How come the game experience varies so much between players?

[prefrontal]

One thing I am constantly wondering is how the game seems to perform so differently for a lot of players. Many people are experiencing severe performance drops, stuttering, crashes and various other severe bugs. I've never had that happen to me. I bought the game on launch but only played it starting 1.5.7. I had no crashes that weren't caused by mods, my game runs smoothly all the time, even in big battles, menus and load times are very fast (i find almost no difference between the direct talk option and visiting the scene option in settlements for example), and most importantly, the ai seems to act better in my game, too. For example, in the dreaded sieges, most units use ladders and even towers for me. Granted, they are still being very dumb but by no measure dumber than they were in Warband. I gather from some of the posts here, that this seems to be the case for some people as well who have a technically more or less functional experience (even when lacking in substance, but this is not the point of the post).

Is it just hardware? That seems implausible to me because I play on a laptop lol, I certainly don't have a high end setup and some people with very good specs have bad experiences? What are the reasons for these very different player experiences, does anybody know?

 

[Spinozart1]

Same for me.
Sometimes I feel like I'm playing a different/parralel version of bannerlord.
I started from 1.5.6 and the only crash I experienced was with a mod.
I can see my troops stucked in front of ladders sometimes (depends of the wall level) but globally it is still playable.
For sure AI in siege still needs improvement though.

 

[Philozoraptor]

Some people have prior experience with WB and expected upgrade not shallow sidegrade with better graphics. Some people play games for 4 hours, and say this is so cool and then move to next thing. Some people have standards while other seem to love when devs are treating them like trash (I assume buyers remors, justification for spending money / time is at play here). Some people wants complex gameplay while other are OK with cutting few looters to pieces from horseback. Some people wnat more realism while some want more arcade gameplay. Some people want very simple (so they can feel good instantly by mastering it) combat system while others want learning curve so they can feel like achieving somethihing that required actual training.

AKA people are different and average person (no offense, but most of buyers are gonna by average due to bell curve) is probably going to have average needs / demands / satisfaction threshold.

Edit: also lot of stuff was promised during the years prior to release and people were hoping it is actually gonna be in the game. In my case for example I see all the potential of the game and I am extremely dissapointed with how it was fulfilled up to this point, how slow the development is, how amateurish it is (I am talking from the experience just look at visuals of castles during release and their Frankenstein state now), how in wrong direction from deisgn perspective it is. For example if 90% of your gameplay is fighting, first thing you should fix is issues with fighting, be it balance, AI, combat system etc. Adding half baked features that will not be properly balanced and finished for months should be of secondary concern. We are talking here lack of common sense on management level. Obviously I am looking at the stuff from perspective of creative person that also creates not just consumes so I am not good "sample" I guess.

 

[prefrontal]

Some people have prior experience with WB and expected upgrade not shallow sidegrade with better graphics. Some people play games for 4 hours, and say this is so cool and then move to next thing. Some people have standards while other seem to love when devs are treating them like trash (I assume buyers remors, justification for spending money / time is at play here). Some people wants complex gameplay while other are OK with cutting few looters to pieces from horseback. Some people wnat more realism while some want more arcade gameplay. Some people want very simple (so they can feel good instantly by mastering it) combat system while others want learning curve so they can feel like achieving somethihing that required actual training.

AKA people are different and average person (no offense, but most of buyers are gonna by average due to bell curve) is probably going to have average needs / demands / satisfaction threshold.

Edit: also lot of stuff was promised during the years prior to release and people were hoping it is actually gonna be in the game. In my case for example I see all the potential of the game and I am extremely dissapointed with how it was fulfilled up to this point, how slow the development is, how amateurish it is (I am talking from the experience just look at visuals of castles during release and their Frankenstein state now), how in wrong direction from deisgn perspective it is. For example if 90% of your gameplay is fighting, first thing you should fix is issues with fighting, be it balance, AI, combat system etc. Adding half baked features that will not be properly balanced and finished for months should be of secondary concern. We are talking here lack of common sense on management level. Obviously I am looking at the stuff from perspective of creative person that also creates not just consumes so I am not good "sample" I guess.

I am not talking about that, though. I am talking purely on a technical level. I am not really interested in the "broken promises" debate that to me seems to be relatively unfruitful. What I am wondering is how come some people are able to play the game from start to finish, not technical issues whatsoever and others have crashes left and right, severe fps drops etc... The devs are apparently very concerend with improving performance and stability and are therefore not working on any features which is obviously very frustrating to people who have had a very stable but shallow gaming experience for months. Other people have their game broken by every patch even without mods. It is very baffleing to me how the performance differences can be so stark and apparently so unrelated to hardware quality.

 

[Philozoraptor]

I am not talking about that, though. I am talking purely on a technical level. I am not really interested in the "broken promises" debate that to me seems to be relatively unfruitful. What I am wondering is how come some people are able to play the game from start to finish, not technical issues whatsoever and others have crashes left and right, severe fps drops etc... The devs are apparently very concerend with improving performance and stability and are therefore not working on any features which is obviously very frustrating to people who have had a very stable but shallow gaming experience for months. Other people have their game broken by every patch even without mods. It is very baffleing to me how the performance differences can be so stark and apparently so unrelated to hardware quality.

Well people have different computers, each of the parts need some sort of optimization and TW have their own engine so they need to do everything on their own. Performance is one thing that I genuinely see got improved over the year, at least in SP, I played the lackluster MP for a month when the game got released and did not look back so no idea what is hapenning there. I will return to MP when they release custom servers and commander mod from Napoleon.

