Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 12 - The Passage Of Time

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Hello Bannerlord blog regulars and newcomers. In this entry, we are once again responding to your demands to hear more about single player gameplay - specifically, looking at the overworld map and some of the improvements made there. We revealed the map at Gamescom and mentioned some new features in the last blog. Here, we'll take what we've revealed and go into some more detail.

Read more at: http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/14
 
im playing warband right now and would love for bannerlord if you are in a town that is close to the sea i would love to hear the sea in the distance(a recording of waves  and some seagulls) around would give  a lot of immersion .

secondly: would be grait if the game saved the faces that you make and randomly use them in the game like when you fight in a tournament and one of your previous characters are running at you with an axe like that caracter still exists in the world you just arnt in control of it any more.
 
boomstomp said:
im playing warband right now and would love for bannerlord if you are in a town that is close to the sea i would love to hear the sea in the distance(a recording of waves  and some seagulls) around would give  a lot of immersion .

secondly: would be grait if the game saved the faces that you make and randomly use them in the game like when you fight in a tournament and one of your previous characters are running at you with an axe like that caracter still exists in the world you just arnt in control of it any more.

The first idea would be a nice touch, and the second one would be quite amusing and cheering in a way, though it could feel a little annoying too- if you'd had a long game with one character, and he has seen the map of Calradia change dramatically, what is he doing in your new version of Calradia which is probably very different in terms of who controls what land, who has been killed (if lords can die in the game) etc. I definitely like the first idea, just not certain about the second one personally.  :smile:
 
Docere said:
Yeah true, Skyrim is also flooded with such mods :wink:

But it could be interesting if you could apply player made models on Companions or NPC's :smile:

Or for modding purposes if they're easily implemented. People could make packs, like Napoleonic era generals pack, LOTR pack, GOT pack etc.
 
CO-OP idea to make the multiplayer easier to make... https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,349390.msg8371159.html#msg8371159

If all players was in the same party and could not leave the party this would make the multiplayer co-op game a lot easier to make.

You would then all spawn together whenever you enter a city, town, village, place, bandit attack or battle etc. With an active coms channel so you can all talk about where your going, also be able to place a target pin on the map so can show the leader where you think the team should be going. LAN should be an option as well as creating a private server for a team of people that are using coop.

*Each person will be able to buy their own items for their character.
*The money would either be shared or have an equal portion shared out between the playing characters from looting and tasks.
*You would be able to swap/trade/donate items or money to each other. (between players)
*Be assigned a portion of the soldiers to look after or use whilst in battle.
*The hiring of soldiers cost could be spread out amongst the players treasury or each player would hire their own regiments soldiers, and again be able to swap, trade or donate soldiers to one another. (between players)
*Buying of shops and land should most probably be a cost that is shared and jointly owned, each player would put in a shared amount or be able to put in what they can or trade with each (between players) other to satisfy the other players.
*Having seen a mod that has the ability to build a wagon train I think all players should be able to use the wagon train, or have a joint trading venture where you all put money into products that will be traded and profits shared out when sold. (mods Bellum Imperii and Brytenwalda)
*Collection of items from a battle would be a joint pool so you can communicate with each other and each take what you need in real time, or you could put the rest in the wagon train you have built.
*on a mod RaW2 you can hire trained soldiers from villages and upgrade/retrain/equip to the next level at forts and cities I think, I like this idea but I think this could be an additional way of hiring while still being able to hire villagers and farmers, possibly hiring different soldiers at forts and towns/cities only and hiring villagers and farmers at the villages. (but in realistic terms you may find trained soldiers at villages after they have served they would return home to the city/town/village.

** I personally like the idea of each player having their own money and regiment for which they are responsible for feeding, upgrading and pre-battle formation setup and generally looking after. I have seen a mod with entertainment for soldiers, if this was the case then the entertainment could be global, or just global for the entertainment character tribute and having the option from buying a barrel of beer (or hiring a whore) for all soldiers or just your regiment.

Their should be more reasons to walk round a village or town as this would give a multiplayer coop game more activity than just management and battles. For example if you went into a town then characters could go off and go to each merchant they choose, speak to characters, hire people. Story and mission type conversations would come up between all players but the player who initiated the conversation would be the one to answer. When visiting a town or village and buying items without actually physically going through the town all players would have the same screen although it would be with their monies and on their inventory.

