Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 14 - Destructible Merlons

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As is traditional, this blog covers our previous major event, goes talks a bit about our experience and what we showed. This time it's E3, possibly the biggest gaming event of the year and the first time we've ever attended with our own booth. Our reveal was Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord's siege gameplay, which came in the form of this trailer and the extended gameplay video below.



Read more at: http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/16
 
Reading this prompted me to just check how many hours I have spent playing Warband and I am really surprised.  So far I have accumulated (or should that be wasted) over 2300 hours playing Warband and most of that playing PoP and not one hour of Multiplayer.
 
Grumpy181155 said:
over 2300 hours

yeah Warband is crazy like that. Mods/DLCs are essentially new games, and when you combine all the hours...

I posted earlier about a Warband HD (Special Edition, Remaster, whatever PR wants to call it). Would be great to have Warband/Mods running on a updated engine for 64bits and new DX/GPU (better graphics, higher resolution, performance, more memory for scenes/battles, etc). Play mods like PoP with 2013/2015 level graphics, 500 ish battle-size, etc. Would make the waiting for Bannerlord less painful  :razz: . Games like Skyrim SE are breaking records and are a strong trend since 2015.

Now back on topic  :shifty:
 
kalarhan said:
Grumpy181155 said:
over 2300 hours

yeah Warband is crazy like that. Mods/DLCs are essentially new games, and when you combine all the hours...

I posted earlier about a Warband HD (Special Edition, Remaster, whatever PR wants to call it). Would be great to have Warband/Mods running on a updated engine for 64bits and new DX/GPU (better graphics, higher resolution, performance, more memory for scenes/battles, etc). Play mods like PoP with 2013/2015 level graphics, 500 ish battle-size, etc. Would make the waiting for Bannerlord less painful  :razz: . Games like Skyrim SE are breaking records and are a strong trend since 2015.

Now back on topic  :shifty:

On the one hand I kind of agree that a WB Remaster or whatever, could have been a way to make the wait for Bannerlord less painful. I think it would have been a waste of time and resources on the other.

Once the BL engine and the game itself are finished, Taleworlds or a mod team could always try to make Warband Ultra HD on the new engine made from scratch. Sometimes I can't play Warband just because I can't stand the graphics, I still got 900+ hours on it by now. :grin:
 
Pilum said:
I think it would have been a waste of time and resources on the other.

Warband: released in 2011
Warband RE: released in 2015
Bannerlord: released in 2017/2018

it would give us 2+ years to enjoy the RE (remastered edition).

Now lets look at the pessimistic scenario for time/resources:

Warband: 6+ million copies sold
Active players in 2015: 10%, or 600k
Players in 2015 with a modern computer (medium/high end bought after 2012): 50% or 300k
Willing to pay for a upgraded engine: 50% or 150k
Price of RE: $15 bucks (for current owners of Warband), $30bucks for new players (for this pessimistic scenario, we assume zero new players)
Profit for a sell (after paying Steam, taxes, etc, but before studio expenses): $7 by copie, or ~$ 1million
Average cost of a engine engineer/2D and 3D artist/sound engineer per year: ~$100k

That would mean a budget for a team of 10 people (ish) to work on the update, breaking even. We are not talking about a remake, but a remaster. So no gameplay changes, we are talking about updating graphics engine, redo some of the textures and models for higher poly count / definition, rework sounds, ... no game designers to create new stuff, no testing of quests, game balance, no creating a new AI, etc.

Now increase the scenario by a bit, say 500k new sells and 500k old players. That would mean a profit of $ ~10millions dollars to invest in Bannerlord.

Or why do you guys think the game studios are releasing remastered games? Skyrim SE is on the list of top sold games for PC and consoles. Other remastered games are selling well too.

And lets not forget all the free PR, Youtube hype, press coverage, new players interested in the IP for the sequel, etc, that would just help Bannerlord sell.

Hindsight is a great thingy, right? In 2014 people didn't want to talk about remastered games. The impression was that it was just a rip-off, why do it? No money, players would hate the studio, ...
then came 2015 and 2016 and every big studio is trying to release a RE or thinking about a remake now hehe

Looking forward for FF7 remake  :cool:



Pilum said:
Taleworlds or a mod team could always try to make Warband Ultra HD
Its likely we will get a remake of Warband, yes. But the remake (not talking about a remaster now) needs to have features from the mods that improve the overall gameplay from old Native, taking ideas from Floris, Diplomacy, ... and of course, Bannerlord itself (like the siege attack with multiple points of entry, instead of 1 silly ladder hehe). Would be fun to see the expanded lore be applied to Warband, and to revisit our old friends again.

