My ideas to improve the late game

[Mad Vader]

2. Level scaling amounts to little more than slowing the player down in some aspect. I have never seen it done well in any game of any genre.

That was the whole premise of the hugely successful Diablo franchise and its clones. Did you miss those? The draw there were the scaling rewards.
It's an easy and cheap solution to the problem of giving the player an adequate challenge at any time. Not the best though, because grinding. But it's the cheapest one because alternatives require new gameplay and content.

There's a common theme here. I think what taleworlds needs to learn from warband is that the pacing in that game was terrible, and they should accept that with the amount of actual gameplay mechanics they have, campaigns should probably be no longer than about 10 hours from start to finish, assuming the player is trying to become king of the world or whatever the implied "endgame" is. Currently you have to personally besiege hundreds of settlements in near identical sieges, and grind for hours to even participate in the kingdom play of the midgame. The reason the lategame is so boring is because by that time, the campaign has long since outstayed its welcome.

10 hours?? Even 100 hours is too little for a game that thrives on epic battles.
What they could do is to reduce the grinding aspects (like endlessly fighting respawning, fully restocked lords; or indeed having to siege 100 towns and castles) and make those hours more fun. When an AI kingdom is losing to the player, this should be recognized by diplomatic options used to shorten the war and reduce the repeating battles.
Hopefully they did this in Bannerlord and dropped the grinding Warband design mentality that served to artificially prolong the game and nothing else.

 

[orgrinrt]

10 hours?? Even 100 hours is too little for a game that thrives on epic battles.

10 hours for an entire campaign is on the short side, but I'd say there's a long distance between 10 and 100 hours. 100 hours to complete a single campaign is a lot, even if the late-game content was more varied, in-depth and less grindy than in warband. I'm not sure how many casual players would ever finish a campaign if it took 100 hours, and I know it's not that much for devoted fans of the game, but casual players tend to be the majority of the players in any given game.

I bet there's a hidden opportunity here to make something like "campaign speed" an option when starting a new game. I for one would love to sink hundreds of hours in one campaign, but I've seen enough to know that most people would not.

 

[Orion]

The Witcher 3 was launched with the claim of having about 100 hours of content in the base game, so I don't think that's an unreasonable amount for an open world game.

 

[Mad Vader]

Here's a Warband poll (of unknown value). You can easily sink 100 hours into a SP campaign, up to 500 hours for some people.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

The Witcher 3 was launched with the claim of having about 100 hours of content in the base game, so I don't think that's an unreasonable amount for an open world game.

The Witcher is a game with hundreds of written quests and levels, while Bannerlord is a systems-driven game where the mechanics are designed for repetition. In the Witcher if you keep playing to 100 hours you're extremely unlikely to see the same amount of sheer repetition as if you did the same in Warband. I don't think merely being open world should inherently mean an exceptionally long game.

Here's a Warband poll (of unknown value). You can easily sink 100 hours into a SP campaign, up to 500 hours for some people.

Even if we can take that at face value, the only reason those numbers are so high are because the game forces you to spend that long to complete it. I would like to know the percentage of all players who actually have the world conquest achievement.

I don't think completion stats really make much sense in an open-ended strategy game like Mount and Blade. The game hardly even acknowledges your world conquest.

 

[John_M]

I would like to know the percentage of all players who actually have the world conquest achievement.

According to Steam, 1.7% of people have gotten the "Rule all of Calradia" achievement. Of course there are probably a decent amount more, people who "completed" it with cheats on.

 

[Mad Vader]

The numbers give you a rough time scale of player investment. Players were willing (and required) to spend hundreds of hours, not tens.
It's definitely not a game for casuals or people with ADHD problems.
I remember playing a single SP campaign for weeks at a time, then taking a break, then following up for more weeks.  I think battles were most time-consuming (and most satisfying), not some busywork, although some battles are definitely less exciting repeats.
If they want to cut down the time needed, it will have to be at the expense of battles. This is fine as long as they can design it properly.
But I doubt they could or should cut down the time dramatically.

 

[Orion]

The Witcher 3 was launched with the claim of having about 100 hours of content in the base game, so I don't think that's an unreasonable amount for an open world game.

