MB3: Bannerlord Early Development Leaked Version - was Based on Warband

[DJenxu]

This is not a mod, but an early development leaked version of Mount & Blade 3 Bannerlord, which was built on Warband but abandoned before much was done.

I was so shocked that I couldn’t help but want to share it with you guys.

Since my computer configuration is relatively low and this version has almost no optimization, I used the lowest quality preset throughout the process.

 

[DJenxu]

Since my computer configuration is relatively low and this version has almost no optimization, I used the lowest quality preset throughout the process.

 

[BigFat]

The soul alone is enough to drive a man mad.

 

[DJenxu]

The soul alone is enough to drive a man mad.

For me, compared to Warband, bannerlord is a game with better art performance and battle field, but worse game playability.

 

[BigFat]

Warband to me felt like a cohesive idea that could be fully fleshed out with mods, whereas bannerlord feels like it an assortment of things that need mods to make it cohesive

 

[DJenxu]

The soul alone is enough to drive a man mad.

The family system should have been premeditated at the beginning of the project..

 

[DJenxu]

 

[Martino2727]

I mean it makes sense, they started Bannerlord on 2012, but I assume it was this garbage lmao

 

[black_bulldog]

Warband to me felt like a cohesive idea that could be fully fleshed out with mods, whereas bannerlord feels like it an assortment of things that need mods to make it cohesive

Honestly I think the management put in different ideas from different rpgs without any thought of how to properly integrate them more like a check list than actually adding features. Making an open world game is difficult. Adding a bunch of features so more than 1 play style is possible is even tougher. I think it can be done but it would take an experienced team who knows what they want their game to be. Warband was a combat simulator with a smattering or rpg elements to vary it up. It was simple but it worked.
We kept hearing throughout ea how proposed ideas by fans "weren't Taleworlds vision". But I never ever heard them say what that vision actually was, because the way features got added was so random. As an exmple crafting was suppose to be something that you could go and get done at a smith. A nice feature and possible money sink. But then when ea comes out now we can smith and it's so busted it erased the need to worry about money. Imho it wasn't needed and should've been ripped out of the game in early ea but here we are.

 

[DJenxu]

Honestly I think the management put in different ideas from different rpgs without any thought of how to properly integrate them more like a check list than actually adding features. Making an open world game is difficult. Adding a bunch of features so more than 1 play style is possible is even tougher. I think it can be done but it would take an experienced team who knows what they want their game to be. Warband was a combat simulator with a smattering or rpg elements to vary it up. It was simple but it worked.
We kept hearing throughout ea how proposed ideas by fans "weren't Taleworlds vision". But I never ever heard them say what that vision actually was, because the way features got added was so random. As an exmple crafting was suppose to be something that you could go and get done at a smith. A nice feature and possible money sink. But then when ea comes out now we can smith and it's so busted it erased the need to worry about money. Imho it wasn't needed and should've been ripped out of the game in early ea but here we are.

To quote an old player of Warband: "Make sense, yes Bannerlord it is in fact M&B3 but we just needed M&B2", I believe this is what most existing players of Warband want to say.
By the way, Warband is called MBExp.

 

[lukethisup]

I enjoy returning to this forum every once in awhile to see others like myself mourning what could've been.

RIP the game we should've got. The vision is just too strong and arbitrary for us to understand why they couldn't just improve on everything they established in the decade prior to bannerlord. Hope they got their money out of it, cus they really pushed away a large number of players who put several thousand hours into warband, like myself. Seems like everywhere you turn in bannerlord is the beginning of a good idea that never ended up in the completed stage and was just pushed off for other things until someone forgot about it then returned and forgot what they were doing.

Wish they just made warband 2 instead of making us wait almost a decade for a game that attempts to be caviar while only offering spam.
Super cool post. Like seeing a video of your long lost loved one.

 

[DJenxu]

I enjoy returning to this forum every once in awhile to see others like myself mourning what could've been.

RIP the game we should've got. The vision is just too strong and arbitrary for us to understand why they couldn't just improve on everything they established in the decade prior to bannerlord. Hope they got their money out of it, cus they really pushed away a large number of players who put several thousand hours into warband, like myself. Seems like everywhere you turn in bannerlord is the beginning of a good idea that never ended up in the completed stage and was just pushed off for other things until someone forgot about it then returned and forgot what they were doing.

Wish they just made warband 2 instead of making us wait almost a decade for a game that attempts to be caviar while only offering spam.
Super cool post. Like seeing a video of your long lost loved one.

People have said too much about bannerlord's sense of loss, and I don't want to repeat them. What I'm more looking forward to is when Talewords will release a high-definition remake of Warband, which is "Small in size, yet complete in essence." "compact and impactful."

 

[Tasak]

Is it the same thing that was leaked back in 2015 by a former TaleWorlds employee?

 

[DJenxu]

Is it the same thing that was leaked back in 2015 by a former TaleWorlds employee?

