After nearly 30 hours of gameplay I must say I am disappointed in Bannerlords. I get that the Game is EA. But I just have to wonder how they managed to have so little content in the game after 5-10 years of development. But let's start off with the good.
Bannerlord looks and feels amazing. Where Warband never felt like a real world and was all wonky, Bannerlord has amazing graphics, citys full of live, taverns with musicians playing you a song while you play bordgames and battles which feel much more exciting, messy and fun. But also have much more tactictal depth to them than Warband. Especially Sieges are incredible in Bannerlord. Overall the engine is a perfect framework for a great game.
Sadly there is not much more than this framework. There are some new features like the clan and kingdom tabs, the new recruitment system, Influcence Points which can be used to gather armys or take a hand in your kingdoms decision making and a whole new skill/level system.
They all work just fine after one got used to them, but these new systems are not that much better than the warband systems they replace to make up for all the missing content that was in Warband or in its mods. For example:
- You can't interact with Lords and Notable NPCs. Yes you can talk to them, but 95% off them just don't have anything to say. You can't even ask them questions about themselves and their clan/kingdom yet. Furthermore there are no voicelines what so ever.
- You can already buy workshops and caravans, but you can't interact with them aswell. A Caravan will just travel around on its own and maybe make some money, maybe not. You have no say in where it goes, what it trades or which/how many troops it recruits. The same with workshops, once you buy them they will simply spit out some money every day and that's it. You can't give them raw material or take the products. You furthermore don't see how the calculation for profit is done. It just sometimes gives you money and sometimes costs you. Both Native Warband and MB:WFAS had better systems than this.
- Clan members (or Heroes) can be sent out to form their own party. Once again, you don't have any say in where they go or what they do. You just have to pay their wage while they wander around and probably get caught by bandits sooner or later. Warband with the diplomacy mod did a great job with assigning patrols and recruitment jobs through your castellan. Bannerlords way of dealing with this matter is bad compared to this age old mod for a worse engine than Bannerlords.
- Developing your castles and towns does not grant you anything really. Castles are utterly useless at the moment. You can't trade there, you can't recruit there and they give virtually no money to you (120 denars for a castle + one village, while the 80 unit garrison to protect the place costs 650 denars a day.) Towns give a little bit more money (680 for a quite poor town and 2 villages) but not enough to have a good garrison there (200 mid tier units would cost round about ~1600 denars a day.) While there is a development screen for Towns and Castles (not for villages though), none of the buildings feel really usefull. All they do is balance out the system of secruity, food, loyalty and prosperity. But the system is so one-dimensional, and none fluid, it does not feel like it actually brings anything to the game besides the need to balance itself out. Both Native Warband and in particular mods like Nova Aetas had much more complex and rewarding development systems.
- Ships are not a thing anymore. While Naval Invasion finally implemented proper Ships and Ports, they are simply gone in Bannerlord.
- Kingdom creation is locked behind a tedious story quest and does not work properly. There is no real diplomacy in this game. Pretty much everything Warbands Diplomacy mod added to the game is missing. And this mod was the most downloaded and played mod for a good reason. These features should have been in Native Warband already. Not having them in Bannerlord is a joke.
- There are loading screens for everything. Entering a city, talking to someone, leaving a city, engaging bandits. Everything that is more than just walking around the map has a loading screen.
- Building your own village, castle or hideout (A feature from Naval Invasion or many Warband mods like Nova Aetas) seems to be impossible. I am not sure on this one, but I have not seen any indication that you could.
- While fighting a siege is amazing, sieging in itself is boring. All the cool tactic features from Naval Invasion are gone. All you can do now is click a build slot for either a ram, a tower or a siege engine. Once built the siege engines will just fire at a random target and give you no way of controlling them (while sieging, in Battle you can control them). As a defender it is even more boring since you can't even chose which siege enginges you build. They will be build automaticly. All you can do is sally out, try to break out and request a parley, which has not worked for me once thusfar.
- Smithing is in the game and it works. It is just very tedious, because you can't simply craft a sword. You first have to do several steps of refining and smelting and refining and smelting before you will have the material to craft a weapon. Wouldn't be to bad if there wasn't a cooldown on doing ANY smithing related things. Once you've done a couple of refines or smelted some weapons, you gonna have to rest. Just walking around on the map doesn't count. You will need to stay at a city or village before you can do it all over again. And you will have to do this a lot. Because the only way to get higher tier weapon recipies is through crafting/smelting. So before you can eventually build the weapon of your dreams, you will most likely have crafted at least 20-40 crappy swords and spent hundreds of days waiting for your cooldown. Furthermore, armor smithing is not a thing.