 

[Lord Grindelvald]

I played virtually without any problems till 1.5.6. Then it started crashing a lot and now it wont even boot up.

What changed in the meantime? Absolutely nothing at all. Pc is mid to high spec.
Perhaps next patch will un-break it again.

 

[Apocal]

Is it just hardware? That seems implausible to me because I play on a laptop lol, I certainly don't have a high end setup and some people with very good specs have bad experiences? What are the reasons for these very different player experiences, does anybody know?

If anyone did, they could make a lot of money.

 

[Grank]

Is it just hardware? That seems implausible to me because I play on a laptop lol, I certainly don't have a high end setup and some people with very good specs have bad experiences? What are the reasons for these very different player experiences, does anybody know?

I too play on a laptop, though it's a gaming one. The spec is high but not pro gamer high, but I seem to be having better performance than most people here. I don't have lag or crashes. I have some hypothesis, such as alt-tabbing habits (I have crashed a few times from alt-tabbing too much), other apps running in the background (I close other stuff when I play), unupdated Windows OS (I always keep my Windows 10 updated), and tinkering with settings too much (I just use default High with very little changes). I don't care about people enough to confirm these.

 

[Philozoraptor]

Well they add some feature that is supposed to help with performance, but since they have limited sample of hardware and system installs they cant test it on everything. Once they release it they find out that some specific hardware have issues with it and crashes or performs worse than before. Since BL is only game with this engine, they can test only internally and once patch is released to the public. Obviously some problems might come with overclocking of any kind (SW Battlefront II is crashing to me reliably when I OC my GPU for example), this might include official XMP profiles of rams for example. Finally some of their code is real spaghetti so it is easy to break something.

 

[SOku]

Since they are rolling out their own tools from what I've understood, your experience can vary depending on how well they test things inhouse.
This is a different story for proprietary engines on bigger studios with bigger QA team, and most importantly smaller studios using Unreal or Unity, when a lot of things are got covered by the said companies delivering the engines upfront.

Add to the fact that certain hardware tend to age more like wine than others ( AMD is notoriously famous for that ) and you got a complicated problem that even bigger studios fail to tackle.
Bannerlord is unique on it's own ( it's not a nth survival game on a generic map I mean ) so the codebase could reflect that aswell, thus it isn't that revelant to compare it with Shooters or Single player RPG with smaller scopes.

 

[Medivhtratos]

In 1 campaign I have 3000days played. The game gets a fps drop on campaign map to 2fps. When I hover over a city or on my army/party and the ui info plobs up it goes back to 60fps. So I must constant hover over something so I get my fps back (v. 1.5.9). The menus take also long on loading again(before the latest hot fix came out the item menu etc doesn't take 10seconds for loading, but now.... Between 10 and 20 sec? )

In a new campaign I have no fps drops. So I conclude that something in the late game are responsible for that.

 

[Bloc]

Granted, they are still being very dumb but by no measure dumber than they were in Warband

That's a wrong statement and I don't think it's even subjective. Warband's siege AI was working. It had basic siege functionalities in it, you can say that sieges are almost like more "elevated" version of regular battles. But that doesn't mean it was broken or dumb.
Whereas, Bannerlord isn't like that. If the entire army waits in front of the inner gate for you to break it, it's dumb. If a big chunk of soldiers waits in front of the ladder doing absolutely nothing, that's dumb. If attackers already put siege tower on walls but your defenders still waiting behind the game where no enemies are coming from because they don't even have siege ram, that's dumb. tldr; Bannerlord's siege AI doesn't function properly. That's not related to hardware. TW knows it, TW needs to fix it.

 

[prefrontal]

That's a wrong statement and I don't think it's even subjective. Warband's siege AI was working. It had basic siege functionalities in it, you can say that sieges are almost like more "elevated" version of regular battles. But that doesn't mean it was broken or dumb.
Whereas, Bannerlord isn't like that. If the entire army waits in front of the inner gate for you to break it, it's dumb. If a big chunk of soldiers waits in front of the ladder doing absolutely nothing, that's dumb. If attackers already put siege tower on walls but your defenders still waiting behind the game where no enemies are coming from because they don't even have siege ram, that's dumb. tldr; Bannerlord's siege AI doesn't function properly. That's not related to hardware. TW knows it, TW needs to fix it.

You are being needlessly antagonistic. As I said in the original post, this is not about the quality of gameplay but about the differences in technical performance, i.e. crashes, fps drops for different players. I was also making a point about my experience with sieges where I have yet to experience the problems you describe. I am not saying that they aren't real problems and TW doesn't need to fix them. I was just wondering how it happened that in my game (with no mods) soldiers so far climb ladders and towers just fine while other people report major problems. Maybe I haven't played enough or just got lucky lol no need to get your panties in a bunch.

 

[Bloc]

I literally quoted only that part and replied to that part. If you are not getting it and finding it somewhat offensive, it's not my problem. You claim your post isn't about the quality of gameplay but you are giving gameplay-related examples. Don't do that then.

Related to the rest of your post, it is because of the hardware and optimization of the engine. I'm playing this game since closed beta and the only issue I faced is CPU overuse that was triggering the hard reset. Apart from that, I haven't experienced any mid-game crash etc. and I'm also playing on a laptop and with mid specs, I don't have a gaming laptop or whatsoever. Different hardware, different specs = different results,different issues.