It's a fun game for a while, when field battles are still a novelty.
Once you try to do anything more (or engage in things like sieges, or large army-on-army battles), all the problems and placeholders start coming out and smack you right in the face.
Which wouldn't have been all that much of a problem, IF,
1) This was a project that was just getting off the ground - however you look at it, what we have in hands right now is the result of a few years worth of work already. Going by the "priority list," and the speed of work being done so far, there ain't gonna be much expansion of what we already have, and that's, at best, a mixed bag that's nowhere near even Warband+mods level of development. M&B is no longer a one-man-show, or a graphical facelift with some additional functionality thrown in, and expectations are likewise (and in my opinion justifiably) adjusted.
2) Communication. Or, rather, the horrible way in which TW completely ignores it as an important part of not just EA process (seriously, this is one of the worst "EA" projects I've participated in, and there's been quite a lot of them - including original M&B!), but even simple game development business.
Steam forums are completely ignored. The same forums that have been successfuly used as a source of feedback and testers by EA titles of tiny studios. Even the "official" forum barely sees any communication. Important - at least important to custmers who already paid for this title - information is dumped somewhere in middle of a thread (like the latest "we're postponing the patch because 'holidays'" post a week and a half ago, heh, that hasn't seen any kind of follow up even in terms of "uh.. we kinda ran into a bunch of problems, so it'll take a while"). You can make a crash report thread, detailing a game-breaking issue that completely prevents you from playing, and won't even see a generic acknowledgement of it (and it's not a part of the forum that sees a lot of posts, even compared to the rest of it which is already pretty slow).
After paying what amounts to AAA-title price tag, you're left to fumble in the dark with no idea what's going on with the development process, scant information on resolution of most pressing issues, and basically a feeling of "we got your money, get lost." This doesn't even touch the "community feedback in terms of balancing and feature implementation" part of the supposed EA. Even assuming TW is interested in actual feedback (both balancewise and suggestions of potential features - and that's a big IF from where I'm standing), they completely fail at showing that interest and encouraging people to engage in it. How are you supposed to suggest anything when you don't know what the developers plan, don't know what they are working on right now, in what areas they could use some additional ideas, and - most importantly - you basically have no idea IF they are looking for anything from you, WHAT they are looking for, and what in that suggestion you made did not fit their vision of the game in the first place.
Basically, just one-way communication without any kind of recursion. If you want to kill your "EA," that's the fastest way to do it. But maybe that's precisely what TW wants - get the money, and have the peons who forked it over shut up and let them do their thing for another x years, or until they get bored with this project whatever its state.
Sure, best approach for anybody unhappy with current state of the game is probably to just forget it, come back in a year or so, and hope in the meantime that Taleworlds will perform better in that time than they have so far, but that's a pretty unrealistic assumption from where I'm standing. Also, very much the opposite of what even Steam describes "EA" stands for.
The least they could've done after releasing the "EA" (and, again, as far as my experience is concerned this is anything but a genuine "EA" aside from paying for an unfinished game) is to hire one or two interns who can do a better job at communication than "we don't want to spam Steam forum with patch notes" Callum, because apparently the person being official face of the company doesn't even understand the importance of keeping people informed, especially when it comes to a game in ongoing development that also may happen to break the many mods required by the lackluster planning (if there's any real one) involved in development of this game.
tl;dr version:
- barely any features, and even the core strength of the franchise, combat and field battles, are full of issues (no matter how pretty they look - and you can't even customize "custom battles," heh),
- project already giving the impression of "feature lockdown" despite being filled with placeholders (or regressing Warband elements in the first place for no apparent good reason - see village fief no longer being independent),
- absolute failure at communication from the developers - instead of leveraging EA as a testing and/or ideas hotbed, TW is still failing to realize the importance of steady communication loop, especially considering they are supposed to be engaged in an "EA" project.
- all of this in a franchise that is so unique there aren't really any other alternatives to it. Also one that has (or perhaps, at this point, had) a very enthusiastic following with pretty understandable expectations of Bannerlord being an improvement over what we already had in Warband and mods, and not just in graphical terms.
It's my highly biased opinion, but maybe it'll give you some idea why a lot of people are unhappy right now.
But... to be honest, mostly I think it's just the complete communication blackout. Everything else they could get around simply talking to us - at least in statistical terms, because there'll always be somebody unhappy no matter what you do.