Mods may worth the wait but...

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Taleworlds has released Two (2) games; Mount and Blade (which they released twice under two slightly different names) and Bannerlord. The first was a mess that took years of community input to be half decent, the latter is a mess that is ignoring community input entirely. Their development philosophy is a shambles, one look at the code or employee reviews from either game will tell you all you need to know. There is also some shadier stuff I can't go into. They have a very poor track record which is only getting worse.
I said they earned my respect, and my respect isn't earned to that level easily. Your opinion on the games doesn't matter to my opinion, and we both know you're not accurately reporting the truth anyhow, so I don't know why you decided to respond to me subjectively stating they earned my respect with this. Leave me out of that nonsense. :razz:

I strongly disagree with your assessment, for what it's worth, and it's not worth more discussion than this.
 
Also, early-access isn't a fraud. It doesn't sell itself as anything other than being early access to a game that isn't yet finished, and being provided with exactly what you are promised is not fraud. Fraud may be more providing feedback based on experiences of playing the game you have not actually had. :wink:
That's funny and I actually enjoy being a fraud. Except that I have plenty of experience with the previous titles and can read the copious player feedback for Bannerlord. The Bannerlord EA on the other hand can be construed as fraud given the promised features in their dev blogs that won't be delivered. They earned a lot of money based on their hype that they maybe didn't deserve.
I said they earned my respect, and my respect isn't earned to that level easily. Your opinion on the games doesn't matter to my opinion, and we both know you're not accurately reporting the truth anyhow, so I don't know why you decided to respond to me subjectively stating they earned my respect with this. Leave me out of that nonsense. :razz:

I strongly disagree with your assessment, for what it's worth, and it's not worth more discussion than this.
You are so full of it that your "opinion" is literally worthless.
Kentucky here knows his stuff and his opinions are based on first-hand facts (including actual code and art) and knowledge of past dealings of Taleworlds with developers who are sometimes careless with NDAs. You don't even have the judgment to recognize the disparity of knowledge between you two.
Your only way out of this now is to commit account sudoku.
 
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That's funny and I actually enjoy being a fraud. Except that I have plenty of experience with the previous titles and can read the copious player feedback for Bannerlord. The Bannerlord EA on the other hand can be construed as fraud given the promised features in their dev blogs that won't be delivered. They earned a lot of money based on their hype that they maybe didn't deserve.

You are so full of it that your "opinion" is literally worthless.
Kentucky here knows his stuff and his opinions are based on first-hand facts (including actual code and art) and knowledge of past dealings of Taleworlds with developers who are sometimes careless with NDAs. You don't even have the judgment to recognize the disparity of knowledge between you two.
Your only way out of this now is to commit account sudoku.
That's a whole lot of ad hominem verbosity in place of just being a reasonable and mature adult and sticking to the topic.

I don't care for your opinion, either. That to me says we have nothing worth saying to each other. Thanks for minding that.

Kentucky has nothing at all valid to say about my respect for Taleworlds, anyhow -- his opinion about me respecting them is pretty invalid. :razz:
 
You made the same non-argument in another thread when you challenged me about game design, and I responded with very simple and hard facts.
You just troll around the forum looking for fights and when you are proven wrong with actual arguments, you go into full denial mode "its just ur opinion man". It's pathetic and you should reconsider your life choices, maybe do some gardening or yoga.
 
I said they earned my respect, and my respect isn't earned to that level easily. Your opinion on the games doesn't matter to my opinion, and we both know you're not accurately reporting the truth anyhow, so I don't know why you decided to respond to me subjectively stating they earned my respect with this. Leave me out of that nonsense. :razz:

I strongly disagree with your assessment, for what it's worth, and it's not worth more discussion than this.

You can disagree with what I'm saying, but if you don't have any actual objections to any of the things I've said, or any evidence of your own beyond "actually I like Taleworlds", then it's pointless.
 
Nobody "understands" what early access is because every company implements it differently and has different results. There are no standards and no clear guidelines (maybe on steam but nobody really follows them).

For bigger companies like Taleworlds, Early Access is nothing but a marketing term that mainly serves to deflect criticism on a game they think will be poorly received otherwise. The reasoning is to ease buyers into the modern reality that there is no "final" game most of the time, and that there will always be massive gamechanging patches after the release hype has already died down. The point of saying it's in Early Access (for a large company) is to maintain at least some of the hype until the game is presentable, while also selling it at full price.

