SP - General My List of Constructive Feedback

[Acid91]

Hey guys,

Here's my list of thoughts and suggestions on the game through my personal experience. So far I'm generally very pleased, however there are a lot of issues to address, as well as some features I'd like to see in the future. I'd also like to know if any of you guys agree/disagree on any of these points?

Features deserving praise:

• Combat is brutal, realistic and gritty. I love it.
• Animation is fluid and immersive. Graphics are in my opinion, gorgeous and well suited.
• Trading is fantastic, it feels like a proper fleshed out aspect of the game, as well as being part of a living economy.
• The world really feels alive, with little sight of AI cheating. Lords appear to recruit real individuals and caravans of all sizes lug resources across the map.
• Environments are beautiful and realistic.
• Battles are truly epic.
• World map is huge and sprawling with life.
• I feel the game is good without voice acting for quests and such, I personally don't think the benefit would be worth the time, work & money involved.
• The potential for this game to grow looks huge, I'm very happy the devs actively encouraged and facilitated this to happen through mods.

Severe Issues:

• Too many roaming bands of scaled bandits. The way Warband did it was much more preferable. No party scaling.
• Game progression and character strength feels too easy when I have all settings on realistic. It also feels out of alignment with slow progress of skills.
• Levelling seems broken and unachievable beyond a certain threshold.
• Attacking hideouts needs a serious re-think. I attacked a hideout with a warband 3 times their number, I got taken down first by a javelin to the face and lost the whole thing. For some senseless reason, my entire band was taken prisoner. You should be able to target hideouts like any village or town, with any degree of units you have available, there's no realistic reason why not. If you had the troops, you would surround it and rush the place. I personally think they should be like mini sieges, and the reward should depend on your cunning. They also need battle continuation after you fall and time of attack should be up to the player.
• Why are perks related to garrisoning capacity and reduced wages in the Two-Hander perk tree??
• Endless & unnecessary loading screens. All we need is a low res 2D background behind most of our encounters with the npcs. I don't think most of us care about having an immersive background for every encounter, the tedium is bad enough on a high end rig.
• Automatic speed adjustment upon clicking a new destination is very irritating.
• It might just be me, but the repetitive sound of pouring drinks in the taverns is very irritating, especially with headphones. I can't stand to be in taverns long enough with that going on.
• Party size seems too easy to expand despite not touching the leadership skill. Currently I can have 77 men with leadership of 17 and no perks. It would make a lot more sense at this stage for that capacity to be at least half.
• There's a clear imbalance of power with factions. They gain way too much momentum when conquering.

Lesser Issues:

Tournaments:

• Tournaments are too easy for low level characters, despite small rewards. Especially in comparison to practice fighting.
• There are too many tournaments available. It waters down the sense of it being a special event when you can do them endlessly.
• AI in tournaments feels too easy to abuse with shield bashing, they should at least have the same ability.
• Calvary AI in tournaments consistently seems a bit stupid. I'm frequently able to stab them without a response.
  
  Other:
• Make AI spread out a bit more, and behave less like a hungry zombie horde. They swarm densely around their targets which I just can't see happening in the same manner in real life.
• Enable us to have any class of partner to marry and have children with, rather than nobles. We can make our own family prestige.
• Archery too easy for newbies? It should be very difficult for a noob character to hit accurately with these weapons unless your target is less than 10 meters away.
• Cycling camera across map is tedious and disorientating, we need an instant centre camera button.
• Do enemies ever surrender? Especially outnumbered & outclassed looters.
• Will the game ever have its own complete soundtrack? A lot of the music is also used in The Guild 2, it's distracting more than anything. The main theme is awesome, I think the Devs should pursue the "Conan the Barbarian" theme.
• Weapon preview defaults to a top down view, forcing you to move it every time before you can see it properly.
• I appreciate the simplified trading menu, but I think we need quick access tabs to filter types of items to avoid having to manually search.
• Battle results window needs re-jigging. The morale and renown stats take up way too much of window, most of the time I'd rather have the unit results in front of me. Maybe the renown and morale can sit in a corner.
• I feel like the currency is hugely inflated? The value of a Denar in this game is pathetic. It would be nice to have tiers of currency such as copper, silver and gold. Even merchants notes and other paper agreements? Rather than always paying with huge hordes of pennies. In any case, the numbers are too crazy for a medieval currency.
• Sometimes it's hard to identify exactly where a town/village/hideout is under its title on the map, it would be nice if the title/icon could be used just as well as clicking on the location itself.
• Still haven't been able to identify what "Profits are marked" references to in the perks list for Trading.
• Orders menu shouldn't pop up upon unit selection, only when the F keys are pressed. Often you just want unit groups ready for orders without having to close the menu every time.
• I think there should be at least an optional feature for morale penalties upon recruiting prisoners. These soldiers were trying to kill each other only the other day. Some probably lost battle brothers to them.
• Considering the abundance of wealth, I think units should be much more expensive to upgrade, especially considering they get high level gear out of no where.
• Should be optional at the start to ignore and remove the main quest from your log. It's not very engaging with the general theme of the game, and I doubt I will want to do it more than once.
• Relation change upon aiding in a battle could be grouped into fewer/single message/s. Also accessible in a recent log.
• Bandits are stupidly brave when you camp near their hideouts, such as 9 men attacking a group of 47.
• Assuming troops enter the battle based on position in party, it would be good to be able to sort your troops based on their tier.
• We shouldn't repeat some aspects of Warband, such as clearly inferior enemies charging to their doom. If an enemy is clearly outgunned, then they should hold position for as long as they can before breaking.
• A bug with archers often not doing their job in battle.
• Left shift doesn't seem to work often with upgrading/recruiting units.

Feature Suggestions:

• It would be great to have rare grand tournaments for the mightiest warriors, with very high difficulty and great rewards. Even tournaments that reflect more on the culture of the hosting faction, such as jousting, boulder throwing, hunting or archery competitions.
• More variety for tournament rewards.
• More than one type of mercenary available in taverns at any one time?
• More ways to boost morale for soldiers, such as buying rounds at the tavern, hosting feasts or paying bonus wages. All with sensible limits of course.
• Blocking would be a lot smoother if we didn't have to re-click to initiate a new block direction. If possible could we be allowed to move the mouse while holding right click to change block direction.
• Morale penalty for excessive travelling with no rest for hardcore players?
• Why am I being forced into a cinematic confrontation with the hideout bandits? I think the open approach should be optional.
• Would be good if we could scale the damage for everyone, rather than just us and our troops. Just so you can drag out battles a little longer.
• Bartering for your life and freedom should go for the enemy as well as the players.
• If we have to have huge groups of looters and other bandits, there should at least be some sort of leader responsible for such a large throng of ragtag units.
• Would be good to have features like mercenary factions with recruitable legions ready for purchase at an extortionate rate, depending on relation and renown.
• If it doesn't already, renown should have severe penalties for victories involving unacceptable casualties. If you win, but get 90% of your army slaughtered, it should probably have more of a penalty than a boost of renown.
• The "Empire" factions probably need more to their names. I doubt they would refer to themselves as the "Southern/Northern/Western" Empire. If one of the three factions is the last one standing, it should be renamed to "The Empire".

Other Suggestions:

• Feel free to shoot me down on this one, but wouldn't it make sense to hire/reward the communities best modders for adding potential official content to the game? This franchise already has a huge and experienced community and a massive library of impressive mods in its history. With the monetary incentive, the depth and grandeur of this game could swell beyond our imagination!

I'll be updating this as I continue to play. Thanks for reading.

Thank you Taleworlds!