The new forums need a thread too.
This joke is really getting old. I think that now that it's in EA, a proper gear system should be added.
To prove that it's an ill-conceived joke, here are the absolutely paper-thin reasons TW provided:
So, the very first point immediately shows a complete lapse in logic. Namely, this issue of "Snowballing" has nothing to do with how players pick their gear!
Quite simply, it's a gamemode issue. What they are talking about is how some modes in Bannerlord count your resources differently. Instead of having a certain sum of dough and spending it on gear or a class, you can basically choose whatever, but the more expensive your choice, the more you are penalised. In Captain this is with troop numbers, in Skirmish it's with the amount of lives you get.
If you still could pick your gear in BL, then nothing about this would change. You'd still spend more dosh on gear and get fewer lives in return in Skirmish, and so on.
That they even brought this up puts their competence into question.
Obvious playerbase insulting aside, this would easily have been addressable without throwing everything good out.
Many games that let you pick your loadout give you solid presets, autocomplete functions, and loadout saving. This is a solved problem.
As I've already explained, this is an issue of gamemode design, and not of gear systems. None of this is unachievable if you let players pick their own stuff.
This one is hilarious, because they managed to achieve the exact opposite! In Warband, when you see a player, you see their weapons, their shield and their armour. This gives you a fairly good estimation of what they're facing. Is he wearing mail armour? His body will probably take a few hits. Oh, he has no helmet? Okay, go for the noggin. He's also using a two-handed polearm, so unless he switches weapons, he's vulnerable to ranged attacks. See? Simple and intuitive.
Meanwhile, the devs their infinite wisdom have decided to disconnect unit appearance from unit stats. Armour values are arbitrary, no longer based on what the character is wearing. This has some really strange, counterintuitive results where a virtually naked class can tank more hits than a guy in actual armour.
Also, locational armour has been removed in MP, but is still exists in SP. Not only is this a terrible dumbing down of the game, but when it comes to bridging the gap between SP and MP, and smoothing out the transition, this is an extremely idiotic choice. They made the game less intuitive, less accessible and less interesting!
What an absolute joke of a statement. Not only has TW's class design proven they aren't really capable of delivering this, but the added flexibility of designing your own loadout for the situation, for adapting and creating an ever-evolving meta, is infinitely more interesting than a top-down created one, especially when it's not even any good.
A decked out Swadian cavalryman looks like a knight. Ranged classes always had a certain choices in gear that made them look distinct, even if they dropped their crossbows. This isn't anything new. That they think they achieved something new with this yet again calls their own knowledge of M&B, and their general competence into question.
And hilariously, this hasn't worked out very well. The system only really fits a few modes. It's downright unsuitable for anything non-competitive, certain perks become totally pointless in some modes, and so on.
Free gear selection is unquestionably more adaptable. Let players kit themselves up to suit their playstyle or the exact circumstances. Don't give us such a limited amount of choices, especially when much of the choices you give us are comically unsuitable.
Finally, a more recent post from Callum:
Again, just read this. Do I even need to explain how utterly bad this reasoning is?
Not only is min-maxing still a thing as generally very few choices are actually viable, but the dilemma of what you upgrade first in a more casual mode is gone. Should I choose a better weapon? Should I get a proper helmet? All of those significant and meaningful choices are gone. Now all I can do is get the more expensive class and pick the non-crap options.
You can do so much more with actual gear selection. Here, watch me expand on it in a way Warband didn't do. For example, more expensive armour doesn't always need to be heavier. You could give the player a choice between if they want an exquisite mail vest that provides good protection with little impact on mobility, or for the same cost, the full coat-of-plates, long-sleeve hauberk shabang that's much tankier, but comes with major mobility penalties. If you want to go really crazy, you could even make things like berserker gear give you bonuses totally unrelated to armour!
Horse barding! Do I want all-round protection, at a major speed penalty, or do I go with the front-only option? Maybe I want protection against projectiles, but ain't too worried about melee attacks, so I could go with a specific material (padded?) and save money/mobility?
Sure, to some degree, there will be a defined meta that comes out of this for competitive play. So what? You can still have meaningful choices at other levels of play, the best choice will probably change depending on map and mode, and so on. Giving players free choice will obviously result in more viable options than with this current system.
Then there are the less meaningful, but still important question of customisation and aesthetics. The current system is laughably bad at this. In a modernised gear-based system, having options like helmet plumes, or different variants of the same gear would be a no-brainer.
Hell, I don't see why in some casual modes, you shouldn't get the option to bring weapons you designed yourself into battle! It wouldn't matter if it's about minmaxing, cool looks, funny gimmicks or what. It'd be great fun and add tons of replayability.
So yeah, this joke stopped being funny in September. It's time to move on. Warband's system wasn't perfect at all, it was a very simple, low-effort solution that could punch way above its weight class.
To throw it all out and replace it with a downgrade was a massive mistake. A new system that builds on the foundation Warband created would be worlds better in every measurable way.
agree with every single point in this.
