Releasing the game in this state feels like a slap in the face

[Lucius Confucius]

It does not feel like a slap in the face, but a warm summer breeze to the chest. How I am looking forward to more updates and DLC. We have had a grand time, and yet, a grander time is ahead of us.

Cherish in the joy that is Bannerlord, my boy!
For it is a splendid toy, given to us by Taleworlds that is sometimes so coy.
Bannerlord, can have my sword!
It is a great game, it even has a forum board!
Let us all rejoice in its creation,
For without its iteration,
We would all be barbarian in litigation.

 

[Bjorn The Broken]

I'm of course not saying that every video game needs to have thousands of hours of good quality game time

Yep, it does not have to offer you thousands of hours.

I have 5 hours on Portal and 29 hours on Portal 2 and, oh man, they were worth 10x every penny I spent on them.

 

[Ser Jon]

Yep, it does not have to offer you thousands of hours.

I have 5 hours on Portal and 29 hours on Portal 2 and, oh man, they were worth 10x every penny I spent on them.

People with arguments like the time thingy are probably easily addicted to mobile games, too. They put in the time, and they won't admit it was better spent elsewhere, because gosh darn it, they already have 1k hours in it already. Why not keep going?

 

[xdj1nn]

People with arguments like the time thingy are probably easily addicted to mobile games, too. They put in the time, and they won't admit it was better spent elsewhere, because gosh darn it, they already have 1k hours in it already. Why not keep going?

it has a lot to do with self-acceptance - oddly enough... Once you fix your own self-esteem issues (which most ppl, probably the vast majority of ppl in the world, have) you'll find it easier to accept being wrong and as such you won't care as much about dumb details like "Oh! I wasted my money and time!" - when the truth is we are constantly wasting money and time under the staple social constructs that are imposed upon us.
Once someone overcomes this obsession with not accepting their own mistakes and don't start taking those lightly, as they actually are, they quit the spiraling effects of it and automatically become much more logical and less of a snowflake... And as much as snowflake adjectivization sounds tied to right winged bigotry, it is the best term to properly classify weak ppl who let their own emotions take over them frequently. I, for one, am very leftist as anyone could probably tell by my profile pic choice.

PS: to me saying "wasting money and time" is sort of redundant, because money is actually time really...

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

People with arguments like the time thingy are probably easily addicted to mobile games, too. They put in the time, and they won't admit it was better spent elsewhere, because gosh darn it, they already have 1k hours in it already. Why not keep going?

I think it's more the fact that there is no quantitative measure of how much you enjoyed a game, so people just automatically go to the next best thing, the number of hours spent. It's not a perfect measure by any means, in fact I think it's ridiculous, but at the very least it says "i spent X number of hours preferring to do this than literally nothing at all".

When I see someone with 1000+ hours i now just assume they were using it as a time waster or stress relief tool after work or something. I modded warband for years and had the launcher in the background for months at a time, but I still barely cracked 1000 hours. I think after that amount of time, words like "enjoyment" are irrelevant, because the player isn't really engaging with the game directly, they're probably listening to a true crime podcast or something while their cerebellum and muscle memory play the game on their behalf.

 

[xdj1nn]

Yep, it does not have to offer you thousands of hours.

I have 5 hours on Portal and 29 hours on Portal 2 and, oh man, they were worth 10x every penny I spent on them.

it's the quality of the game not the time sinking it requires - pretty much... Although in the case of a sandbox it does have some significance (the replayability potential speaks much much louder)

 

[Grank]

They put in the time, and they won't admit it was better spent elsewhere, because gosh darn it, they already have 1k hours in it already. Why not keep going?

I mean... aren't you describing people who hate the game here? They hate the game yet they won't leave it alone. If they're not adding to their 2k hours clock, they're in these forums complaining about the same things over and over again, attempting to fix the game.

One of the messages I tried to get across is that at the end of the day, this video game is just a toy that costed a relatively small amount of money. If you don't enjoy playing it, shrug off that $50 and just go do something else.

 

[Grank]

I think it's more the fact that there is no quantitative measure of how much you enjoyed a game, so people just automatically go to the next best thing, the number of hours spent.

When I see someone with 1000+ hours i now just assume they were using it as a time waster or stress relief tool after work or something.

