Rank 1 Gamer Thoughts on Bannerlord PvP

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Agreed ?. *Laughs in beeing gamer rank 69* lol :party:

Aaand also about warband tbh just downloaded again yesterday played 1 match then went straight to bannerlord. Guess I'll die to warband fanboys.
 
Y'all know what is here the best ? That this lad just posted 1 message (no replies so far) and probably watch the thread burning now.

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Haha yes! :grin: I'm gonna steal this one. Thank you!
 
video plz


Was ment as an joke ofc :wink: Because of the cult classic and he mentioned the warband cult

Because ya know about all these fanboi talk...Think ive seen hints of 1 or two fanboi comments where people are just talking good without reason of the actual game...But that word is totally abusive these days because to me an fanboi defends everything without even questioning just because ^^

Ps. Idk how mods got that to be a bait. But well for the sake of balance i guess when i was away eating
 
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It is very low. You can't seriously say that Bannerlord takes as much skill to be really good at as warband. in BL the skill gap between the good players and the really good players is very slight whereas in warband that gap was actually a meaningful one.

But the reasons for the low skillcap are nothing like what the OP posted. Customizing classes and having tons of keybinds? ew, come on, that's not what's wrong with BL. Oh god, please don't include a million skills and 50 keybinds, that would be awful. The most fun part of the M&B franchise is that you don't have to play it like a time-sink MMO where a lot of the skill is based on just knowing what tons and tons of abilities do. I love that you can't customize your skills in WB or BL multiplayer. It's so much easier to jump right into, and much more fun for new people - so they can focus on gameplay, rather than figuring out how to customize their character to be viable. It means that playing is much more based on how well a person physically plays the actual game, rather than on some vast pool of game-knowledge.

The problems with BL skillcap, as far as I can tell (after maybe 50-100 MP skirmishes so far, and based on 1500 hours in WB / WFAS), seems to boil down to a few key things:
- Combat is wayyyy to slow. People swing really slowly and it's very plodding. It also seems much harder to fight multiple opponents, probably due to the speed.
- Way too many weapons have crush-through. Fighting a skilled player? Take a 2-hander and just overhead swing repeatedly, something will get through.
- Throwing weapons are ridiculously overpowered. Ability to one-shot with shoulder hits with many throwing weapons, not even head-shots, is just crappy.
- That "weird arm-swinging-around thing" makes it hard to tell where attacks are coming from. So even if you're really good at the blocking and maneuvering mechanics, it's just easy to block in the wrong direction. It's something I use by accident to kill much more experienced BL players over and over.
- The hitboxes seem weird and not intuitive. I've had one of those players with the 750-win trophies successfully block and counter one of my attacks and whack me with an axe, but it somehow it glances? and barely damages me, even though it was a clear solid hit. And my clumsy sword swing takes the guy down (because the glance didn't stun me), even though he "beat me" in the physical combat. It's crap.

Those are the problems, it's nothing to do with skill customization. that's just conflating M&B with completely different game styles. It's just the combat system needs improvement in multiple areas. I'm hoping they'll get there over the next 6 months.
 
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Im waiting on an confirmation on that to :wink:

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Yep its him :smile: and he appreciates the attention it seems so were all good here...Now we can perhaps keep it in a good tone now that we know its not bait perhaps but idk....one man for each i guess
 
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- That "weird arm-swinging-around thing" makes it hard to tell where attacks are coming from. So even if you're really good at the blocking and maneuvering mechanics, it's just easy to block in the wrong direction. It's something I use by accident to kill much more experienced BL players over and over.

I agree with most of your post -especially the wonky hitboxes part, but doesn't something like ^ this ^, if you're referring to chain attacks, actually raise the Bannerlord skillcap?

Having alternative animations for the same type of attacks means players will have to learn how to read and recognize more animations to be able to defend themselves, thus raising the tech-skill required to be successful in combat.

If we applied your same logic to Warband, it would be like me saying eurofeints and bend n' blend stabs actually lower the dueling skillcap because they're harder-to-read animations than just basic swings and attacks. This is of course would be false reasoning and entirely untrue. These creative and tricky animations played a big role in increasing Warband's skillcap. A huge part of higher-level Warband skill was learning how to create deceptive attack animations in order to fool your opponent.

I think one of few new things Bannerlord actually did right was adding alternative animations in the form of chain attacks. My only criticism of the chain attack feature is that they're tied to the flawed stance system and thus also a modicum of RNG.
 
I think one of few new things Bannerlord actually did right was adding alternative animations in the form of chain attacks. My only criticism of the chain attack feature is that they're tied to the flawed stance system and thus also a modicum of RNG.
I think the stance system would work better if stances weren't locked after windup. In Warband I had the habit of walking into my hit for earlyer connect and a bit of speed bonus. The stance system could be a natural extension of that but as the stance is locked once you wind up the connection between the stance and the effect on the swing is weakened.

- That "weird arm-swinging-around thing" makes it hard to tell where attacks are coming from. So even if you're really good at the blocking and maneuvering mechanics, it's just easy to block in the wrong direction. It's something I use by accident to kill much more experienced BL players over and over.
Yeah, that's really annoying. The smoother animations are nice; the unclear paragraphing is not so much. Does the time for a block still vary depending on your weapon position? The hitboxes for blocking seem more generous tan in Warband though which might be a plus in some situations.

I also don't like that some swing attacks seem to have basically no minimum travel distance. That means that threre's often no reaction time when a swing is released making feint spam even more annoying (harder to break out of, harder to reply with your own feint spam).
Shield bash and kick seem too slow paced/low ranged to do the trick. I had really hoped they would strengthen chamber blocks for Bannerlord as they seem to be a nice way to deal with feints and keep the flow. Don't know, howerver, what it would do to the skill ceiling if chamber blocks became too easy.

