five bucks
Knight at Arms
Oh yeah the policies certainly need work too.
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Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord Video Review by IGN
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Knight at Arms
To me, there needs to be a whole lot more than that. All that Kingdom Policies do is give a few perks here and there. They don't actually give you anything to do - no management, no orders to give, no strategic decisions to make or problems to solve. No gameplay.
It's the same with owning fiefs. A castle or town is mildly useful to have - because it gives you a 'stash' in which to put things that you don't want to sell and you don't want to carry about with you. More importantly, it gives you a Garrison, so you can build up a pool of spare troops that allow you to replenish your Party after a costly battle. But that's it - the upgrades you can build, again, just give you a few perks to certain stats. You don't feel like you're actually ruling anything, because there's no gameplay involved in that.
I really think they need to add some completely new gameplay elements to the overworld map - some management, some strategy. Something to give the player some real input.
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Warband had the same issue, the buildings in that game were just laughable. It took you about 100 days to build a farm, giving you a whopping 5% prosperity bonus. Wow!!! A school took 200 days, costing some 30000 denars, and gave you +1 relations monthly. Wow!!! They follow the paradox game design philosophy of miniscule, imperceptible bonuses that take an entire game to build up, and are static so you can't influence that 5% in any way.
Buildings and policies should unlock new gameplay mechanics, not just lazy ass percentage bonuses that are basically glorified difficulty sliders. There should be a world of difference between playing as a khuzait lord and an imperial lord because of the policies.
Buildings and policies should unlock new gameplay mechanics, not just lazy ass percentage bonuses that are basically glorified difficulty sliders. There should be a world of difference between playing as a khuzait lord and an imperial lord because of the policies.
I don't know about this IGN review, it feels wrongly rated. I would have given Bannerlord an 8.5/10.
Absolutely agree. For instance, upgrading the garrison to its last level should give you the ability to send troops from one garrison to the next without having to carry them in your party.
Upgrading the food stocks should give you the ability to send food from one town to the other.
Upgrading the militia should give you the ability to send patrols around the town to kill looter parties.
Nice little perks which add depth and late game content.
I don't think improving buildings or some other small stuff would make the game much better. In my opinion core gameplay shifted quite a bit from Warband to Bannerlord. In Warband, your whole game revolved around building up a strong party. Almost every single thing in the game helped you for this. You slowly improved your companions, all of whom stayed in your party almost all the time. You slowly improved your own character. You slowly improved and increased number of your troops. Money sources were for supporting your own party, nobody cared if schools were ridiculous cause it simply wasn't part of the actual core game. Even relations and such I would argue was to help your own party because there was no clan relationship or anything. You used relations to convince lords to help your own party. It was all about main character and their party in the world.
Then Bannerlord comes, supposedly continuation of the series. And to me personally it feels they added every single thing that sounded cool or realistic on paper without actually considering its effects to the game. And the core gameplay shifted from player and their party to kingdoms. Which made us suddenly left with something that isn't fun, that isn't proven to be fun and missing lots. Kingdom management is lacking a lot. Settlement management just exists, nothing more. Diplomacy is same. Clans don't mean much other than letting you create multiple parties and continue with an heir if you die. Relations don't do much. And then there is this plague called "army system" that changed balancing a lot just to have it and in turn completely ruined focusing on your own party by making it way less important. Now all we have is a not so fun end game that only consists of repetitive "create an army -> get a settlement -> try to pay some lords to join you" cycle. And the pacing is quite fast but can't be slowed down because end game is simply empty.
TLDR; Bannerlord isn't good because it isn't Warband.
Then Bannerlord comes, supposedly continuation of the series. And to me personally it feels they added every single thing that sounded cool or realistic on paper without actually considering its effects to the game. And the core gameplay shifted from player and their party to kingdoms. Which made us suddenly left with something that isn't fun, that isn't proven to be fun and missing lots. Kingdom management is lacking a lot. Settlement management just exists, nothing more. Diplomacy is same. Clans don't mean much other than letting you create multiple parties and continue with an heir if you die. Relations don't do much. And then there is this plague called "army system" that changed balancing a lot just to have it and in turn completely ruined focusing on your own party by making it way less important. Now all we have is a not so fun end game that only consists of repetitive "create an army -> get a settlement -> try to pay some lords to join you" cycle. And the pacing is quite fast but can't be slowed down because end game is simply empty.