Exactly. The purpose of an entertainment is to get enjoyment, or to kill time. The most accurate way to measure enjoyment would be to hold a survey and quantify the input, but it would be biased, as it should be. It's enjoyment. It's subjective. So the next best thing is time, because it can be used to measure both enjoyment and killing time. If there are many hours clocked in, you can say the game has fulfilled its purpose, whichever it is for a particular person.

But people don't like the use of time as a measure when it's used to point out that the game has fulfilled its purpose for them. Sure. It's not a perfect measure for enjoyment after all, but then if someone came out and said they enjoy Bannerlord, they like it and think it's a good game, and they've played for 60 hours, Bannerlord critics would jump on that play time. They'd call the comment stupid and inaccurate, because you need to play x amount of hours bla bla you get the point... but they have openly admitted that enjoyment is not tied to time. You can be satisfied with a game even though you've only played it for a few hours. That's not wrong, but why is it wrong when people like Bannerlord? Isn't that just insanity?

 

[Ser Jon]

I mean... aren't you describing people who hate the game here? They hate the game yet they won't leave it alone. If they're not adding to their 2k hours clock, they're in these forums complaining about the same things over and over again, attempting to fix the game.

One of the messages I tried to get across is that at the end of the day, this video game is just a toy that costed a relatively small amount of money. If you don't enjoy playing it, shrug off that $50 and just go do something else.

I suppose if you want to compare the two, you can. I wouldn't compare people trying to make a game better with consistent posting to people playing a bad game just because they put time in it, but that's just me.

 

[Life_Erikson]

it has a lot to do with self-acceptance - oddly enough... Once you fix your own self-esteem issues (which most ppl, probably the vast majority of ppl in the world, have) you'll find it easier to accept being wrong and as such you won't care as much about dumb details like "Oh! I wasted my money and time!" - when the truth is we are constantly wasting money and time under the staple social constructs that are imposed upon us.
Once someone overcomes this obsession with not accepting their own mistakes and don't start taking those lightly, as they actually are, they quit the spiraling effects of it and automatically become much more logical and less of a snowflake... And as much as snowflake adjectivization sounds tied to right winged bigotry, it is the best term to properly classify weak ppl who let their own emotions take over them frequently. I, for one, am very leftist as anyone could probably tell by my profile pic choice.

PS: to me saying "wasting money and time" is sort of redundant, because money is actually time really...

Is it really that people accept these mistakes or do they rather ignore them because it is more comfortable? And even if people accepted their mistake would they give the game a good review? I mean if I thought buying and playing a game was a mistake I certainly wouldn't.

And besides, how much of the mistake is on the side of the player and how much is on the expectations which were set by TW over the years?

True, if a player plays hundreds of hours without enjoying the game his masochism is on his part. I for exemple played the game for 80 hours total. A solid number of hours for any other game, but in this case it was just trying out multiple time if things have gotten better. My mistake I did it that often (although it takes time untill you reach mid-game where you can actually tell if the gane works or not) but I learnt from that experience. I haven't touched the game in half a year or so and will only do so if updates stop pouring in and modding can take over.

 

[Apocal]

I think part of it is when the game came out. Loads of people seem to claim 1000+ hours in bannerlord. At first I didn't believe them, I don't have 1000 hours in anything, but thinking back on it I can see how some people, perhaps with no family or easily accessible friends, would do nothing but play vidya games during the early phases of lockdown. Bannerlord was basically their only friend for an entire year where they weren't allowed to go to work or meet friends. They have an emotional attachment to it that isn't really related to the actual quality of the game.

I was on very hard lockdown and had a new baby, so I needed a game I could play with her in my lap and not MP in case I needed to do baby stuff. BL was fine for that.

 

[MariusTitus]

I'd take easier approach to comparing BL and WB than philosophy:

Warband was fun.
Bannerlord isn't.
Hours you spend on game are just direct reflection of how much it keeps you amused.

Last couple of games I really liked was Little Nightmares, both of them take up 8hrs at most, but they'll stay in my brain forever because they're simply great. Same as other certain titles that I'll return to and keep playing, because they're simply good.
It's not the nostalgia, more like the fact WB brought something unique and original that wasn't there before, thus it was a bomb.
Bannerlord doesn't hold a candle to Warband, and is simply weaker, tacky product. Inferior version of Warband.
I have well over 2000+hrs on Warband, and every hour of that was spent well and I had fun.
Steam says 1039hrs on Bannerlord, and most of its hours was, well, pretty meh. Trying out barebones game isn't great.