Future looks good!
 
kalarhan said:
Pilum said:
I think it would have been a waste of time and resources on the other.

Warband: released in 2011
Warband RE: released in 2015
Bannerlord: released in 2017/2018

it would give us 2+ years to enjoy the RE (remastered edition).

Now lets look at the pessimistic scenario for time/resources:

Warband: 6+ million copies sold
Active players in 2015: 10%, or 600k
Players in 2015 with a modern computer (medium/high end bought after 2012): 50% or 300k
Willing to pay for a upgraded engine: 50% or 150k
Price of RE: $15 bucks (for current owners of Warband), $30bucks for new players (for this pessimistic scenario, we assume zero new players)
Profit for a sell (after paying Steam, taxes, etc, but before studio expenses): $7 by copie, or ~$ 1million
Average cost of a engine engineer/2D and 3D artist/sound engineer per year: ~$100k

That would mean a budget for a team of 10 people (ish) to work on the update, breaking even. We are not talking about a remake, but a remaster. So no gameplay changes, we are talking about updating graphics engine, redo some of the textures and models for higher poly count / definition, rework sounds, ... no game designers to create new stuff, no testing of quests, game balance, no creating a new AI, etc.

Now increase the scenario by a bit, say 500k new sells and 500k old players. That would mean a profit of $ ~10millions dollars to invest in Bannerlord.

Or why do you guys think the game studios are releasing remastered games? Skyrim SE is on the list of top sold games for PC and consoles. Other remastered games are selling well too.

And lets not forget all the free PR, Youtube hype, press coverage, new players interested in the IP for the sequel, etc, that would just help Bannerlord sell.

Hindsight is a great thingy, right? In 2014 people didn't want to talk about remastered games. The impression was that it was just a rip-off, why do it? No money, players would hate the studio, ...
then came 2015 and 2016 and every big studio is trying to release a RE or thinking about a remake now hehe

Looking forward for FF7 remake  :cool:



Pilum said:
Taleworlds or a mod team could always try to make Warband Ultra HD
Its likely we will get a remake of Warband, yes. But the remake (not talking about a remaster now) needs to have features from the mods that improve the overall gameplay from old Native, taking ideas from Floris, Diplomacy, ... and of course, Bannerlord itself (like the siege attack with multiple points of entry, instead of 1 silly ladder hehe). Would be fun to see the expanded lore be applied to Warband, and to revisit our old friends again.

Future looks good!
I forgot to add that Taleworlds is not a very big studio by comparison.
Like you said, it's more of a recent trend to make a "remaster".

Nah, I'd rather they work fulltime on their new game and make it the best that it can be.

And I agree with the Warband "remake" part.
 
Pilum said:
Taleworlds is not a very big studio

I'd rather they work fulltime on their new game

so you are saying they couldn't work on more than one game - at the same time - and kept the quality level, hire a few more people (grow the team with +5 or +10), etc, ?

we are not talking about doing something for free or losing money. If they had to hire a few more people, then make money of that work, those same people and experience could later be applied to the new game as well. Similar to the console port. They invested some money on it, we don't know if they made that money back, but they are definitely learning a lot and will use it for a Bannerlord port (reducing the number of issues in the future version).



This also made me curious. How much do you think Bannerlord will cost? 30 millions dollars? More? Less? The team is suppose to be about 60 in size, right? Considering they work close together with a university, they have access to lots of cheap interns to work on the boring stuff as well  :mrgreen: Still we are talking about years of development, extra costs, etc. That seems like a reasonable guess.



Bethesda is a interesting case for comparison. They have the advantage of time (decades of experience and multiple games), and they still are a small company. They use to mostly work on one game at time (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, ...). Fallout 4 had about 100 people working on it, and we are talking about a game that made over 1 billion dollars (750millions in the first 24hours). Yet now they are working on 3 new tiles (IIRC), not related to the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series. Oh and they made a killing with Fallout Shelter, a very small mobile game, done by just a few people, that was a sweet surprise in revenue hehe.
 
-|Hydra|- said:
That AAA Title who doesn't even have support for Azerty keyboard that I have to use autohotkey to play a game  :mrgreen:
Ok sorry for the troll but Fallout 4 as a big fan of Fallout series made me so mad about Bethesda.

you can find small specific issues with any game, including Warband. Fallout 4 is no exception. I guess you know that mods, patchs and workarounds (like autohotkey or changing language to ENG were available at one point or another).

it doesn't matter if the dev team is 10-man size (No Man's Sky was ~16), 100 (Fallout 4), 300 (Witcher 3), 1000+ (GTA).