The Witcher is a game with hundreds of written quests and levels, while Bannerlord is a systems-driven game where the mechanics are designed for repetition. In the Witcher if you keep playing to 100 hours you're extremely unlikely to see the same amount of sheer repetition as if you did the same in Warband. I don't think merely being open world should inherently mean an exceptionally long game.

Considering that includes side quests, monster bounties, etc., then it actually does contain a lot of samey content. All of the monster hunts are the same in premise: get mission, find tracks, follow tracks, fight monster. In most cases, talking to people is unnecessary beyond being given the quest. Side quests include the fist-fighting chain, which contains--you guessed it--exclusively fist-fighting. The only change-up in that entire line are the final two fights, but they're superficial changes because for the player the experience is identical: punch thing until it falls down. Gwent was the focus of a side quest chain and is the samey-ist of samey content in all of sameyland, but despite that it was popular enough to turn into a spin-off game of its own. One of the most common criticisms (that I've heard, at least) is that the combat, despite being better than all previous iterations, is still the weakest and most boring part of the Witcher 3 because every fight feels the same. Samey clearly isn't a deal breaker, though, if we're judging it by Witcher 3's success.

Besides, my point was that 100 hours isn't unreasonable for a casual player, which I should have specified. Nobody says you have to no-life a game to reach those kinds of hours, and most adults can't. Still, you can pick it up, play a couple of hours, put it down and come back later. Being samey actually helps this approach, because it's easier to pick up after shelving it for a while when even new content feels familiar.

 

[Huggles]

I think all enemies scaling with the player ruins the sense of progression and getting more powerful. Far more interesting is to simply add more elements or phases of the game.

So for instance, basic looters shouldn't ever become ****ing ninja samurais, but you could add assassins and such hired by other lords with elite gear that try to track your party and kill you.

 

[monoolho]

So for instance, basic looters shouldn't ever become ****ing ninja samurais, but you could add assassins and such hired by other lords with elite gear that try to track your party and kill you.

It would be funny looking around and seeing a band of "Assassins (23)" always near your 134 man party. So they would be like annoying sea raiders or deserters, always waiting for your defeat/leaving army to go trade or something somewhere, so then they could attack you.

It wouldn't be unrealistic, but I'm not certain it would be fun either.

 

[Mad Vader]

I think all enemies scaling with the player ruins the sense of progression and getting more powerful. Far more interesting is to simply add more elements or phases of the game.

The cure for this is to provide the player with very different levels of challenges at all times: from weak looter-type parties to unique OP minor faction parties, with lord parties around the average. Provide rewards that correspond to the challenge levels and you have both motivation and choice.

So for instance, basic looters shouldn't ever become ****ing ninja samurais, but you could add assassins and such hired by other lords with elite gear that try to track your party and kill you.

This may become annoying quickly (like Taleworlds' ambushes!). Besides, do you really want to be killed after investing 100 hours into your character in a random non-epic battle?

 

[Roccoflipside]

Gotta say, I did like putting VC on high bandits so I could level my new troops up with easy, but substantial (100 v 100 or so) battles. knowing I could take a few high level troops with mostly low levels, while the rest were safe in my hideout, made it relatively easy to keep a good base of decent troops, even when I was on an extended campaign.

 

[hansolo223]

This is where we can learn from real medieval times.
Once you are in power, it should be hard to maintain power.
Always enemies trying to overthrow you in many ways. Betrayal, assassination, invasion, disease, natural disasters, religion, politics, revolts, etc. And permadeath.
Whose to say your own kin and children might not poison your cup??
Just copy what happened in history and remove the boring parts.
It's hard to be king... but maybe sometimes it's easy. Sooner or later some drama will happen.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

People would generally only want to overthrow a king who was doing a bad job or upsetting an interest group. Things like the "divine right of kings" or "mandate of heaven" are just a mystification of this. A king was like an arbiter between social and economic classes and his whole rule was a balancing act trying to make the groups happy, or at the very least convince them that it would be a very bad idea to depose him. I don't think achieving peace and equilibrium should be impossible, but it should be pretty difficult and highly prone to changes in circumstance.

Let's say some archetypical jealous lord wants to take your throne. Unless he is literally insane, he won't do this unless he know he has enough support to stay there. And this won't happen unless you are negligent enough to let power concentrate amongst a handful of lords.