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Statement regarding Plans for Singleplayer and Engine
- Thread starter Duh_TaleWorlds
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Squire
Revverie
I'm sorry but I love the art in Bannerlord. I LOVE IT. I just got into it high as a monkey eating random plants in the wild can be just to enjoy the aesthetics in the Battanian and Vlandian townSame here. I often buy mediocre games if they look good. But bannerlord isn't one of them. It's on the list of the ugliest games I own*, along with Cities Skylines and Medieval 2 Total War. The art (design wise and skill wise) is all over the place, which is far, far worse to look at than it being uniformly mediocre, like warband.
*Actually my sister bought it despite me telling her she wouldn't like it, and now we're in October and neither of us have played it since may.
+ The lighting is marginally better than warband.
+ The foliage is better, but there are world-class environment artists everywhere these days, and the trees in warband were horrible.
- The water reflections are worse (anybody who uses SSR on an ocean plane should be institutionalised).
- The animations are clunkier and harder to read. They are designed on the idiotic premise that there has to be a short wind-up before every action. Before we all complained about it, there was also inertia while running, meaning you would slide all over the place.
- Most of the armour looks terrible. It's simultaneously overdesigned and overly shabby and asymmetric. Characters wear brown muddy rags with lumps of fur slapped over them, but somehow also have gold engravings on their helmets. Most of the metals are completely different colours, with some of them looking like the artists didn't know the workflow they were supposed to be using.
What's really funny is how it seems to have gotten worse over the last 10 years. I challenge you to find a bannerlord character who looks better than this screenshot from 2013 (right):
Now look what we have:
You may think I'm just nitpicking here, but if you are satisfied with the game in its current state then I can't even shrug my shoulders and say "that's just your opinion" because I honestly cannot fathom not being frustrated that 10 years has led us to this. There is hardly anything to do in bannerlord, and with no overhaul mods it blows my mind that there are still 10,000 per month people letting their single chance at life tick away to a terrifying oblivion while they commit looter genocide for the 1000th time. There are a million things that give my brain more dopamine than playing this game in its current state, including washing the dishes and filling out tax forms.
You had me until here. Either we didn't play the same game, or you're trolling.
five bucks
Knight at Arms
While you're entitled to your opinion, I feel like in order to hold that opinion, your memory of vanilla Warband must be a bit dim. While current Bannerlord is an undoubted improvement on Warband's graphics, battle sizes, polish and depth of simulation, it's undeniably gone backwards in all those gameplay features plus inexplicably worse combat, and (as it stands) being a lot more buggy, imbalanced, and broken.
If they were to leave Bannerlord as it is now, I would not consider it an improvement over Warband, I'd consider it a $60 sidegrade.
Timmortal
Knight at Arms
That might be your opinion, but i think you are holding Warband in a rosetinted memory view.
Uh.... yeah, that would be called an opinion, but let us not discuss logic.
The same things I did in Warband.
five bucks
Knight at Arms
That's the problem here. You can't do all the same things you could in Warband. If you could, Bannerlord would be almost a perfect sequel, bugginess and balance issues aside.
If you're saying it's nostalgia to say Warband is more functional and balanced than Bannerlord's current state, let me point you to sieges as one of many possible examples. Warband sieges may have been 200 guys charging up a single ladder, but at least they used the ladder instead of standing still staring at it, which is what they do in a significant portion of Bannerlord sieges because the AI doesn't work. Or sometimes it's because the siege ram can't fit in the door, or the troops break down the first door but ignore the second one.
Before you say "it's still in EA", I agree, but the argument started from someone claiming that unfinished Bannerlord is better than finished Warband.
I didn't do most of those things in Warband, unless I had to for some reason. Like marrying; your wife was basically totally useless in Warband and so I'd put off doing that dumb poem sequence until I needed the 3 RtR. Putting that **** in Bannerlord would just annoy me.
The one exception I miss (being able to order around parties) the campaign dev said was coming at some point, so it doesn't bother me much.
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Revverie
While I dislike many lack of things in Bannerlord the improvement in combat is undeniable in Singleplayer man, and don't make me start with the UI. Go back to play Warband and the menus themselves will be your biggest nightmare
five bucks
Knight at Arms
But it sounds like you did at least do some of them, so it isn't strictly true you can do "everything you did in Warband", and when it comes to other people who did like those features it definitely isn't true.
