We are hoping to run a productive and efficient early access for M&B Bannerlord as well. However, due to the nature and scale of game that we have envisioned, there may be various problems or missing features and content during the course of early access. Here are a few aspects you may need to know:
Unique Maps for Towns, Castles and Village: Although we plan to create unique maps for every town and castle in the game, it is a rather arduous process to create that many well designed maps and as such, different locations may share the same map during early access.
Quest Content: A portion of planned quests may be missing entirely, and those in the game may be using placeholder maps, animations, etc.
Balancing: Various aspects of the game may be poorly balanced. Parts of the game may be too easy or too hard.
Voice overs: Since the game uses a lot of dynamic text and hundreds of NPCs, we are planning to record voice-overs for only a limited subset of the dialog (greetings, companion introductions and main quest). Some of these planned voice overs may be missing or using placeholder versions during EA.
Savegames: We will strive to keep savegame compatibility during EA, however it may be technically infeasible to provide 100% backward compatibility in savegames and you may occasionally have to start a new game after updating to a new version.
Bugs and glitches: Although we strive to create a stable game experience, the game will be actively developed during early access and hence there will be a greater chance of bugs and glitches creeping up. It will of course be a priority to fix these.
Localization: Our current plan is to localize the game into the following languages: French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Latin American) and Turkish. Other languages may be added later. During EA, localizations for these languages may be missing entirely or may be incomplete.
Multiplayer modes and features: The game currently supports several popular multiplayer modes, but we are planning to add more modes and features, possibly including ranked matchmaking.
Singleplayer Features: Several planned single player features may be missing or incomplete. These include but are not limited to: full game controller support, some skill and perk effects, crafting, some aspects of sieges, and clan, army and kingdom management.