I think this option would be easier to make compared to splitting the group and having various player groups on the campaign map at any one time.

I uploaded this here I didn't know how to suggest this to the creators...
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,349390.msg8371159.html#msg8371159
 
Just do me one GIGANTIC favor... Do not take a wonderful game ( Mount & Blade: War Band ), and complicate the heck out of it.
In my opinion, what makes the Mount & Blade games so fun and addicting, is it's simplicity and of course the Medieval carnage.
Adding minor things is ok ( More Factions, environmental changes, a little bit more of an immersive story and perhaps some more quests that are less annoying) ( like escorting cattle.. ugh. ) I am a warrior, not a herdsman.
If you plan to go through with the whole bartering idea, keep it simple. ( This isn't Elderscrolls Oblivion.)
If you plan to make large cities where it will take us days to find the Guild Master, park him at the front gate.
If you plan to use battering rams, catapults and other siege equipment to make sieging more interesting, keep it simple.
Keep diplomacy simple. ( this isn't an Empire: Total War game )
If you stay with the environmental changes I seen in the video, cool! And if it's blotchy nonsense like Viking Conquest where you could barely see your troops, I may throw up.
If the hero leveling system changes, keep it simple. ( This isn't an RPG, where we need 7 tiers of special skills )
Again, in my opinion, Mount & Blade has been successful because of it's 'straight to the point' simplicity. Don't ruin it with hours of pointless micromanagement, complicated trade and diplomacy systems, like I have seen sooooo many good titles destroyed ( and I am not the only one who sees this ), by following some 'next generation', nonsense.
Stronghold series, Rome series, Civilization series and many, many, many more Overwhelmingly Positive titles that have gone to Mixed and Negative.
I beg you... Don't ruin this. Don't do it!! Please don't do it! If you are going to ruin it, name it something else. Like Ram & Slam: Carnage Unleashed or something of the barbaric sort.
 


I think this game should be easy to learn, hard to master. A fairly easy solution should be acceptable. A complicated and precise solution should be better.

With bartering one should be able to get a decent deal by trading in the right city and not being preposterous with one's offers. Or, if one wants to delve deeper into the art of trading, he should be able to set the whole town against each other, start merchant wars and end up with what he wanted plus a small fortune in profit.

Large cities should indeed have the ability to ask for directions. Or a guild hall. If a city is large there is no reason for it not to have a market/guild hall. On that note I hope we get competing merchants within a city.

Sieges. one should be able to win a siege by amassing an amount of huscarl-equivalent troops double the defender's number. Or by carefully calculating the exact paths the trebruchet's stones have to follow. Or by crafting a genious attack plan. Or by activating a part of the spy network he carefully laid out the last three years.

With diplomacy I do start to lose you though. Diplomacy shouldn't be total-war level complex. It should be paradox-level complex. Ruling a kingdom is hard. It should however be a bit more natural than warband. Less cases of irrational lords becoming angry after you give him and two others each a fief. What I do think you should be able to do though is to hire ministers and officials to help you with this. though they also could become corrupt or even try to take over the power. as I said, ruling a kingdom is hard.

Environmental changes are cool indeed. It should however be a bit more influential. Often battles were decided by the weather. (agincourt, waterloo, operation barbarossa).
Also, fog is great and should be kept. If you don't like it. Don't fight in fog (though the ai should also be disadvantaged). This happened fairly often in real life since it was indeed a pain to command people when you couldn't see them.

Ieveling. I don't think the mount and blade leveling system is good. It lacks cohesion and worst of all suffers greatly from an asynchronicity between experience and growth. You don't become a great surgeon by chopping off arms or heads. What the game needs is a more natural system where one's experience is more than a number.
Also, this game is certainly an rpg.

mount and blade has been successful because of a great combat system and because there was no other game like it. Modding also played a role. Simplicity did not play any part. It might in fact be the opposite. You never see people praise the game's diplomacy or sieges. This is because these are tacked on and oversimplified. To much simplification decreased depth. It actually might be one of the reasons the game has a tendency to become repetitive after the 200th bandit party. Ironically the modding community is most praised for taking away the overt simplicity by mods as diplomacy, by mods with increased unit trees and by a plethora of large scenes of varying quality (look, I generally don't like mods).