It also has to do with reviews. Nobody can predict the future, so even if a reviewer knows that a game won't change much, they have to include "this is not the final release" or some other platitude, and often save any real criticism of the game.

Frankly I think it's PR genius. Taleworlds sold millions and millions of copies, but avoided any immediate backlash whatsoever by just saying "it's early access". The playerbase may have evaporated but who cares, they have their money now, and the majority of redditors who haven't played since June still think Taleworlds is a cute happy cottage company.



Taleworlds has released Two (2) games; Mount and Blade (which they released twice under two slightly different names) and Bannerlord. The first was a mess that took years of community input to be half decent, the latter is a mess that is ignoring community input entirely. Their development philosophy is a shambles, one look at the code or employee reviews from either game will tell you all you need to know. There is also some shadier stuff I can't go into. They have a very poor track record which is only getting worse.
I think for most part I agree with you. And understand the way that knowledge make sense.

But then my biggest thought is if we coming from this viewpoint, how should we view modding? What do you make of modding after EA , still in EA for a case like Taleworlds and BL?

Its the new Steam players that know nothing about M&B that got them to combine children and dying of old age into the death options... They are the ones calling for removing the sandbox and options from this game. The ones demanding that all factions are equal, for balance. The ones that think that horse archers should not be better than normal archers and that their non-shield holding 2h axers should be on par with shielded knights nor should fall to archers before they get to them.

...So if they are going to listen to any players, it should be those that know the game and have loved it for such a long time that they kept the game company in business all these years. The elitist attitude comes from those that know nothing about the game, yet think their input is on par with those that do know it.
Let's not taking up the mantle as well. Let them decide who is or who is not.
If anyone asked, I would then suggest to judge based on if the point been made is true or not, just as you mentioned there are those certainly are invalid and untrue.
 
I think for most part I agree with you. And understand the way that knowledge make sense.

But then my biggest thought is if we coming from this viewpoint, how should we view modding? What do you make of modding after EA , still in EA for a case like Taleworlds and BL?

It's no different from modding after a game has been "released". I actually quit modding warband in 2016 (6 years after the game had come out and a solid 12 years after the first mods for mount and blade) because they suddenly made a bunch of gamebreaking changes that were unannounced and undocumented.

Game development is often an arbitrary and haphazard process and even the best developers can never say for sure if they're "finished" or not. Modding modern games is always fraught with the possibility that the developers decide to delete or change a bunch of stuff, and in an age of steam updates that means your mod dies.
 
You made the same non-argument in another thread when you challenged me about game design, and I responded with very simple and hard facts.
You just troll around the forum looking for fights and when you are proven wrong with actual arguments, you go into full denial mode "its just ur opinion man". It's pathetic and you should reconsider your life choices, maybe do some gardening or yoga.
You don't even play this game. I have no interest in your opinion. Literally, I wasn't making an argument to you in response to your ad hominem trolling. I told you not to talk to me, since you have nothing relevant to the topic at hand to say, since you don't even play the game we are discussing. Go talk to someone else.

Next time I'm simply reporting you. This is foolish.

You can disagree with what I'm saying, but if you don't have any actual objections to any of the things I've said, or any evidence of your own beyond "actually I like Taleworlds", then it's pointless.
I found none of your objections relevant. Like I said, your opinion about my respect for the devs is moot.
 
Why do people who obviously do not enjoy the experience of playing early-access games buy games while they're still in early-access?
Not enjoying this game is not because of early access. If a game is fun, the game is fun, despite bugs/lack of features/time. That's why Valheim already sold so much, because it's fun despite everything.
 
You don't even play this game. I have no interest in your opinion. Literally, I wasn't making an argument to you in response to your ad hominem trolling. I told you not to talk to me, since you have nothing relevant to the topic at hand to say, since you don't even play the game we are discussing. Go talk to someone else.

Next time I'm simply reporting you. This is foolish.
Of course you had interest in my opinion, because you took the time to disagree with it. When you were beaten with actual arguments, you immediately tried to disengage with attitude like this - "don't talk to me" "just your opinion".
That you think that reporting me would do something says you are not just cowardly, but desperate.
 
