SP - Scenes Rewarding exploration

[LordCnut]

Having played the amazing "A Clash of Kings" mod for M&B:Warband a couple years ago, i want to highlight some of the very rewarding exploration mechanics which this mod brought with it and should come as an inspiration to what exploring regular scenes and handcrafted "points of interest" in the Calradia of Bannerlord could look like.

Edit: From what i remember some of these "points of interest" were also part of Viking conquest and were modified to enhance the exploration in ACoK so much of this might sound familiar to you even if you didn't play the mod but played VC.

Monastaries​

Starting with the most interactive one, the mod had septries (monastaries) which opened a decision window where your character could donate or spend time in prayer to increase renown and honour, or do the opposite and lose those for personal gain by raiding them. This was a great light-weight feature to roleplay as a faithful warrior of the faith, a pious noble or a heathen despoiler. If Bannerlord ever goes down the road of adding regional religions and monastic orders, points of interest like city cathedrals, rural chapels and isolated monastaries of different religions would be a welcomed addition to flesh out the campaign map with places to visit and interact with to create immersive stories and increase your piety, relations with characters who belong to a certain faith and church notables.

Points of interest and ruins​

There were also mines, camps, ruined towns, villages and castles which hinted at or detailedly explained events in the recent and distant past of the continents. Walking around these places and uncovering the lore surrounding them granted some xp and was also rewarded by finding hidden stashes of gold, rare trade goods and chests with low to mid tier gear. This made exploration a viable alternative to grinding outlaws, questing or trading in the early game to get adequate equipment and the budget to jumpstart your career. Such exploration rewards also existed for regular scenes like most notably the dragon egg hidden in the hills behind the castle of Dragonstone, which could easily be traded for some of the best gear and horses in the game.

Conclusion​

Ultimately, such exploration mechanics would serve the purpose of enriching the lore of the game world and add reasons to spend time looking through some of the beautifully crafted scenes in Bannerlord.

 

[five bucks]

I would definitely like to see city scenes have more gameplay reason to explore them in person. Right now there is only one reason (the Spy Party quest, which triggers uncommonly).

 

[LordCnut]

I would definitely like to see city scenes have more gameplay reason to explore them in person. Right now there is only one reason (the Spy Party quest, which triggers uncommonly).

I'd like that too. M&B:W had some decent random events like bandit ambushes in villages and nighttime robberies in town aswell as drunkards challenging you to a fight in taverns. The only issue with those often was that they disrupted the game flow for little other than a short random encounter. Personally i'd appreciate random encounters more if i was in the scene already and not visiting a location through the overworld and being dragged into it through rng. There's lots of potential for reasons to visit scenes with thugs in towns and criminal influences which i believe were showcased 6 years ago for the first time and still not particularly functional in BL to this day.

Other than adding more quests, rewards for exploration, meeting notables and random encounters, there's not much on the table from older titles and mods. So i'm not sure what else they could do. Some food for thought is the explorer mod which completely disabled the overworld map and had you travel from place A to B through scenes. Having this as an option for vanilla would be cool, especially since the new battle terrain system will have unique scenes for every area or region in the game which would make travelling through the continent fairly immersive.

 

[five bucks]

I'd like that too. M&B:W had some decent random events like bandit ambushes in villages and nighttime robberies in town aswell as drunkards challenging you to a fight in taverns. The only issue with those often was that they disrupted the game flow for little other than a short random encounter. Personally i'd appreciate random encounters more if i was in the scene already and not visiting a location through the overworld and being dragged into it through rng.

I personally didn't mind village/town bandit ambushes, since you could avoid them by not going into town at night and they were influenced by how many enemies you had made.

But I can see where you're coming from. Perhaps the better approach is to make bandit ambushes/assassination attempts more voluntary and less forced on the player (triggered by choosing the "walk around the town/village" option at night rather than just entering the settlement at all), in exchange for giving them more reward so the player wants to do them.

There's lots of potential for reasons to visit scenes with thugs in towns and criminal influences which i believe were showcased 6 years ago for the first time and still not particularly functional in BL to this day.

Yep. What we need is after winning the street fight and gaining control of the alley, you can store troops and companions there or make a "criminal workshop" that does stuff like extorting the locals for protection money, counterfeiting, black marketeering, etc.

They still advertise this feature on the Steam store page. It needs to be in the game. Last I heard from a TW employee, they are still "discussing" it but haven't even decided if it will actually be in the game or not.

Other than adding more quests, rewards for exploration, meeting notables and random encounters, there's not much on the table from older titles and mods. So i'm not sure what else they could do. Some food for thought is the explorer mod which completely disabled the overworld map and had you travel from place A to B through scenes. Having this as an option for vanilla would be cool, especially since the new battle terrain system will have unique scenes for every area or region in the game which would make travelling through the continent fairly immersive.

I would caution against this because without the overworld map, traveling long distances in realtime would definitely be immersive but would also take huge amounts of time.

I think the best way to go ahead is providing gameplay that can only be done within scenes, and gives you some kind of extra reward that makes it worth taking the time to do.

Like you can explore the town to find higher skill wanderers who don't show up in the town menu; more quests like Spy Party that relate to searching the town; being able to pay the existing Beggars charity to increase your Generosity and Renown; stuff like that.

SP - General - Reasons to explore town scenes.

Taleworlds has put a lot of work into Bannerlord's town scenes, and they look really good! But there's barely anything interesting to do inside them- just one quest that doesn't trigger often. So an average player spends 1% of their time in settlement scenes. 99% of playtime is in menus, field...

forums.taleworlds.com

But I also think that Taleworlds really has no obligation to do these things, except for criminal alley enterprises and recreating what was in Warband, since those were said and implied respectively. I'm okay with fleshing out town scenes more being the domain of modders, and I've seen modders like Bloc do a good job.

 

[Tabbot]

Viking conqust had pretty nice points of interest, the whole Morrigan questline was quite a bit of fun, the Hadrians wall bit, etc.