Massive battles are nice. Graphics are nice. Sieges look way better now too. And that's it.

Where's the soul, the feel? The "zero to hero" way, why the shift from RPG towards realism? WB had this great arcade/realism ratio where you were a massive battle machine at 30 strenght that could take down a group of enemies, but too many foes mobbed you and took you down. Try charging into 3 dudes in Bannerlord, see how well that goes.
Skill system with perks that are just weird, giving you a % here or there, often scattered nonsensically in skills that have nothing in common?
The diplomacy, where is it? I remember how backstabby it felt when kingdoms were allied and they both declared war on your faction. Border incidents that could end up in war, or king losing his face.
Relationship with lords, where you felt people backing you up in decisions if they liked you? Helping others or leaving them to their fate, depending on how they liked each other? Campaigns that were make or break on relations, with hated marshall going around with 2 parties, while another everyone liked mustered a massive force?
Memorable companions, Jeremus getting knocked out in first 2 seconds of every battle is legendary. Ymira turning into medic and strategy master, Marnid into veritable war machine or pretty much anything you wanted out of him. And others, that disliked or liked others, leaving you if you put them together with someone they really hated? Because there was working relationship?
Memorable lords that had personality that mattered, dragging their own country into wars because they were just noble looters hell bent on pillaging, often jumping sides, or king's men that stood behind him to bitter end as their country burned down?

None of this is in Bannerlord.
All they had to do was take Warband, give it better graphics and engine (that's literally only thing that happened), maybe some more gameplay mechanics here and there, package it, stamp it, send it.
We'd have a supreme game and everyone would be happy. But no, Talewords had to go and reinvent the bicycle, ending up with a wreck with square wheels that's pain to drive.

 

[Fistochat]

@Fistochat, clear the expectations are growing into the far sky over years and years, thats perhaps also a ''problem'' Mount and Blade works now more than 15 years and i am sure there will be some more years. That i wait for mods is i think also normal after more than a decade playing that game concept (clear seomtimes also a year of pause^^) But i am sure mods will match my taste in a better way, was in past for M&B the same. And if the platform is fine for modding then it is finally fine.

That is the point, clear the base game isn't astonishing, I agree, but I'm sure we'll have a ton of fun with mods.

No one is overreacting. People were actually under reacting. Coping hard. Using EA as a shield for legit concerns every time and the whole time. Yet here we are. They did what was best for themselves and no one else.

No one is overreacting ? Every day people are complaining about how unfinished this game is, and I agree with them! But seriously, what other company proposes a medieval sandbox game that is, in addition, completely moddable ?

They did a lot for themselves for sure, but they offered us a good base for mods !! That's all we need, I don't care about the base game in itself other than that.

So nobody should be insulted by the fact a 50€ game doesn't hold its promises, is a downgrade to its predecessor and ships with most important mechanics to one extend or another broken?

Nobody should be insulted because the devs made it possible for modders, who are using their free time with no reward other than a thank you (from the player base that is), to fix this damned mess?

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to insult you personally, but people like you are the reason practices like this work and gaming developers can stop putting in the work to produce a product worth the price.

The game is certainly not a downgrade to its predecessor, or your memory has reshaped the game over years.

Nobody is forcing the modders to do it, they do it because it's a pleasure for them, they don't do it to repair TW's game. What you are saying makes no sense.

What do you don't understand in : I agree the base game isn't what it should have been, but don't overreact cause modders will make us enjoy it. I don't think I deserve to be "the reason practices like this work and gaming developers can stop putting in the work to produce a product worth the price". I am just optimistic about the modding possibilities that offer this game.

The game is certainly not a downgrade to its predecessor, or your memory has reshaped the game over years.

Nobody is forcing the modders to do it, they do it because it's a pleasure for them, they don't do it to repair TW's game. What you are saying makes no sense.

What do you don't understand in : I agree the base game isn't what it should have been, but don't overreact cause modders will make us enjoy it. I don't think I deserve to be "the reason practices like this work and gaming developers can stop putting in the work to produce a product worth the price". I am just optimistic about the modding possibilities that this game has to offer.

 

[xdj1nn]

Is it really that people accept these mistakes or do they rather ignore them because it is more comfortable? And even if people accepted their mistake would they give the game a good review? I mean if I thought buying and playing a game was a mistake I certainly wouldn't.