- Heroes or Clanmembers are in the game aswell. But they are generic. No fleshed out companions that you will recognize on your second playthrough. Just random generated NPCs with random names. They also don't seem to level up at all. None of my 4 companions had a level up after 500 days of ingame time. They don't even get skill-ups. Most of them have gotten a 0 to 1 increase in some skills, but no real advancements in their key skills. My surgeon who accompanies me for around 450 days now increased her medicine from 60-63 and that is the most anyone has gotten.
- You don't have limited inventory space anymore. Technically there is an encumberance system instead of a slot system like in Warband, but if you have enough mules and other horses, that won't matter anymore. I didn't sell any of my loot for the last 15 hours of gameplay and run around with enough grain to feed my 100 man army for 500 days.
- You won't find any good armor and diversity is kinda low. While there are quite a lot of different options for armor and weapons, it just does not feel diverse at all. The random prefixes from warband are gone, meaning every weapon is just as good as it is. No cracked Hauberk or tempered two-hander anymore. So anything below the top tier choices is pretty much useless and should never be picked up. But you do have to wear bad armor for most off the game anyways because there simply is no good armor in the game. The amount of good armor I found through fighting ~100 battles and visiting couple hundred citys is round about 15. Not even just chest armor. All armor combined. And money was not of the essence for me, since I got 400k denars from workshops being broken befor the day 1 patch. So I could have bought everything. There just was nothing to buy.
-Quests are turned in automatically, which takes a lot of immersion away and makes it feel less rewarding to actually finish a quest. Quests also don't reward renown, which ties into my next point.
-Instead of having a renown soft-lock for joining a faction you now have a hard-lock. You need 50 renown to become a mercanary and 125 or 150 to become a vasall. This one is not to bad. Takes away some realism but gives you a clear goal. What is bad though is the fact that you don't get renown for anything but battles. And since you can't join battles between two fighting lords, which was by far the best way to get renown and relations in warband, you will have to hunt bandits. A lot of bandits. With an average of 0.5-1.5 renown for most bandit parties, it takes a long while to get to the cap. This opens up two new flaws.
- Movementspeed is broken. At the start, when you are not decked out on horses and mules, you won't catch anything. It takes literal days to hunt down one bandit party. But once you have enough horses or cavalary, it turns to the other extreme. You will catch anything and won't be caugth by enemies ever.
-Since the best way to get renown is fighting bigger parties, it always was a good tactic in Warband to snipe a weak lord, take him prisoner maybe raid a village or two and then make peace with the nation after getting your ransom. In Bannerlord you can still snipe weak lords., and there are far more Lords with 30 stacks than with 100 stacks, but you will only get 400-1400 gold ransom for them. And furthermore you can't make peace that easy. I attacked a lord in my first game and it took a payment of 70k to get peace. Made my safegame useless, since you can't join a faction if you are at war with anyone they aren't currently fighting.
-The map is all wrong. Yes I know that Bannerlord is set hundreds of years before Warband. But nevertheless, cities should not change location in that timeframe. The geography looks completly different. The Gamescom 2019 footage showed a map of the shape of Calradia with the towns being in roughly the same spot they were in Warband. In the EA version however, You don't even recognize old Calradia anymore and towns have teleported through space. Sargot is now in the place of Veluca, and Ocs Hall (Uxkhall) has taken Sunos spot.
-The skillsystem is indirect and hard to follow. You can't level up your skills anymore. They now level passive while you do them. So riding gets exp when you ride on a horse and smithing gets exp when you smith. But there is no clear way of tracking what gives exp in the first place and how much it gives you. With a lot of cool features (Like the ability to trade fiefs, building fire balista and the trainer perk) being locked behind skill requirements, the new system quickly grows frustrating to the point where I simply ignore my skill tab most of the time.
Overall it is just sad to see how many features are not present at all or badly implemented. I get that the game is EA and I get that Bannerlord is a different game than Warband. But especially if you compare Bannerlord to Warband mods like Perisno, PoP oder Nova Aetas, it is just unbelievable how small mod teams of 1-10 people who work on these projects in their freetime, manage to have a lot more features and working systems in their mods than Bannerlord has after so many years of development by a team of 60 people doing this as a fulltime job. But since the framework of the game is good afterall, I have high hopes in the modding community to deliever what taleworlds did not.