Not enjoying this game is not because of early access. If a game is fun, the game is fun, despite bugs/lack of features/time. That's why Valheim already sold so much, because it's fun despite everything.
I was talking specifically about people complaining about aspects related to this game being early-access.

I keep hearing good things about Valheim. Suffice it to say, though, I find the game fun and look forward to the updates. People should speak for themselves when expressing their own opinions about whether they have fun. :wink:
 
It's no different from modding after a game has been "released". I actually quit modding warband in 2016 (6 years after the game had come out and a solid 12 years after the first mods for mount and blade) because they suddenly made a bunch of gamebreaking changes that were unannounced and undocumented.

Game development is often an arbitrary and haphazard process and even the best developers can never say for sure if they're "finished" or not. Modding modern games is always fraught with the possibility that the developers decide to delete or change a bunch of stuff, and in an age of steam updates that means your mod dies.
Yeah this is what I have been saying for a long time now. Patching the game is killing off the mods and modders. It is sapping their will to mod which is why I wish Taleworlds would just wrap it up already. I quit playing back in May of 2020 and gave Taleworlds 9 additionally months to fix their game. In that time not much has changed which means we are going to have to rely on modders but they aren't going to mod if the game isn't stable and not being changed ever few weeks.

My biggest fear is that even when they do release, they will still keep trying to fix and add things, which will keep the modders away or honestly, I am kind of afraid they already ran the modders off inadvertently by releasing as a EA rather than a final product.
 
Anyone taking bets on these modders being run off by the time the game leaves early-access?

Or is it only sky-is-falling rhetoric? :smile:

Come on. Any reasonable modder is going to prefer a stable and fully released platform, and maturity tends to bring patience and foresight, so the only real modders that will be lost are the 14 year olds who really won't be producing much of substance anyhow. It's ego that drives these people to want to take over the game development, not inspiration.
 
My biggest fear is that even when they do release, they will still keep trying to fix and add things, which will keep the modders away or honestly, I am kind of afraid they already ran the modders off inadvertently by releasing as a EA rather than a final product.
I think that's a good estimate of what is happening.
Taleworlds themselves are in a dilemma - do they slow down the patch cycle to allow modders more time and less effort to update their mods or do they keep at the present rate to speed up the base game development, by using the prompt and useful feedback from the EA beta testers, aka. the players.
There's no good solution. I would prefer if they concentrated on the long term plan, i.e. the development of the base game, hoping the mods will come eventually, possibly from a new wave of modders at release time. But a real concern here is what will be the player base at release time? If relatively few players remain then, because the rest have moved on, the number of modders would be fewer as well. Game popularity is the key factor in attracting modders - a less popular game gets fewer and lower quality mods.
The only thing I can think of that would prevent such a poor scenario is if TW attracts a good number of new and returning players at release time by some marketing stunt. This could be a Bannerlord Fixed edition or more likely a DLC (about Vikings obviously). If the players return, the modders will return as well.
 
I think the core game is basically finished the polishing may take quite a while, a year or two I'd think. I like mods and tend to stick with a version for a while with mods that suit that verison. When I upgrade by several versions of course most of the mods wont work and the ones that do need updating but then again some of the mods are no longer needed as the game has improved so I usually play without mods for a while then start adding some again.

Some mods that I have used and no longer work but I think were great are
Generals bodyguard ( gives you a bodyguard of a few soldiers)
Peasant Banners ( Bannerlord needs banners among your armies )
Slow down ( allows you to actually catch things like caravans and stops you having to run all over the map I've never quite undestood how a larger army can't just send its cavalry to pin a smaller host in place to force it to battle chasing things all over the map is no fun)
More troops in hideouts ( tried different mods that did this all were great )

Some mods that seem to keep well up to date and I think are great are
Improved garrrisons ( keeps up to date and keeps adding features like patrols )
Realistic battle ( Improves armour and weapon damages to be more realistic )


The things i'd like to see added to the vanilla game apart from some version of the mods I've mentioned are

Allowing all sources of income to be viable, most people wont use all sources of possible income so dont balance it like everyone has 4 workshops 4 caravans, does some trading and loots all the time.

eg: make caravans, workshops, trading, castles and loot all provide more money, make money sinks like upgrading castles towns more expensive give me additions to throne rooms like gold statues expensive decor, tributes to gods for short lived bonuses, to let me spend that money, have really expensive upgrades for troops like really expensive armoured war horses, or faster horses, a special guard troop with minor advantages in stats but dont make me struggle financially to field a basic army of infantry archers and cavalry or garrison my fiefs.