Your last argument is fallacious though. The franchises you mention have not become less popular because of increasing complexity. Stronghold has fallen because two was shaky, legends was a simpler and therefore more boring version of two with a thin fantasy varnish, three was complete crap and crusader two lacks the depth crusader had. I also seems to have less features. Rome, if you mean Rome: total war it was because the second game was buggy and foll of dlc. Not because of complexity. Sadly, the total war games have become simpler thereby losing a lot of believable simulation for a gamey experience. gamey is bad because it makes the player feel like they are editing a spreadsheet instead of experiencing a world. If you mean the series called just Rome. I have no experience with them so I can't say anything on that.
I don't have experience with with civilization either but what I heard about five was that the outcry was because they took out interesting, deep and complex features. the game was said to be better when the expansions came and added more complexity.

I do not see a "next generation" trend of more micromanagement or overtly complex systems. If anything I see people rage about "dumbing down" beloved titles instead.

On another note. Now I have written this I think it would be interesting if battles were less frequent but longer and more rewarding as well as involving more skill. As I said, using the same cavalry charge a hundred times becomes boring. I personally would really like it if the battlefield were generated from the location you are with features on the campaign map (mountains for instance) actually being on the battlefield. I also hope there will be the option to make a battle plan and distribute it to your troops. Battlefield preparation would be interesting to. Something like planting stakes for the archers or half-cutting trees in order to ambush. Maybe two armies could face off first for half a day, then have a fight between champions, then assemble in lines and then finally fight. Lastly a variety of effects and props like barns or ditches (please allow us to dig our own trenches by the way.) would make a battle more memorable.


and if you think that's to complex. charging with cavalry/heavy infantry should work too though you probably need more men and lose a fair amount of them in the process.

and now I have wasted about 50 minutes of my time on the day before a test I will finally go to bet to have six hours of sleep before my life collapses.
 
DanAngleland said:
The first idea would be a nice touch, and the second one would be quite amusing and cheering in a way, though it could feel a little annoying too- if you'd had a long game with one character, and he has seen the map of Calradia change dramatically, what is he doing in your new version of Calradia which is probably very different in terms of who controls what land, who has been killed (if lords can die in the game) etc. I definitely like the first idea, just not certain about the second one personally.  :smile:
You could always think of him / her as your second cousin twice removed or maybe as one of you fathers illegitimate children  :lol:
 
kraggrim said:
Docere said:
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think they already said that we can even share the created characters among us.

Might end up being annoying. Mod sites for games like Fallout 4 can get clogged with 'mods' that only consist of "Here is a sexyface player-character I created!".  Rather irritating to sift through tons of them when looking through recently uploaded mods, especially as a lot of creators don't tag them correctly.

But I NEED my Scarlett Johanson character! And the nude-huge-bouncing-boobs-and-bottom-mod! I CAN'T PLAY WITHOUT THEM ANYMORE! My wife left me for no reason and, well, I NEED IT!

I still don't think the devs should waste much time in trying to add a MP campaign. Too much work, not enough reward.

A simple thing they could do is just a MP map campaign like Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm, where there are X maps, faction A has 0.5X maps, faction B has 0.3X and faction C has 0.2X maps, each time one side wins, they choose where to attack next.
It's not glamurous nor does it entail much MP rewarding, but it still is fun enough. Even more so if UR CASUL.

So long as their focus remain on an awesome SP game, I care little-to-nothing about MP, especially since I live in south america and internet here is the same it was in Oregon back in 1978. Well, maybe not that horrible. Maybe New York, 1991.
 
an actually interesting article on said nude mods (probably NSFW but it's for educational means. if this is not acceptable please tell me so I can remove the link and write a three-page essay about why I think the overt fear of nudity is fairly stupid)
EDIT: decided to remove the link anyway. you can simply search for "kotaku skyrim nude mods". it's the first link. just as easy and won't get me banned from here. my three-page essay will be written in a couple of weeks.

I find your idea of a more turn-based map interesting. while it would require additional work this could possibly fix the problem. though in that case one might wonder if it should still be in the same game.
 
