, and there the characters had dialogs between them here and there, that was cool in my opinion, it felt like my army wasn't just composed of people meant for death.
 
The whole "we give it the soul" argument is flawed in my opinion. There are numerous sandbox games that have a personality of its own and those worlds feel like they have lives of their own where you are another person that influences that world. In Bannerlord's case, the world its completely numb and it's impossible to influence, even if you become the king of the whole continent there will be people that will be completely devoid of knowledge on who the hell you are - and this is, before you put any excuse, unintentional - you ever go to an amateur play, or an improvisation show and see one actor proposing something, and the other actor being awful and dumb, instead stays still and gets nervous and doesn't know what the hell to do, well that seems to be the case with every NPC here, the dialog and interaction systems make it so every action you do is unimportant. See, you might have saved the whole faction or conquered 5 towns, or won every single tournament you touched, the game simply doesn't care about it, because events don't matter. Of course you could give it a "soul" and make it so the queen comes to you and knights you for your efforts but the thing is the ludo narrative is completely broken, the moment you have to go into your mind for these things to unfold. Therefore stories can only happen in the player's head, not in the player's experience, and that eventually drives everybody off, and definetly not everybody wants to make an effort to imagine each piece of gameplay to make it fun.
 
I suppose you're right that we give games their soul. Based on others' responses, however, my problem seems to be that Bannerlord makes it hard for me to do that. Look at Rimworld: that is a sandbox with mechanics that make storytelling in a playthrough easy for anyone. The solution would be for BL devs to develop mechanics that help people tell their stories; the game world needs to interact with players in a way it doesn't right now.

Oh I agree with you. I was actually agreeing with you in the first comment I made. I don't feel Bannerlord has a soul at all. I was just pointing out how most sandbox type games seem to lack in that department because the expectation is that you will provide that soul. However, I will go one step further in agreeing with you that very few of the game mechanics in Bannerlord assist you with providing that soul. There just isn't enough depth.

I mean in my example to you, I mention I wanted to create a Kingdom but can't find a roleplay reason to do so. In a good sandbox there would be tons of depth that would actually create situations where I might decide to say defect and join another faction or decide to go it alone. Maybe an enemy King would come to me and make me an offer like we do their lords or a lord in my faction who dislikes the king would come to me to ask if I wanted to be part of a coup or the kingdom gets split by a huge civil war which causes me to consider joining one of the factions of the civil war or just say hell with them all and create my on kingdom.

However, none of these situations occur, No mechanic like this exist. Instead I have to try to convert some random stupidity in the game, like getting overruled a vote for a fife or a situation like in one of my previous playthroughs were my Kingdom declared a second war on the other side of the map, then left my territory to burn while the dumb AI kept all the lords fighting the other faction, into a reason for me to rebel and start my own Kingdom.

So yeah, Bannerlord's is absolutely missing most anything to assist with you creating a soul for the game.
 
It also felt easier to suspend disbelief in Warband somehow. Maybe it's because it was uglier and simpler so we expected less. Now, the world of Bannerlord is huge and empty. It's like how in Cyberpunk the city feels lifeless when the AI is basically the same as any 'generic civilian AI' from The Witcher.
 
It also felt easier to suspend disbelief in Warband somehow. Maybe it's because it was uglier and simpler so we expected less. Now, the world of Bannerlord is huge and empty. It's like how in Cyberpunk the city feels lifeless when the AI is basically the same as any 'generic civilian AI' from The Witcher.
It's almost too full - but shallow. There are more companions (but generated, not familiar), more lords, town notables, village notables, as well as bandits and caravans. But as others have said, the dialogue is too generic and (apart from some minor wording changes) doesn't reflect your standing or relationships very well. There more shallow dialogues you have, the shallower they feel.
 
WB had some of this elements, very basic stuff if you ask me... so eveyone expected something better due it looked easy to improve but we get a souless world. :shock:
It reminds me of the world that Truman was kept into... What is far beyond the square world's borders of Calradia ?
 
Ahhh been half a year since I played and maybe since I last commented or posted a thread here and I still see this is a big issue with the game not that I'm suprised. I've put 60 hrs into this game and nearly 300 into vanilla warband and 1.4k with it modded I had it on xbox before I got it on pc hense why I've got 300hrs unmodded. Bannerlord couldn't keep me entertained for more than 60 hrs with its boring repetitive gameplay i had fought one defensive siege in that time suprisingly and the ai didn't build any siege equipment haha the game has no immersion the ai is terrible the only good thing is the field battles but after the 10000th battle it got very boring when the ai would only have low tier troops
 
The game's dialog mechanic uses a system "tags" and "weights" to determine which line an npc should speak, but currently when the game loads in the all of the dialog lines, it hardcodes the weights of all of the associated tags to a value of 1 instead of using the weights that are specified in the xml files.

oqUVt.png

That essentially blocks a certain portion of the dialog lines from ever being chosen, and it's also the reason that your spouse won't call you wife/husband, because the "PlayerIsSpouse" tag is supposed to have a weight of 10 for those greetings, but is instead assigned a weight 1 when they are loaded in. It also causes dialog lines with negative weights to be selected in the wrong situations.

V1E9-.png

It's anyone's guess whether hardcoding it like that is just temporary while they work on it, an oversight/bug, or they switched to a different system and haven't worked out all the kinks yet ?‍♂️.

Also, I think some of the conversation tags are either bugged or redundant, which has an effect too.

Edit: It's the LoadFromXML method in the GameTextManager class.
 
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Why is there some "random" player who is able to find more bugs and/or non working functions than the actual devs? And even suggests how to fix the code?

Of course I appreciate that very much but still :grin: .
 
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