TLDR; Bannerlord isn't good because it isn't Warband.
Underuse2307
i can understand this. but they do this at their peril.
even if it cannot be enforced by law, or there isn't a clear definition of what early access means, they are putting their reputation on the line.
and the point still stands, if they "release" the game in EA and leave it alone, at the very least there will be lots of backlash from infuriated players. it's a question of building trust also.
Every developer puts their reputation on the line by releasing a game. Its not like it really matters though, a good hype cycle can easily wipe out all the bad press. Activision, Blizzard, Creative Assembly have had a dozen horrible releases and PR controversies over the last few years, but none of them have really impacted sales. Nostalgia buyers and franchise simps will keep coming back regardless of what the company does, so long as they keep getting to ride the hype train every few years.
If taleworlds hypes up a mount and blade 3 well enough, all the millions of buyers will just come back again.
What really does impact sales is if the hype train isn't interesting enough and offers nothing new. Asscreed games sales dropped in the late 2010s when they announced another industrial setting, and then bounced right back when they shifted to ancient greece and the vikings. It didnt matter that all of these games played the exact same, were grindy and derivative, and had terrible releases or bugs.
Similarly with total war all that matters is the setting. If creative assembly just posts a giant MEDIEVAL 3 and a contextless link to a paypal, they would probably make a million dollars overnight. Its the idea that sells, not the game itself (which is kind of impossible to evaluate before release anyway)
If taleworlds hypes up a mount and blade 3 well enough, all the millions of buyers will just come back again.
What really does impact sales is if the hype train isn't interesting enough and offers nothing new. Asscreed games sales dropped in the late 2010s when they announced another industrial setting, and then bounced right back when they shifted to ancient greece and the vikings. It didnt matter that all of these games played the exact same, were grindy and derivative, and had terrible releases or bugs.
Similarly with total war all that matters is the setting. If creative assembly just posts a giant MEDIEVAL 3 and a contextless link to a paypal, they would probably make a million dollars overnight. Its the idea that sells, not the game itself (which is kind of impossible to evaluate before release anyway)
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Calabanar
Sergeant at Arms
Buildings in Warband sure sucked, but for some reason I still enjoyed building a mill or school in my village... it just felt nice... granted I was the kind of player just guarding it from all agression... oh well.
I expected that to be one of the biggest improvements from Warband though.. so we could pick buildings to specialize our fiefs instead of... just maxing everything out.
Frontier fief? More defenses so it would be harder to raid and less prone to bandit attacks... more militia, perhaps small patrols to secure roads.
Want more taxe revenue? Build a Taxation Office, but decrease relations over time...
Food production building + Storage to accumulate foods, + Caravansay to increase trade... but little militia and poor village defense...
Idk, trade-offs, something! Anything! Plus individual buildings for villages! I'd even be fine with them still being linked to a castle/town as long as they could still ahve unique buildings!
And let's not talk of castles... they were THE opportunity to allow interesting buildings: more nobles spawning in villages, Bigger Keep to retreat into, More slots for siege engines... More/recharching throwables rocks... Torture chambers to lower assailing troops morale...
Like COME ON!
That's the same as Warband. That's how I can tell a bunch of devs never actually got to that point in WB, because if they had, they wouldn't have replicated it in BL.
To be fair, they made the early game worse in every way too.
I don't think that mattered in Warband. That was my point. The "game" was building/improving your party in Warband. In bannerlord it is building your kingdom. I mean even consider most popular mods like PoP. They had a lot of bonuses, items etc for your character and for your soldiers. Your challenges weren't just other kingdoms but were actually the big NPC armies that spawned every once in a while. The end game was collecting shards/diamonds to have all the upgrades and troops. I don't even remember if they had more buildings or more complicated kingdom management etc. They knew what Warband was about and they followed same logic. And it is one of the most popular mods.
The design behind some of the PoP's main features can be summed up in a very simplified way: take the fun bits of Warband and expand on them. Play to the strengths of the base game (and do a lot of other stuff, but this principle is simple and effective for every game.)