I don't know why Fallout 4 didn't support AZERTY. Maybe they didn't think it was worth on release (expected sells on those regions). Maybe they had to cut it off for some reason. Its a weird issue, considering the engine is not new (its a progressive work they update with new games, so pretty much Skyrim engine).

Just pointing out the same thingy will happen with Bannerlord, not matter how good the game is  :mrgreen:
 
Just to throw my two cents in, for a small-scale developer example, you can look at Defender's Quest. On their way to the sequel, they re-released the original one with updated graphics and using the engine that's being developed for DQII.

If you're not really familiar with it, I can't recommend enough the author's blog -> http://www.fortressofdoors.com/ he's got some solid articles about game development in general.
 
kalarhan said:
Pilum said:
Taleworlds is not a very big studio

I'd rather they work fulltime on their new game

so you are saying they couldn't work on more than one game - at the same time - and kept the quality level, hire a few more people (grow the team with +5 or +10), etc, ?

we are not talking about doing something for free or losing money. If they had to hire a few more people, then make money of that work, those same people and experience could later be applied to the new game as well. Similar to the console port. They invested some money on it, we don't know if they made that money back, but they are definitely learning a lot and will use it for a Bannerlord port (reducing the number of issues in the future version).



This also made me curious. How much do you think Bannerlord will cost? 30 millions dollars? More? Less? The team is suppose to be about 60 in size, right? Considering they work close together with a university, they have access to lots of cheap interns to work on the boring stuff as well  :mrgreen: Still we are talking about years of development, extra costs, etc. That seems like a reasonable guess.



Bethesda is a interesting case for comparison. They have the advantage of time (decades of experience and multiple games), and they still are a small company. They use to mostly work on one game at time (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, ...). Fallout 4 had about 100 people working on it, and we are talking about a game that made over 1 billion dollars (750millions in the first 24hours). Yet now they are working on 3 new tiles (IIRC), not related to the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series. Oh and they made a killing with Fallout Shelter, a very small mobile game, done by just a few people, that was a sweet surprise in revenue hehe.

A Warband "remaster" maybe would have been possible from a business standpoint, but if you are already working on a new tech platform, why remaster Warband with the old technology?
Isn't "Warband" already a remaster of the original "Mount & Blade" in many ways?

About the cost of Bannerlord: I really don't know how much TW have spent on the development process so far.
But 30 million dollars doesn't sound unreasonable to me (I think they also get government funding).

About Bethesda games: although I liked Skyrim (with 50+ mods, lol), I still feel their games are lacking in many ways, or are dull even.
Their mod support though is commendable compared to many other developers.

But if Bannerlord is going to be successful business wise, I'm sure they can build on that "platform" with confidence, with mods and future games, which seems to be their plan anyways, at least according to an interview (don't know which one it was).
 
you can find small specific issues with any game, including Warband. Fallout 4 is no exception. I guess you know that mods, patchs and workarounds (like autohotkey or changing language to ENG were available at one point or another).

it doesn't matter if the dev team is 10-man size (No Man's Sky was ~16), 100 (Fallout 4), 300 (Witcher 3), 1000+ (GTA).

I don't know why Fallout 4 didn't support AZERTY. Maybe they didn't think it was worth on release (expected sells on those regions). Maybe they had to cut it off for some reason. Its a weird issue, considering the engine is not new (its a progressive work they update with new games, so pretty much Skyrim engine).

Just pointing out the same thingy will happen with Bannerlord, not matter how good the game is  :mrgreen:

Well that's the fun fact Skyrim never had any problem with AZERTY support I really didn't understand what happened there I still finished Fallout 4 and enjoyed it with mods but what a pain at the start of the game  :evil:

For Bannelord I expect it to have support for AZERTY since Warband doesn't have any issue but who know  :mrgreen:

Half of the team was playing the game friday  https://steamdb.info/app/261550/graphs/ TW have party without us  :cry:
 
Hello everyone, any news … (I know it’s a bad joke) about navigation ?
Would it be something like “The Pirate Caribbean Hunt” ? I hope so, with some small missions (like passenger transportation and goods transportation) , open navigation (with ship wreck plundering and discover/destroy wreckers hiding place) … without canons of course but maybe greek fire, spur and ballista.
Hope well and have well ! Maybe for M&B III ?
 
Oris Iram said:
Hello everyone, any news …

visit the Bannerlord thread. This one is about the blog, not random stuff in general  :mrgreen:

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,249537.0.html

nothing on ships so far. To be fair, we know very little about the game lol.

Seems unlikely, as the map is mostly connected by land, but we never know... maybe on a DLC, expansions (extending the world map), alternative universe, mod, new games like BG:Carribean,  ...
 
Are only the merlons destructible, or  is there plans to also allow destroying the towers and walls?
 
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