And besides, how much of the mistake is on the side of the player and how much is on the expectations which were set by TW over the years?

True, if a player plays hundreds of hours without enjoying the game his masochism is on his part. I for exemple played the game for 80 hours total. A solid number of hours for any other game, but in this case it was just trying out multiple time if things have gotten better. My mistake I did it that often (although it takes time untill you reach mid-game where you can actually tell if the gane works or not) but I learnt from that experience. I haven't touched the game in half a year or so and will only do so if updates stop pouring in and modding can take over.

if you understand why they happen you'll accept them - just as I do haha
I know I'm wasting my time playing games, fact, but I also know that I need escapism to cope with some other stuff I have to endure, as such it's a mistake and yet it still serves a purpose, so why should I bother much about? I just have to be attentive to commit it in the best possible light.

I think BL is crap and I still have gotten 1500+ hours in it, and it's growing. At some pt it'll cease to be worth my time, much sooner than other better entertainment, that because it provides less quality time investment because it engages and challenges my brain much less than other games, it bring little to no knowledge be it either on a simulation level or in a creative level, and it sort of makes me feel bored often much quicker than a game like TW3, or a heavily modded Skyrim. You can call me a masochist, but good games now-a-days are rare, so if there's something that appeals to me or the possibility of it being "fixed / improved" it's less of a waste than if I was trying to play some newer Bethesda game like FO76, for instance.

Think about it, if all other games are completely trash, a game that's just crap will become the GOTY, that doesn't make the game less crap, it just makes it the "best crap"

 

[nibbler2345432]

I mean... aren't you describing people who hate the game here? They hate the game yet they won't leave it alone. If they're not adding to their 2k hours clock, they're in these forums complaining about the same things over and over again, attempting to fix the game.

One of the messages I tried to get across is that at the end of the day, this video game is just a toy that costed a relatively small amount of money. If you don't enjoy playing it, shrug off that $50 and just go do something else.

They are doing something else. Complaining on the forums is free and may deliver you the satisfaction which the game couldn't. Just playing the lategame of BL for a little while and I'm intrigued to learn why the game turned out so godawful.

 

[Orion]

Half the time the game feels like it's playing you, not the other way around. Many decisions are made for the player on a regular basis, or are false choices where the player's input doesn't change the outcome. An obvious example of the former is the automatic recruitment/upgrading of troops in castle and town garrisons. Can't turn off recruitment, can't turn off upgrading, can't even decide what troops it upgrades into. If you don't fully stuff a garrison yourself (after emptying all of the trash out of it) then when you come back a month later it will be packed with units you often don't want. This actually creates a continually escalating problem for the player if they don't actively purge the garrison on a regular basis, as you still have to pay for all of these troops as they are recruited into the garrisons and upgraded, alongside their usual wages.

For the latter, kingdom policies can make holding onto certain settlements a nightmare with the rebellion system. If you join a faction that wants to pass all of the policies which reduce town loyalty (like debasement of currency) then any foreign towns you wind up with are going to be stuck in a catch-22: an upgraded building can get your loyalty equilibrium out of the rebellion range, but your stacked loyalty penalties are so strong that you have to run the festival continuous project to stay out of rebellion range. Unfortunately, the AI seems to universally want some policies and never others. The support splits are almost entirely lopsided along the lines of 90:10 one way or the other, and they remain that way once the policy has passed. It's also a trap to choose a culture during character creation which matches the faction you join (except imperial) because the only way you're going to get settlements of your culture is if your faction loses some of their starting territories and retakes them. Congratulations on your new castle or town, you only got it because your faction couldn't keep hold of it the first time. The AI is firmly in the driver's seat and takes you along for a ride.

Bugs, glitches, stuff like the smithing parts having gaps, those are all pretty straightforward issues with obvious solutions. Given enough time, TW can fix those, but I have no reason to believe TW will revisit design choices they've made like I described above. The greatest trend I have observed is to deliberately limit the agency of the player in the game world in systems with more than a couple of variables. Granularity and direct control are always the things getting cut out of systems.

