Rock Paper Shotgun - Is Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord better after a year in early access?

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For me it is not better. Still a lot of grind at the beginning and almost no mid/endgame content.
Weird broken smithing with just overpriced products - maybe useful only with "Everithing has a price" perk.
The main story quest is still broken and sieges - You must see for Yourself...
 
I'd say it's not even better when it comes down to performance. From release day up to 1.5.9 I've lost 3 to 10 fps in 500vs500 battles, open field and siege both. On top of that, there's the issue of every. Single. Menu. Taking about 2 seconds to load, something that was far less aggravating in the first released version. Ah, and the stupid Parkinson's aim bug/feature when using bows.
A respectable development studios would have fixed that crap in a month, top. We're talking about a whole year, and what does the game have to show for it? Useless and broken mechanics, memory leaks for the UI, same hunt down parties - rinse and repeat loop that quickly gets old... and a deafening silence from Taleworlds. Silence that is only broken to post a risible one-year anniversary update where the developers congratulate *THEMSELVES* while 90% of the non-bot replies are, basically: "Fix your game."
 
No, also I'm confused with everyone who has over 200 hours on this game. The game is more empty then Warband was 11 years ago and we thought games advance over the years.
 
No, also I'm confused with everyone who has over 200 hours on this game. The game is more empty then Warband was 11 years ago and we thought games advance over the years.
I prolly have 2000 hours because I left in running back round for days on end. Maybe played an actual couple hundred but it’s generally to try out some mod that I’m hoping will save the experience until inevitably it either ctd’s for some reason or I run into the same lackluster wall of monotony and boredom in which continuing feels tedious so I quit out until The next intriguing mod rolls around hoping it’ll be The One

Ad infintum
 
I try to be positive and it has improved some but its lacking core features that can be found in Warband & its' mods. The game can use pages and pages of dialogue, the feast and weddings.

Performance for me has greatly improved, at launch it ran at 20 fps now it runs at 60 fps with at highest setting with 400 on screen. But there is still some performance issues like launching the game for some reason takes a bit too long.

My greatest fear is that the base game will not be fun with out mods and will be as vanilla as Warband.
 
Soldiers combat AI is much worse now compared to the release. Tournaments were pretty challenging at release while now are ridiculously easy, the AI does not know how to block.

On the other hand, campaign AI is much better now IMO.
 
Is it better now than at the start of EA ,Yes 100% better but still work to do.
Would i recommend this game. YES.. theres no other game out like this on this scale also you can pay £100 on a high end game play for 50 hrs and you have finished , With this i have played over 1000 hrs and still going ,
 
feck a javelin at a nobleman's horse and watch his doomed tumble into your gang of frothing axemen.
Or just watch their doomed ride into any unit at all....
>javelins
>Axemen
Game jurnos: NOT EVEN ONCE!
 
It's both better and worse than it was when it entered early access.

Since early access started there was a hyper inflation of item prices that broke looting in the game. There was a time when you could loot the helmet of a sea raider chief. Now you need mods to be able to loot anything other than rags. (Specifically the mods Better Looting and Make Everything Cheaper.) That same item value inflation is partially to blame for the smithing quagmire.

The game is more polished and slightly more fleshed out, but there are still missing features like pre-battle deployment. Sieges are still a mixed bag of awfulness. I have to wonder how many more years of early access it would take to get things sorted out.
 
Performance wise, the game improved quite a bit. Content wise, not so much. After a year of EA we have basically the same features we had at launch. In my opinion the game we have now is just the chassis of what we hope it will become, if it will i don't honestly know anymore.

Factions are still unbalanced (looking at khuzaits), no feasts, marketplaces are still lackluster and missing tons of stuff even after a year of economy related fixes that only made caravans and workshops useless, no feasts, there's little to no diplomacy, no feasts, still some annoying visual bugs such as characters turning into mudballs while wearing specific gear, no feasts, still some broken perks, no feasts, the only purpose of castles is to drain your cash, have i already mentioned that there are no feasts?

In the end i think that TW focused on the wrong things to work on, adding some new armor pieces (some of them look awful too), caring too much about player's cash gain. The only important thing they did was working on perks.

I personally wouldn't reccommend anyone to play the game in it's current state, it turns very quickly in a boring constant battle. There's no strategy involved since every playthrough seems scripted to me, Khuzaits will steamroll everything sieging the same settlements in the same pattern. I've tried to start some playthroughs as sturgia and it turns out always the same. Make peace with vlandia after a couple of big battles, then khuzaits declare war and invade with an army composed of 2k+ and another of 1.5k+ while sturgia can deploy a grand total of maximum 1k. This is the pattern i see in every playthrough (i have more than 500 hours on the game) and that's the pattern i see happening since launch.

The only hope i have is that TW is working on a lot of stuff simultaneously and will manage to release a finished game after a year of EA as they stated at the beginning. But i doubt it. I think the game will be in EA at least untill the end of 2021, then we'll see what modders can do to improve the game.
 
For me it's a good game, give it half a year - to a year more of development and it's going to be way better if devs keep updating each month or so. If performance got updated so much, I expect more content in the upcoming months. Once sieges are fixed, and perks/leveling are all implemented and balanced, then some more content additions, I can see it becoming great. If they add more things to do in the game, especially end-game stuff, it will be as good as it needs to be for a native version imo... I personally wish they would look at some mods for inspiration and implement extra features in the game, even later on. For example, the bannerlord online farming is pretty good. You gain even 1handed, 2handed, and athletics experience by watering crops etc. Can easily make that into a quest at least, where you choose how many crops to plant and harvest for a village. Hundreds of players are doing such mundane task so I'd say that the argument that "only few players would do it" falls rather quickly. Devs just need to give us more things to do, fix some things like sieges, smithing, improve tournaments and arena... Some basic refinements to be honest, and the game's pretty good already imo...
Soldiers combat AI is much worse now compared to the release. Tournaments were pretty challenging at release while now are ridiculously easy, the AI does not know how to block.

On the other hand, campaign AI is much better now IMO.
I do agree, I hope they will remake tournaments and make specific tournament units that are better in combat than they are now...
 
I had such hopes when the game was announced. "This will be a good old Warband, only better", i thought. But no. It is not better. It is not even Warband. The devs are either oversimplify features they add (I imagine adding feasts as a single message box - seems real now) or rip them out completely (say hello to the ability take over the alleys in towns). I still have a small pale light of hope for this game, but every patch, almost every descision made take my hope away bit by bit.

Same feelings here.

The game is better than one year ago, but that's because when it was released it was a skeleton of what we hoped. One year later has improved but stills feels like a half backed product, the worst is that some decisions make me doubt if some day it will be something close to true WB successor by now it is a medieval battle simulator were almost all realm/live managing issues are pushed to be manage by AI with few player control.
 
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