All the non-combat diversions and the worldbuilding features made Warband have much better variety in its gameplay and more immersion in its world. And marriage wasn't "useless" at all, plus the RTR you also got married so you could hold feasts yourself and roll in reputation gain with the nobles, which could be extremely helpful in setting up a kingdom.
When did I ever say anything about other people? I, personally, don't care about most of those features. The few I do care about they said were coming, so they don't bother me.
There was no point to holding feasts when releasing lords gave you honor, which meant higher relations with good personality lords automatically. I just never kept lords I'd caught so by time I was forming my own kingdom, every good-natured and upstanding noble in the game was friends with me -- even if I'd never met them before.
So a wife was literally nothing but RtR and scene decoration in Warband.
five bucks
Knight at Arms
The way you said was misleading: "I can do everything I could in Warband" implies that everyone can do what's possible in Warband, which is untrue. If you say that wasn't your intention, then fine.
Fine and dandy on easier difficulties, but on harder difficulties catch and release gets you swamped in massive recruit armies.
Oh, I wasn't actually complaining about performance. As for bugs though I don't know how you would have managed not to encounter any. Sieges for example are very buggy still and a lot of perks don't work as they're supposed to.
Is it really demanding to expect that a sequel you paid money for is the same, or better, in every way than the last game? Because Bannerlord isn't the same or better in every way than Warband, not yet at least. Good on you for acknowledging your potential bias though.
No, it didn't. It took a week on "Good" for an AI lord to recover and they wouldn't move out any earlier than that. I had to actively try and engage more than three of them per day, so there was plenty of downtime to recover.
edit: I will say that probably one of the smartest things TW did with Warband was stuffing the difficulty settings in the Option menu while the default for everything was the easiest setting.
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At least one of those mods has been out of date for more than a month.
Warband was a very mediocre, if not pretty bad game with an amazing premise that hadn't really been tried before. That was back in 2010. Things have moved on significantly since then. If bannerlord is only marginally better than warband, it's not a good game.
five bucks
Knight at Arms
A week is for complete recovery to full army strength and top unit tier. They can have a recruit spam army up and running in a much shorter period of time than that, if you're constantly trying to push into their territory. If you don't take lords prisoner on the Good setting, you're drowning in a nonstop flood of recruits which they can magic into existence almost immediately, and that's for each and every lord.
To clarify I'm not complaining that the game isn't done (...although the amount of content progress in 6 months has been a cause for worry). I'm just saying vanilla Bannerlord is not better than vanilla Warband yet. Right now, they both have plenty of advantages and disadvantages. Bannerlord has some way to go before I would call it a sequel rather than a sidegrade.
Bannerlord is a good game in its current state but it's only good for 1 playthrough, IMO. The fun drops off very quickly after that.
And you just rolled them again with your party, without taking losses.
If anyone actually ever lost to that (let alone considered it a reason to keep a lord prisoner) they were either very new to the game or RPing in some way because War band's recruits couldn't threaten high-tier parties.
Plus, you had to actively seek them out; they wouldn't (usually) come out on their own until their party templates were mostly full. It was hardly drowning in recruit armies, in any case.
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five bucks
Knight at Arms
Are you by any chance playing on 1/2 difficulty to allies or some other form of cheese? You don't have a full high tier party once you've suffered heavy attrition fighting multiple full-strength high-tier lord parties, mostly by yourself, because allied lords love to let you fend for yourself on "Good" campaign AI difficulty. If you stop pushing to go re-recruit and re-train your party (who you have less fief income to pay for on Good), in a fraction of that time the AI lords you let go free have already replenished entire elite armies from their infinite funds. And that is why capturing and holding lords is almost mandatory on full difficulty unless you want to really drag out your playthrough.
Now, you could do some ridiculous mental gymnastics to pretend all of this is easier for the player than courting a lady (which you were going to do anyway because of the RtR benefit) and holding a feast. Or, you could just admit that having a wife actually did have a purpose for 90% of players who were trying to conquer the whole map.
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five bucks
Knight at Arms
What did they add that had you cheering?
