I think we all can get a bit carried away at times, myself included. And the game is obviously not terrible or bad, especially not if you're a new player to the series.
But for some of us who's been waiting for 10 years, it's just dissapointing and frustrating in the sense we should've gotten so much more.
The original M&B was pretty much just Armagan (and his wife?) and it was very impressive for what it was. Then with Warband they pretty much refined the experience and I believe they scaled up to be 6-7 developers in total around that time. With Warband, the game's popularity skyrocketed and it sold millions of copies! All sorts of high quality mods came out adding tons of new features and in general taking things to the next level.
Now TW had a huge warchest from Warband, they increased their developer count to around 60-100 developers, they worked on Bannerlord for almost 10 years (there was a leaked turkish video like a year before the official announcement). They had all the succesful mods to take features from as well as the experience from Warband.
Through the years TW was of course as silent as now, and Captain Lust (old community manager) would only occasional drop in with a comment in the 1000 page discussion when our frustrations became too heated due to the silence. We were speculating about things like co-op campaign, naval battles, deep diplomacy, Nord invasion etc.
Then the infamous comment about "We expect to have the game in some shape or form in gamers' hand by the end of 2016" came around, but we were still shown and told absolutely nothing so that didn't help things either. But then devblogs started coming out more in a more consistent manner and they showed a lot of cool features (see here for summary of the missing ones: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...se-dev-diaries-but-not-in-game-by-now.436973/ )
So 4 years after that and Bannerlord finally released in Early Access, and I know some people gave them some flak for the many bugs and crashes. However in my opinion those were not the problem, the problem was TW appeared to have cut pretty much every single corner imaginable in terms of features, even as you can see a lot of the stuff they themselves mentioned in their devblogs.
Now the battles and combat are great, but if everything else around is shallow and meaningless the battles eventually become boring as well. Additionally battles and combat is more or less together with the graphics the only aspect where Bannerlord is an obvious improvement vs Warband, which is just bizarre considering they had 10 times the workforce and they already had the formula and done the features once, it's not like they had to start from scratch with Bannerlord.
But okay Bannerlord had obviously had problems through development, and for sure they were going to eventually make the game the greatest it can be right? Nope, every suggestion which apparently takes more than 10 minutes to do is denied, features which Armagan probably did in a few afternoons 10 years ago by himself now suddenly takes months to do (Keep battles, Prison break). The game lacks all those "extra" features which might not be essential but it's what makes an okay game great and TW shows no ambition nor interest in actually adding these. Just see this thread: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...cess-roadmap-ready-for-you-taleworlds.440590/
So yeah sorry for the rant, but I hope it makes it a bit clearer at to why some people are frustrated about the game.
But for some of us who's been waiting for 10 years, it's just dissapointing and frustrating in the sense we should've gotten so much more.
The original M&B was pretty much just Armagan (and his wife?) and it was very impressive for what it was. Then with Warband they pretty much refined the experience and I believe they scaled up to be 6-7 developers in total around that time. With Warband, the game's popularity skyrocketed and it sold millions of copies! All sorts of high quality mods came out adding tons of new features and in general taking things to the next level.
Now TW had a huge warchest from Warband, they increased their developer count to around 60-100 developers, they worked on Bannerlord for almost 10 years (there was a leaked turkish video like a year before the official announcement). They had all the succesful mods to take features from as well as the experience from Warband.
Through the years TW was of course as silent as now, and Captain Lust (old community manager) would only occasional drop in with a comment in the 1000 page discussion when our frustrations became too heated due to the silence. We were speculating about things like co-op campaign, naval battles, deep diplomacy, Nord invasion etc.
Then the infamous comment about "We expect to have the game in some shape or form in gamers' hand by the end of 2016" came around, but we were still shown and told absolutely nothing so that didn't help things either. But then devblogs started coming out more in a more consistent manner and they showed a lot of cool features (see here for summary of the missing ones: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...se-dev-diaries-but-not-in-game-by-now.436973/ )
So 4 years after that and Bannerlord finally released in Early Access, and I know some people gave them some flak for the many bugs and crashes. However in my opinion those were not the problem, the problem was TW appeared to have cut pretty much every single corner imaginable in terms of features, even as you can see a lot of the stuff they themselves mentioned in their devblogs.
Now the battles and combat are great, but if everything else around is shallow and meaningless the battles eventually become boring as well. Additionally battles and combat is more or less together with the graphics the only aspect where Bannerlord is an obvious improvement vs Warband, which is just bizarre considering they had 10 times the workforce and they already had the formula and done the features once, it's not like they had to start from scratch with Bannerlord.
But okay Bannerlord had obviously had problems through development, and for sure they were going to eventually make the game the greatest it can be right? Nope, every suggestion which apparently takes more than 10 minutes to do is denied, features which Armagan probably did in a few afternoons 10 years ago by himself now suddenly takes months to do (Keep battles, Prison break). The game lacks all those "extra" features which might not be essential but it's what makes an okay game great and TW shows no ambition nor interest in actually adding these. Just see this thread: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...cess-roadmap-ready-for-you-taleworlds.440590/
So yeah sorry for the rant, but I hope it makes it a bit clearer at to why some people are frustrated about the game.