For example: is it fun to meet various bandits, peasants and lords fighting battles that you can join? Yes, then make a whole bunch of varied minor factions, mostly hostile to each other, so you can have an even greater variety and frequency of battles you can join opportunistically.
So why didn't the Taleworlds designers do the same thing? I guess they haven't played their own game enough and didn't play mods to pick up the most fun mod features from all kinds of mods. You really need to play the game to find out what is fun about it and improve on it, you can't just have meetings and pretend you are the best designer ever and decide what you need to do in the next game.
I don't think they can ever really fix the game unless they can change their core game design philosophy. They seem to believe that frustrating mechanics = fun challenge and at the same time they seem to be fundamentally opposed to giving the player direct control over anything. Everything's designed to frustrate the player and you only have the most roundabout ways of dealing with the frustrations.
After countless complaints and requests for controlling your clan parties, the best they could do was add the offense/defense slider because its anathema for them to let us just issue direct orders to our subordinates. You can't control your workshops or caravans. You can't talk to lords to gain support for the policies you want. You can't even put your own troops into your preferred formations.
The entire fief management minigame is basically designed to screw you and there's very little you can directly do about it. If your town's starving you can't put food in the granary. If your villages are destroyed, you can't rebuild them. If you happen to be the wrong culture and don't have a good governor, you're screwed. You can build all the buildings and its still not enough to counter all the debuffs and there's nothing else you can do. You can't even clear the bandits from the area. In Warband, you could clear a hideout and it would respawn in a different spot, hopefully farther away from your settlements. Now they just move right back in the minute you go away. These aren't fun challenges. Fun challenges are ones you can solve through your actions. These are just frustrations.
After countless complaints and requests for controlling your clan parties, the best they could do was add the offense/defense slider because its anathema for them to let us just issue direct orders to our subordinates. You can't control your workshops or caravans. You can't talk to lords to gain support for the policies you want. You can't even put your own troops into your preferred formations.
The entire fief management minigame is basically designed to screw you and there's very little you can directly do about it. If your town's starving you can't put food in the granary. If your villages are destroyed, you can't rebuild them. If you happen to be the wrong culture and don't have a good governor, you're screwed. You can build all the buildings and its still not enough to counter all the debuffs and there's nothing else you can do. You can't even clear the bandits from the area. In Warband, you could clear a hideout and it would respawn in a different spot, hopefully farther away from your settlements. Now they just move right back in the minute you go away. These aren't fun challenges. Fun challenges are ones you can solve through your actions. These are just frustrations.
This is why so many long term fans are disappointed in BL as opposed to the Steam casual crowds - this being their first exposure to the game. Obviously Im generalizing the Steam crowd as there can be some really well thought out good perspectives there -but im talkin the overall kid who just thumbed up the game without any real previous knowledge of what past Mods or DLC's were able to accomplish.
PoP had colorful kingdoms (I really dont care for the Corporate LOGO look of BL's Banners and GUI in general), a strong Lore and background, very good Map and well thought out and consistent Factions, Kingdom management, varied and interesting Knighthoods that could be founded and really mattered as they too had likes and dislikes, Quali gems (a reason to enter town to find), hidden factions and excellent pacing as the world got darker and more dangerous through-out leading to an almost Armageddon Doomsday feel. A crescendo. Add to that voice acting , written out backstories and for all the companions and more...
Knowing and having experienced all that -one would hope the TW devs would take note of one of its top 3 Mods of all time and if not outright trying to beat the Modders ability at least match that with its own vision of a colorful world.
The thing mentioned about about Warband buildings: that was so aggravating. The time it took to build didn't even give you that much in return. Talk about not having a very appealing incentive. I mean I still did it, because for some reason it was still fun to do, but it definitely had a lot of room to improve/change.
A big difference is that Warband fiefs weren't designed to f**k you over, so the buildings were just bonus
That's true, there was at least that.
Also the map was small. In WB, late game does not take too long.
Making the map big and shortening the year was a bad decision and TW did this just for adding deaths and being able to play as your child but they could not execute this idea well bc it still takes too much time to play as your child and far less time than that to capture all of the map.
I literally hold my punches against ai just to play as my child and not to capture all of the map before that but I ended up bored to death for that.
If you levelled the engineer skill past 8 or so they were cheap enough to be worth building.. but still I only built the school and the prisoner tower.
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