A large defender bonus for castles ( castles should be a lot harder to take, even vastly outnumbered garrisons should be inflicting lots of casualties and taking longer to overcome, also give castles enough income to allow for a decent garrison)

Hideouts give more renown for less troops but let me have the option of taking lots more troops for less renown

Better controls in battle, let me set my troops up initially in groups 1- 10 then allow me to send each group or target each enemy group seperatley

Spawning in reinforcements is poor a better system is needed ( Possibly moveable spawn point )

Better battlefields for larger armies, Its no fun to try and fight 500 v 500 in a forest once a battle is larger than 100 v 100 more spacious battlefields should be used it might also omprove lag as the battlfield would be picked with larger armies in mind.
 
Anyone taking bets on these modders being run off by the time the game leaves early-access?

Or is it only sky-is-falling rhetoric? :smile:

Come on. Any reasonable modder is going to prefer a stable and fully released platform, and maturity tends to bring patience and foresight, so the only real modders that will be lost are the 14 year olds who really won't be producing much of substance anyhow. It's ego that drives these people to want to take over the game development, not inspiration.

I just know that I am shocked to see how many mods have be abandoned on Bannerlord Nexus, many of them I feel are critical. I mean I have been looking for a mod that just reduces the amount of wars going on and can't find one that has been updated. One such mod has been abandoned, picked up by another person, abandoned again, then picked up again only to be abandoned yet a third time. If the mod wasn't so important to gameplay, I don't think it would have been picked up 3 separate times but obviously no one wants to keep updating it with all the changes.

So honestly I don't know if the sky is falling but what I see is that if feels like at least 80% of the mods on Bannerlord Nexus are dead and abandoned and there are very, very fun new mods being added. Compared to the activity level back in April/May of last year the modding scene seems virtually dead. Either people have totally lost interest in the game or the constant patching is keeping them away.
 
Well it seems the way they recompile each patch generally kills mods unlike some other games in which the way core data is generally kept safe - a mod can last years after many many years
 
The 'normies' is still waiting probably. Ok that wasn't very fair, judging from places like reddit, youtube and steam, I believe most of played and potential players are happily waiting for milestone or official release, thanks to the initial impression from grace period is overall positive afaik. With the game in current state however I just feel like there is still danger they will pull out a No Man's sky, especially in today's market.

I believe popularity can be restored, like Taleworlds can pulls some marketing schemes such as stream marathon at the time. But will the game keep attracting player then?
 
Well it seems the way they recompile each patch generally kills mods unlike some other games in which the way core data is generally kept safe - a mod can last years after many many years
Honestly I don't think that this should be unexpected in Early Access so I don't fault them for breaking mods now especially since there are a lot of changes that have made many mods obsolete. My concern is for the long term. I have generally found that with Warband and to some degree with Bannerlord, virtually anything I find to be an issue or not enjoyable, I can fix with a Mod. However, if no one mods, that won't be the case and the longer Taleworlds takes to get the game to a stable condition where most mods don't break for years at a time, the smaller the playerbase and the smaller the pool of modders. I honestly feel that Taleworlds is in a race against time now.
 
Then That race started when they decided to go into EA. It's like this, Warband and original M&B's development was actually already a sort of EA. I think the key about EA is how do you handle communication and consideration. Especially when you encourage modding in the process of EA. And like Kentucky 『 HEIGUI 』 James said, Warband's years into official release update still break things, that a record to take into account.

On the one hand, if they cannot deliver a decent game at release, the reception-realization will be brutal and their EA sales can be the biggest sale they will have. On the other hand, already existed modding community is discouraged if needed development goes on. Taleworlds need to make the right decisions. But to be fair, I think when they entered EA they definitely know what they are doing. One can also think it is just everything the trade off for a early access and it's initial sale.

I personally view this game can be on the level of GTAV and Minecraft if we measure success, with current one digit millions sale but a niche case. I sincerely wish Taleworlds can do it right and make it happens.
 
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