-Inconsistent Hitboxes and Weapon Reach

Weapons feel functionally shorter than they actually appear (except for some maces and short swords, which feel longer than they look). The hitboxes also seem really janked at times. A lot of either ghost-hits or unexplainable straight-up whiffs on a pretty nice-sized targets. The friendly fire too, allied hitboxes just seem to be magnet for teammate attacks. And don't get me started on the those wall-hit that your weapons always get stuck on. Something just feels off about the hitboxes. I might be the only one thinking this, or maybe it's not just me. Who knows, that's just my take.
Did some testing with a sword on the crow post in the duel arena. Couldn't get the camera angeled propperly but it almost seemed like the tip just went through the post. And yes, being stuck on the wall is sometimes really annoying. Maybe some hitboxes are larger than the Textures which also sometimes happened in Warband. And maybe the swing arcs are too wide or have too much range at the fringes, which is what I think.
 
Having alternative animations for the same type of attacks means players will have to learn how to read and recognize more animations to be able to defend themselves, thus raising the tech-skill required to be successful in combat.

Just because something is more difficult doesn't mean it has a higher skill ceiling. Having two animations for the same action is the equivalent of saying that having multiple models for the same weapons makes the game more skill based. All it does is add a needless layer of complexity in the interaction between player and game. Games with high skill ceilings are much less about memorising game mechanics and much more about using those game mechanics in interesting ways. Having to memorise twice the number of attack animations doesn't make the gameplay any more interesting.
 
I agree with most of your post -especially the wonky hitboxes part, but doesn't something like ^ this ^, if you're referring to chain attacks, actually raise the Bannerlord skillcap?

Having alternative animations for the same type of attacks means players will have to learn how to read and recognize more animations to be able to defend themselves, thus raising the tech-skill required to be successful in combat.

If we applied your same logic to Warband, it would be like me saying eurofeints and bend n' blend stabs actually lower the dueling skillcap because they're harder-to-read animations than just basic swings and attacks. This is of course would be false reasoning and entirely untrue. These creative and tricky animations played a big role in increasing Warband's skillcap. A huge part of higher-level Warband skill was learning how to create deceptive attack animations in order to fool your opponent.

I think one of few new things Bannerlord actually did right was adding alternative animations in the form of chain attacks. My only criticism of the chain attack feature is that they're tied to the flawed stance system and thus also a modicum of RNG.

Possibly, but there's also a fine-line between difficulty and freedom to manipulate, vs readability. If you go too far in the direction of just allowing anything and some attacks being much harder to defend against vs how difficult they are to perform, you actually reduce the skillcap, e.g. " It's something I use by accident to kill much more experienced BL players over and over. "

I was never an expert in duelling in either game, but my impression is that Warband's main issue with feinting was the torso manipulation which could break certain animations making it difficult to react, whilst in BL I feel like the blending between attack and defend is too long and can hide movements too well, while also skipping some parts of the attack animation when released. I am not certain though.

But in general just something being difficult doesn't improve the skillcap, it has to be difficult yet balanced.
 
Possibly, but there's also a fine-line between difficulty and freedom to manipulate, vs readability. If you go too far in the direction of just allowing anything and some attacks being much harder to defend against vs how difficult they are to perform, you actually reduce the skillcap

You actually bring up a really good point with this.

In Warband, it took many many hours of practice to learn how to bend/tilt/angle your character in the right way to pull off some of the crazy animations -and then even more time spent learning how to apply them against an actual opponent.

In Bannerlord, performing chain attacks is simply a factor of how well you can tap left-click in rhythm -which petty much even the most awkward of individuals can learn how to do in a short amount of time.

So yeah, comparing the two, the road to consistently performing chain attacks is much shorter and easier than the path of skill progression in Warband. Good point.

my impression is that Warband's main issue with feinting was the torso manipulation which could break certain animations making it difficult to react, whilst in BL I feel like the blending between attack and defend is too long and can hide movements too well, while also skipping some parts of the attack animation when released.

I've seen the animation blending/meshing issue brought up in other combat-related threads and I couldn't agree more.

I think it's why I've seen so much over-feinting in Bannerlord as compared to Warband. I've routinely seen people throw 7,8,9, even 10 step feints for a single attack. This is because it seems like the more feints you throw together, the "dirtier" and "messier" the animations become. The lines between attack and block animations are blurred, so it all looks like one big attack, even when your opponent right clicks. It's a total mess, not good.

In Warband, the animations were always tight and well-presented -no matter how many times you feinted. The only exception of course being any weird character angling/tilting hocus pocus, but this had to do more with actual player inputs rather than the game's inability to show what is happening on screen -which is the case in Bannerlord.


What Bannerlord desperately needs are two of the things that made Warband great: Completer player control over character movement and actions, and crisper, tighter, more consistent animations.
 
I think it's why I've seen so much over-feinting in Bannerlord as compared to Warband. I've routinely seen people throw 7,8,9, even 10 step feints for a single attack. This is because it seems like the more feints you throw together, the "dirtier" and "messier" the animations become.

Hard agree
 
okay wow, i was not expecting to get this amount of replies. i came back to post since several people reached out to me via discord and/or other social medias. i'll update some thoughts after i read through everyone's replies, and i made some statements further explaining my thoughts on past stream. i'll try to clip and put the clips here
 
Youre welcome :smile: but im serious
Regarding warband, i can't say anything on that because i never played warband. but i get the feel, just from what i've been reading, that apparently they did have mods/talent systems in warband pvp. hopefully they do add it to bannerlord. and i wasn't aware warband did have this
 
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