Look at the pre-battle formations/OOB update: we gained the ability to pre-position our troops and assign companions to them as leaders. We lost the ability to manually designate certain troop types into different groups, so you're stuck with broad classifications for troops which may have a common baseline but differing roles, or are the same role but different tiers. The prioritization toggles can sort-of alleviate that, but they don't work 100% and you still end up with troop types bleeding into different groups if their base class is the same (e.g. melee cavalry includes conventional cav like vlandian knights as well as skirmisher cav like aserai faris, which have differing engagement behavior). Also, companions can't be manually assigned to a specific group, they're stuck with whatever classification the game thinks is best for them when they're generated and that's what they are. Your brother is considered infantry even though he has riding skill and you can give him a horse. Depending on your difficulty settings, this can get him literally killed if you order your infantry formation to charge, because he'll ride out ahead of them and get stuck in a melee all alone. The game forces you to play your infantry formation defensively (or never give him a horse despite his riding skill) to avoid your brother's suicide-by-looter obsession.

 

[Alyss]

I am just waiting for Europa ad bellum, INOJ2, or Della arte della guerra to release at this point. Not worth playing the game in this version of calradia atm, even with some mods it gets quite boring.

 

[Grank]

They are doing something else. Complaining on the forums is free and may deliver you the satisfaction which the game couldn't. Just playing the lategame of BL for a little while and I'm intrigued to learn why the game turned out so godawful.

It ultimately comes back to the game. They're investing time and effort posting to attempt to fix the game. That's why they are angry. They're spending too much attention to a game that they hate.

 

[Ser Jon]

I think it's more the fact that there is no quantitative measure of how much you enjoyed a game, so people just automatically go to the next best thing, the number of hours spent. It's not a perfect measure by any means, in fact I think it's ridiculous, but at the very least it says "i spent X number of hours preferring to do this than literally nothing at all".

When I see someone with 1000+ hours i now just assume they were using it as a time waster or stress relief tool after work or something. I modded warband for years and had the launcher in the background for months at a time, but I still barely cracked 1000 hours. I think after that amount of time, words like "enjoyment" are irrelevant, because the player isn't really engaging with the game directly, they're probably listening to a true crime podcast or something while their cerebellum and muscle memory play the game on their behalf.

Funny you bring that up. I have a friend who has nearly 3k hours in Bannerlord. And I know for a fact--an absolute fact--that most of the time he idled or used it to break the "ive nothing to do" time, because he made it clear every chance he could get. So I can actually believe that this has something to do with it, too, because I've seen it in practice. I'm a little guilty of it myself, too. With Loop Hero. Although I do love and enjoy the time spent in that game immensely (for some crazy reason), sometimes I'm so bored or tired I just load it and mindlessly go through it because I've nothing else to do. lol

 

[Life_Erikson]

if you understand why they happen you'll accept them - just as I do haha
I know I'm wasting my time playing games, fact, but I also know that I need escapism to cope with some other stuff I have to endure, as such it's a mistake and yet it still serves a purpose, so why should I bother much about? I just have to be attentive to commit it in the best possible light.

I think BL is crap and I still have gotten 1500+ hours in it, and it's growing. At some pt it'll cease to be worth my time, much sooner than other better entertainment, that because it provides less quality time investment because it engages and challenges my brain much less than other games, it bring little to no knowledge be it either on a simulation level or in a creative level, and it sort of makes me feel bored often much quicker than a game like TW3, or a heavily modded Skyrim. You can call me a masochist, but good games now-a-days are rare, so if there's something that appeals to me or the possibility of it being "fixed / improved" it's less of a waste than if I was trying to play some newer Bethesda game like FO76, for instance.

Think about it, if all other games are completely trash, a game that's just crap will become the GOTY, that doesn't make the game less crap, it just makes it the "best crap"

I know exactly what you mean by wanting to kill time. Often times it is the same problem with me. I generally tend to watch youtube instead which is in some regard worse.

Whilst time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time I think that if gaming is the only free time activity thats not the way to go. Mixing it with other stuff; social or productive would be best if possible. But afterall we are gamers and gaming will always take part off our free time.

One interesting point is that you say Bannerlord is a bad game but compared to other games right now it is quite good. I hear this alot in other media too. Movies espacially and I think it is true that quality in some regard has declined. Media today is much more about being flashy and showing off than it was 20 years ago. The plot (or in terms of games interesting mechanics) is what suffers.

However nobody is stopping people from consuming older media. I don't go to the cinema much anymore instead I like to watch older movies. There are definetly enough that I haven't seen before. The same goes for games. Although games tend to age much worse than movies I have found plenty of over ten year old games in the past couple of years that I enjoy.