Hope with character creation first you choose your gender then the faction you want to start with then you should have the option to have been born there or in a far off land as you grow up one of the next options should be to have been a shield barer for one of the lords and then you can pick witch one, so when you start the game there is one lord that knows you and that you have good relations with , it should of course just be one of the many choices you can make when creating your character and his or her back story.
 
boomstomp said:
Hope with character creation first you choose your gender then the faction you want to start with then you should have the option to have been born there or in a far off land as you grow up one of the next options should be to have been a shield barer for one of the lords and then you can pick witch one, so when you start the game there is one lord that knows you and that you have good relations with , it should of course just be one of the many choices you can make when creating your character and his or her back story.

The character creation screen is already done, you can take a look at it in the PC Gamer video.
 
Tarbosaurus said:
boomstomp said:
Hope with character creation first you choose your gender then the faction you want to start with then you should have the option to have been born there or in a far off land as you grow up one of the next options should be to have been a shield barer for one of the lords and then you can pick witch one, so when you start the game there is one lord that knows you and that you have good relations with , it should of course just be one of the many choices you can make when creating your character and his or her back story.

The character creation screen is already done, you can take a look at it in the PC Gamer video.
they said its still a work in progress and we haven't seen the background options yet
 
Dest45 said:
Tarbosaurus said:
boomstomp said:
Hope with character creation first you choose your gender then the faction you want to start with then you should have the option to have been born there or in a far off land as you grow up one of the next options should be to have been a shield barer for one of the lords and then you can pick witch one, so when you start the game there is one lord that knows you and that you have good relations with , it should of course just be one of the many choices you can make when creating your character and his or her back story.

The character creation screen is already done, you can take a look at it in the PC Gamer video.
they said its still a work in progress and we haven't seen the background options yet
Well, I meant the face creation screen. And yes, I know it's a work in progress but still that looked like a final version, I guess they are not going to scrap such a polished form of it.

Edit: Hm, I see that boomstomp wasn't talking about the face creation at all, apologies :razz:
 
Dear Journal
It the year 2998,and evreybody is scared because of the Y3K,but im not .
I still await for Taleworlds to relese the 13th blog or the game,i heard rumors,whispers in the shadow but i dont lisen to them ,i still hope
.P.s:Tomarrow is the grand day in wich we launch the colony ship Zalmoxis's Wisdom's, and im abord,i still hope for Bannerlord but my hope is getting smaller
-Cody Pluto
 
What I would like to see the most in Bannerlord is voice chat.

I am serious. How can modern game exist without voicechat?? Imagine all roleplay server/mods with voicechat. I know that there is teamspeak but only clans use it and it will never be like real implemented to game voicechat. Garry's mod game lives long thanks to voicechat. Imagine what would happen to community if it was deleted...
I would be very sad if Bannerlord didn't include voice chat.

Voice chat would work best if it would look like I describe below. I have experience with various voice chat systems in many games.
Voice chat system should include following options:

0. Option in admin panel to enable/disable voice chat completly.
1. LOCAL CHAT as base for most of gamemodes: Sound is heard localy by players nearby not all players in team. The lauder you speak the bigger distance you are heard by others. Yes, realistic. (local chat)
2. Only dead players hear each other everywhere (global voice chat for dead players), they also hear alive players who are near their camera position.
3. Ability to turn global voice chat on and off for everyone and for teams in administrator's panel.
4. Ability to gag players by admin and votegag by players (also ability to turn those polls on and off) gag means player cannot speak by microphone but can use chat.
5. Ability to mute player, mute means they cant use voice chat, neither use text chat.
6. Option to personal/clientside gag or mute players which we dont like to hear/see.
7. Ability for admin to be heard globaly by all players if he wants, even if global voice chat is turned off for everyone else.
8. Player can speak in voice chat up to 4 seconds after he dies (but not if he got hit in the head). It is funny when players can comment their death sometimes (like in Garry's mod).

PS If you dont know how it should look, check Gmod. Best quality of voice chat I saw was in Natural Selection 2 game.
PS2 Also it would be nice to have nicknames of all players sorted alphabetically when you make a poll to votekick/votebann them because it is hard to find annoying player on the list when there is more than 50 players on the server.

Dear developers seriously, consider adding voice chat to Bannerlord.
 
Voice chat wouldn't work very well in a game that has so many players on a single server. There are a plethora of free talky things like Teamspeak, and clans aren't the only ones who use them. Since you brought up Gmod, I'll put in that the very few times I've tried out RP on that game mic spam was rampant and anything that anyone wanted to be taken seriously was typed out.
 
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