Bannerlord looks and feels amazing. Where Warband never felt like a real world and was all wonky, Bannerlord has amazing graphics, citys full of live, taverns with musicians playing you a song while you play bordgames and battles which feel much more exciting, messy and fun. But also have much more tactictal depth to them than Warband. Especially Sieges are incredible in Bannerlord. Overall the engine is a perfect framework for a great game.
Sadly there is not much more than this framework. There are some new features like the clan and kingdom tabs, the new recruitment system, Influcence Points which can be used to gather armys or take a hand in your kingdoms decision making and a whole new skill/level system.
They all work just fine after one got used to them, but these new systems are not that much better than the warband systems they replace to make up for all the missing content that was in Warband or in its mods. For example:
- You can't interact with Lords and Notable NPCs. Yes you can talk to them, but 95% off them just don't have anything to say. You can't even ask them questions about themselves and their clan/kingdom yet. Furthermore there are no voicelines what so ever.
- You can already buy workshops and caravans, but you can't interact with them aswell. A Caravan will just travel around on its own and maybe make some money, maybe not. You have no say in where it goes, what it trades or which/how many troops it recruits. The same with workshops, once you buy them they will simply spit out some money every day and that's it. You can't give them raw material or take the products. You furthermore don't see how the calculation for profit is done. It just sometimes gives you money and sometimes costs you. Both Native Warband and MB:WFAS had better systems than this.
- Clan members (or Heroes) can be sent out to form their own party. Once again, you don't have any say in where they go or what they do. You just have to pay their wage while they wander around and probably get caught by bandits sooner or later. Warband with the diplomacy mod did a great job with assigning patrols and recruitment jobs through your castellan. Bannerlords way of dealing with this matter is bad compared to this age old mod for a worse engine than Bannerlords.
- Developing your castles and towns does not grant you anything really. Castles are utterly useless at the moment. You can't trade there, you can't recruit there and they give virtually no money to you (120 denars for a castle + one village, while the 80 unit garrison to protect the place costs 650 denars a day.) Towns give a little bit more money (680 for a quite poor town and 2 villages) but not enough to have a good garrison there (200 mid tier units would cost round about ~1600 denars a day.) While there is a development screen for Towns and Castles (not for villages though), none of the buildings feel really usefull. All they do is balance out the system of secruity, food, loyalty and prosperity. But the system is so one-dimensional, and none fluid, it does not feel like it actually brings anything to the game besides the need to balance itself out. Both Native Warband and in particular mods like Nova Aetas had much more complex and rewarding development systems.
- Ships are not a thing anymore. While Naval Invasion finally implemented proper Ships and Ports, they are simply gone in Bannerlord.
- Kingdom creation is locked behind a tedious story quest and does not work properly. There is no real diplomacy in this game. Pretty much everything Warbands Diplomacy mod added to the game is missing. And this mod was the most downloaded and played mod for a good reason. These features should have been in Native Warband already. Not having them in Bannerlord is a joke.
- There are loading screens for everything. Entering a city, talking to someone, leaving a city, engaging bandits. Everything that is more than just walking around the map has a loading screen.
- Building your own village, castle or hideout (A feature from Naval Invasion or many Warband mods like Nova Aetas) seems to be impossible. I am not sure on this one, but I have not seen any indication that you could.
- While fighting a siege is amazing, sieging in itself is boring. All the cool tactic features from Naval Invasion are gone. All you can do now is click a build slot for either a ram, a tower or a siege engine. Once built the siege engines will just fire at a random target and give you no way of controlling them (while sieging, in Battle you can control them). As a defender it is even more boring since you can't even chose which siege enginges you build. They will be build automaticly. All you can do is sally out, try to break out and request a parley, which has not worked for me once thusfar.
- Smithing is in the game and it works. It is just very tedious, because you can't simply craft a sword. You first have to do several steps of refining and smelting and refining and smelting before you will have the material to craft a weapon. Wouldn't be to bad if there wasn't a cooldown on doing ANY smithing related things. Once you've done a couple of refines or smelted some weapons, you gonna have to rest. Just walking around on the map doesn't count. You will need to stay at a city or village before you can do it all over again. And you will have to do this a lot. Because the only way to get higher tier weapon recipies is through crafting/smelting. So before you can eventually build the weapon of your dreams, you will most likely have crafted at least 20-40 crappy swords and spent hundreds of days waiting for your cooldown. Furthermore, armor smithing is not a thing.
