So, it's been a week and a few days since "full" release.
Multiplayer has plenty of issues, you can just take a look at the forums and you'll see what's wrong. Disconnection issues, crashes, lag, bad hit registration, balance, loot system. There's little that's working as it should. It can be entertaining, at times, but so is farting at a Halloween party (I know, oddly specific.)
But even more worrisome it's that, usually, games tend to have a strong and vibrant multiplayer on RELEASE, and only after a year or so they begin to decline, albeit slowly. Napoleonic Wars still has a rather strong community this long after the release, and it was a "mere" mod turned into a DLC.
Speaking of which, the server population of Bannerlord at 2:00 CET, which is prime time on the US East coast, was:
-A cRPG NA server with 56 players.
-An EU siege server with 44 players.
-Another cRPG server with 14 players.
-A dozen servers with less than 10 players.
Now, I ask you: is this sustainable for Bannerlord's multiplayer? For ANY game's multiplayer?
It was probably to be expected given how multiplayer was treated, well, how the GAME was treated, but a game with that kind of sales cannot get back on its feet with those numbers. Or can it? It was said that mods and custom servers would have saved it, yet there's just cRPG out there and it has a paltry amount of players compared to what I was expecting given how many copies the game's been selling. I'm not seeing any multiplayer mod coming soon either.
Is there anything that can be done? Would a massive multiplayer update (which won't come, I'm pretty sure) be enough to make multiplayer viable for the long term, or is it just too late for that?
Multiplayer has plenty of issues, you can just take a look at the forums and you'll see what's wrong. Disconnection issues, crashes, lag, bad hit registration, balance, loot system. There's little that's working as it should. It can be entertaining, at times, but so is farting at a Halloween party (I know, oddly specific.)
But even more worrisome it's that, usually, games tend to have a strong and vibrant multiplayer on RELEASE, and only after a year or so they begin to decline, albeit slowly. Napoleonic Wars still has a rather strong community this long after the release, and it was a "mere" mod turned into a DLC.
Speaking of which, the server population of Bannerlord at 2:00 CET, which is prime time on the US East coast, was:
-A cRPG NA server with 56 players.
-An EU siege server with 44 players.
-Another cRPG server with 14 players.
-A dozen servers with less than 10 players.
Now, I ask you: is this sustainable for Bannerlord's multiplayer? For ANY game's multiplayer?
It was probably to be expected given how multiplayer was treated, well, how the GAME was treated, but a game with that kind of sales cannot get back on its feet with those numbers. Or can it? It was said that mods and custom servers would have saved it, yet there's just cRPG out there and it has a paltry amount of players compared to what I was expecting given how many copies the game's been selling. I'm not seeing any multiplayer mod coming soon either.
Is there anything that can be done? Would a massive multiplayer update (which won't come, I'm pretty sure) be enough to make multiplayer viable for the long term, or is it just too late for that?