Well, it's been one year since early access opened and I gave my initial impression; lets review the state as it exists now. This will largely be a subjective take as there are plenty of great objective criticisms regarding specific details that I'm not going to rehash.
Since purchasing the game one year ago, I have clocked in a grand total of... 51 hours into Bannerlord. 51 hours into the newest installment of my favorite series, a series that's held me captive since I was in grade school. I have more tenure on the forums than I've had playing this new itteration.
This is in contrast to playing well over 100 hours of M&B Warband in the first week of closed beta. I admit some of my allure to Warband initially, was from my attraction to the game since M&B v0.632; with the prospect of multiplayer being the forbidden fruit. Joining one side of the split community on the issue, I advocated for for multiplayer's inclusion with everyone else, despite the nay-sayers; saying it couldn't be done, that M&B was only feasible for SP, that MP M&B would die immediately. So when it was finally a reality, I skipped school and binged it.
However, what kept me beyond the initial binge of Warband's multiplayer for thousands of hours more; was how captive the community was. The community was vibrant and healthy from beta; continuing even to this day, over 10 years later.
It cannot be understated how much of a role that the fantastic modding community held in Warband's outcome, hell they kept M&B SP alive even before warband; however, the module system and dedicated server files for Warband were not given out for a long period as well if you recall. I did not receive them until I requested them from Armagan, expressing the growing trend in deathmatch servers where people would raise their weapon to request a duel but persistently be interrupted by other players. Not to mention the entire lack of dedicated west coast NA servers. It had already been several months in the beta by this point and SP alpha was just beginning to be slowly distributed at personal request. It would be a long-time still, until significant multiplayer mods were created or even found popularity.
Warband's beta lasted 8 months and it was during that beta that the module system and dedicated server files were distributed; by-request and consideration. If you recall, a major issue during the period was not the lack of mods to fix present balance issues. Instead, the common issue was the lack of official servers for different regions; making it difficult to find a server with good latency depending on your region. This was the largest push for dedicated servers back then, not game modes, not mods; native stood strongly on its own and had a very strong player-base.
All of this to say, we have had Bannerlord out of beta, and sitting in open early access for over a year now and have neither received the dedicated server files nor the module system. We even have a native community to speak of anymore.
I expressed my concerns last year about what was going to cause the death of the native community and was supported by popular opinion. We are far beyond native at this point, very few even have faith in the ability of TW to address the issues of stability, poor mechanics, design issues, nor reviving the health of the community; we instead are looking towards mods as our messiah as is very observable with the immediate success of BLO.
Message to TaleWorlds if you are reading this: I don't know if you have acted autonomously regarding the vision of Bannerlord MP or have been pressured from 'higher-ups' to maintain this current course, despite popular rejection by the consumer. I get the impression of the latter; reading into comments by developers in the forums. If this is the case, I implore you to appeal our case to them; whatever metric they believe is going to result in higher profitability from MP. Be it through MTX or other monetization options... it is not going to work this way; you need a community to exist to push whatever plan you have.
Even if you perfectly tweaked MP right now at this point according to your vision, it simply will not revive enough of the community to make that position profitable, especially when the community disregards anything you want to try and monetize and instead moves to the modded community. Any hopes of monetizing native is dead the moment mods fix the poor design choices you've taken.
Perhaps this vain hope of monetizing a dead native is exactly why you haven't released them yet...
Since purchasing the game one year ago, I have clocked in a grand total of... 51 hours into Bannerlord. 51 hours into the newest installment of my favorite series, a series that's held me captive since I was in grade school. I have more tenure on the forums than I've had playing this new itteration.
This is in contrast to playing well over 100 hours of M&B Warband in the first week of closed beta. I admit some of my allure to Warband initially, was from my attraction to the game since M&B v0.632; with the prospect of multiplayer being the forbidden fruit. Joining one side of the split community on the issue, I advocated for for multiplayer's inclusion with everyone else, despite the nay-sayers; saying it couldn't be done, that M&B was only feasible for SP, that MP M&B would die immediately. So when it was finally a reality, I skipped school and binged it.
However, what kept me beyond the initial binge of Warband's multiplayer for thousands of hours more; was how captive the community was. The community was vibrant and healthy from beta; continuing even to this day, over 10 years later.
It cannot be understated how much of a role that the fantastic modding community held in Warband's outcome, hell they kept M&B SP alive even before warband; however, the module system and dedicated server files for Warband were not given out for a long period as well if you recall. I did not receive them until I requested them from Armagan, expressing the growing trend in deathmatch servers where people would raise their weapon to request a duel but persistently be interrupted by other players. Not to mention the entire lack of dedicated west coast NA servers. It had already been several months in the beta by this point and SP alpha was just beginning to be slowly distributed at personal request. It would be a long-time still, until significant multiplayer mods were created or even found popularity.
Warband's beta lasted 8 months and it was during that beta that the module system and dedicated server files were distributed; by-request and consideration. If you recall, a major issue during the period was not the lack of mods to fix present balance issues. Instead, the common issue was the lack of official servers for different regions; making it difficult to find a server with good latency depending on your region. This was the largest push for dedicated servers back then, not game modes, not mods; native stood strongly on its own and had a very strong player-base.
All of this to say, we have had Bannerlord out of beta, and sitting in open early access for over a year now and have neither received the dedicated server files nor the module system. We even have a native community to speak of anymore.
I expressed my concerns last year about what was going to cause the death of the native community and was supported by popular opinion. We are far beyond native at this point, very few even have faith in the ability of TW to address the issues of stability, poor mechanics, design issues, nor reviving the health of the community; we instead are looking towards mods as our messiah as is very observable with the immediate success of BLO.
Message to TaleWorlds if you are reading this: I don't know if you have acted autonomously regarding the vision of Bannerlord MP or have been pressured from 'higher-ups' to maintain this current course, despite popular rejection by the consumer. I get the impression of the latter; reading into comments by developers in the forums. If this is the case, I implore you to appeal our case to them; whatever metric they believe is going to result in higher profitability from MP. Be it through MTX or other monetization options... it is not going to work this way; you need a community to exist to push whatever plan you have.
Even if you perfectly tweaked MP right now at this point according to your vision, it simply will not revive enough of the community to make that position profitable, especially when the community disregards anything you want to try and monetize and instead moves to the modded community. Any hopes of monetizing native is dead the moment mods fix the poor design choices you've taken.
Perhaps this vain hope of monetizing a dead native is exactly why you haven't released them yet...
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