- Heroes or Clanmembers are in the game aswell. But they are generic. No fleshed out companions that you will recognize on your second playthrough. Just random generated NPCs with random names. They also don't seem to level up at all. None of my 4 companions had a level up after 500 days of ingame time. They don't even get skill-ups. Most of them have gotten a 0 to 1 increase in some skills, but no real advancements in their key skills. My surgeon who accompanies me for around 450 days now increased her medicine from 60-63 and that is the most anyone has gotten.
- You don't have limited inventory space anymore. Technically there is an encumberance system instead of a slot system like in Warband, but if you have enough mules and other horses, that won't matter anymore. I didn't sell any of my loot for the last 15 hours of gameplay and run around with enough grain to feed my 100 man army for 500 days.
- You won't find any good armor and diversity is kinda low. While there are quite a lot of different options for armor and weapons, it just does not feel diverse at all. The random prefixes from warband are gone, meaning every weapon is just as good as it is. No cracked Hauberk or tempered two-hander anymore. So anything below the top tier choices is pretty much useless and should never be picked up. But you do have to wear bad armor for most off the game anyways because there simply is no good armor in the game. The amount of good armor I found through fighting ~100 battles and visiting couple hundred citys is round about 15. Not even just chest armor. All armor combined. And money was not of the essence for me, since I got 400k denars from workshops being broken befor the day 1 patch. So I could have bought everything. There just was nothing to buy.
-Quests are turned in automatically, which takes a lot of immersion away and makes it feel less rewarding to actually finish a quest. Quests also don't reward renown, which ties into my next point.
-Instead of having a renown soft-lock for joining a faction you now have a hard-lock. You need 50 renown to become a mercanary and 125 or 150 to become a vasall. This one is not to bad. Takes away some realism but gives you a clear goal. What is bad though is the fact that you don't get renown for anything but battles. And since you can't join battles between two fighting lords, which was by far the best way to get renown and relations in warband, you will have to hunt bandits. A lot of bandits. With an average of 0.5-1.5 renown for most bandit parties, it takes a long while to get to the cap. This opens up two new flaws.
- Movementspeed is broken. At the start, when you are not decked out on horses and mules, you won't catch anything. It takes literal days to hunt down one bandit party. But once you have enough horses or cavalary, it turns to the other extreme. You will catch anything and won't be caugth by enemies ever.
-Since the best way to get renown is fighting bigger parties, it always was a good tactic in Warband to snipe a weak lord, take him prisoner maybe raid a village or two and then make peace with the nation after getting your ransom. In Bannerlord you can still snipe weak lords., and there are far more Lords with 30 stacks than with 100 stacks, but you will only get 400-1400 gold ransom for them. And furthermore you can't make peace that easy. I attacked a lord in my first game and it took a payment of 70k to get peace. Made my safegame useless, since you can't join a faction if you are at war with anyone they aren't currently fighting.
-The map is all wrong. Yes I know that Bannerlord is set hundreds of years before Warband. But nevertheless, cities should not change location in that timeframe. The geography looks completly different. The Gamescom 2019 footage showed a map of the shape of Calradia with the towns being in roughly the same spot they were in Warband. In the EA version however, You don't even recognize old Calradia anymore and towns have teleported through space. Sargot is now in the place of Veluca, and Ocs Hall (Uxkhall) has taken Sunos spot.
-The skillsystem is indirect and hard to follow. You can't level up your skills anymore. They now level passive while you do them. So riding gets exp when you ride on a horse and smithing gets exp when you smith. But there is no clear way of tracking what gives exp in the first place and how much it gives you. With a lot of cool features (Like the ability to trade fiefs, building fire balista and the trainer perk) being locked behind skill requirements, the new system quickly grows frustrating to the point where I simply ignore my skill tab most of the time.
Overall it is just sad to see how many features are not present at all or badly implemented. I get that the game is EA and I get that Bannerlord is a different game than Warband. But especially if you compare Bannerlord to Warband mods like Perisno, PoP oder Nova Aetas, it is just unbelievable how small mod teams of 1-10 people who work on these projects in their freetime, manage to have a lot more features and working systems in their mods than Bannerlord has after so many years of development by a team of 60 people doing this as a fulltime job. But since the framework of the game is good afterall, I have high hopes in the modding community to deliever what taleworlds did not.
