MMORPG

[Time Golem]

From a business point of view MMOs are naive vanity projects doomed to financial failure unless they have mass appeal to a demographic that has the time and money to spend on it. Sadly, at that point the quality of gameplay is very elementary or overly contrived which is unacceptable to the average M&B player. It may be fun for a bit but an MMO needs long term customers while the average M&B player will lose interest fairly quickly.
Taleworlds knows they have crafted a Holy Grail in a difficult genre and I for one hope that they don't lose sight of the conceptual purity which resulted in such success.

 

[Orion]

as far as I know, Bannerlord is still in the design stage. It's up to TW to decide whether they want to make it into an MMO or only a SPG.

Anyway, I hope TW are smart enough (they are, by the looks of it so far) and will realize that MMO is the way to go at some point. Even the Elder Scrolls went MMO (a lousy implementation though), I can't imagine why TW wouldn't.

Bannelord is well past a decision as major and defining as turning it into an MMO. That would have been something they figured out before the announcement that they were working on it because MMOs are logistical nightmares. So much goes into getting one off the ground that it can't be haphazardly thrown together this late into development. I expect they may have a larger, unmodified player cap on servers, and they may even implement some kind of multiplayer campaign. MMO? No way.

I don't think a game like M&B will ever succeed as an MMO until infrastructure has reached a point where players around the world can get steady <80ms pings, and then you have to deal with the glaring issues the game would face if scale were increased. One would reach the same tactical conclusion that real strategists came to in the past, which is that ranged volume beats most anything else. A successful M&B MMO would have to do something to change that. Right now, 8 archers won't always beat 8 of mixed compositions, but in an 80 vs 80 engagement my money would be on the archers more often than not. Scale affects ranged units differently, because they can all engage the same target simultaneously while only a handful of infantry can engage any single target simultaneously.