Yes, but I've never seen anyone disclose the details before. Then I downloaded it and did some simple fixes to get it running, and this is what you see.

 

[Lucius Confucius]

Haha! This post makes me glad we got Bannerlord.

I made a poll a long time ago in this community to see which game was better vanilla, Bannerlord still leads that contest.
Link:

Base Bannerlord is better than base Warband

^ As topic describes. There are so many improvements over Warband in Bannerlord. Take the army system for example, much more convenient and allows for larger battles to happen more often. And with upcoming features such as Banners and allowing us to make Companions into new clans will bring...

forums.taleworlds.com

Many people make the mistake of remembering Warband with its mods when they say it is better than Bannerlord.

Warband was very unbalanced and bare bones.

 

[DJenxu]

Haha! This post makes me glad we got Bannerlord.

I made a poll a long time ago in this community to see which game was better vanilla, Bannerlord still leads that contest.
Link:

Base Bannerlord is better than base Warband

^ As topic describes. There are so many improvements over Warband in Bannerlord. Take the army system for example, much more convenient and allows for larger battles to happen more often. And with upcoming features such as Banners and allowing us to make Companions into new clans will bring...

forums.taleworlds.com

Many people make the mistake of remembering Warband with its mods when they say it is better than Bannerlord.

Warband was very unbalanced and bare bones.

When bannerlord is only slightly better than games from 15 years ago, I think it's already a shameful thing. From a business perspective, bannerlord is more successful, has better art performance, and has more players. The explanation I gave is that with the improvement of productivity, especially the improvement of purchasing power in developing countries, the number of players is no longer the same order of magnitude as it was more than ten years ago. To be honest, in the Warband era, many players in developing countries played pirated games because they did not have so much money to buy games. But I don't think Bannerlord's game design is better, just like classic Mario is so simple, but it is still regarded as a textbook example of game design.
I'm not saying Bannerlord is without merit; I just feel they could do better.

 

[Tasak]

Yes, but I've never seen anyone disclose the details before. Then I downloaded it and did some simple fixes to get it running, and this is what you see.

1. I remember seeing it and trying to get it running to no avail after attempting to do so; maybe I did not have the patience required to mitigate the errors. Good job with that.
2. It is a pity that the source code is incomplete even though one may believe it is, given the fact that the entire file weighs over 6 GB after unpacking it from the compressed archive. Some things would be interesting to explore if they were in there...
3. Bannerlord would have arrived much sooner if TaleWorlds had not abandoned their project and instead decided to start afresh. Just a thought of mine.

Warband was very unbalanced and bare bones.

The whole package counts. Warband may have been bugged and bare-bones upon its release, but in the long run it has been a long-lived and popular game due to its vibrant modding scene. Bannerlord may be a more complete game on its own, but it offers no real modding value (there are just a few mod projects going strong after all those years and the rest is long gone), therefore it seems to be a typical game to beat and move on. Bannerlord resembles a regular console game offering tens of hours of entertainment at best, whereas Warband is a true PC platform from which one can squeeze thousands of hours of gameplay or modding. To each their own, I guess.

 

[Lornloth00]

Haha! This post makes me glad we got Bannerlord.

I made a poll a long time ago in this community to see which game was better vanilla, Bannerlord still leads that contest.
Link:

Base Bannerlord is better than base Warband

^ As topic describes. There are so many improvements over Warband in Bannerlord. Take the army system for example, much more convenient and allows for larger battles to happen more often. And with upcoming features such as Banners and allowing us to make Companions into new clans will bring...

forums.taleworlds.com

Many people make the mistake of remembering Warband with its mods when they say it is better than Bannerlord.

Warband was very unbalanced and bare bones.

Exactly! I have been playing Warband fanatically before the pandemic and through out Bannerlord's early access until this day for fun and comparison sake. And modless Bannerlord is far more playable than a modless Warband. Its not even a contest. Besides stick a fork in Warband its done, finished but Bannerlord is still being developed yet Warband and many of its mods are broken and buggy. Most Warband mods are buggy messes that are dead, closed source and hard to fix because decompiling them is a *****. But Bannerlord is in C# which means that a modder has to go out of their way to make their mod closed source and C# sharp is easier to mod. Bannerlords's modding system is far better because of it's modular modding system but in Warband no one at this point can make modular plugins like in Bannerlord. People look at Warband and modder's with rose tinted glasses. Bannerlord is the stronger game at this point.

 

[sh1ny4]

Pretty interesting find, I'm surprised to see some of the things we have have been planned for so long

 

[ijese]

Many people make the mistake of remembering Warband with its mods when they say it is better than Bannerlord.

Warband was very unbalanced and bare bones.

Just tried Bannerlord again and after two evenings quit and started new run of PS4 vanilla Warband.

On PC I usually play Pendor or VC, sometimes Perisno, but vanilla is still cohesive and joyful experience. Bannerlord still isn't.