SP - General What's missing in the game

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Hello everybody,

First, I want to say that I love M&B, I played the older versions and spent a lot of time on warband and waited for Bannerlord for years. I'm still exploring Bannerlord, as you know, there is a lot of content. But here are my first impressions: Please allow me to be somehow negative, I'm not here to list the good stuff, I bought the game because I loved the good stuff.
I'm here to talk about the room for upgrade. So, let's not forget that we are all on the same team and let's talk together in good spirit.

The big and huge thing missing in Bannerlord, would be coop multiplayer. I know it wasn't there in the older version. But eh, why it wasn't there in warband? I'm just surprised why I can connect to multiplayer and fight other players, showing that there is already a multiplayer system. But I can't invite my friends to join a battle and help me out in a siege. Many games, like the Total War franchise got the hot seat option that allows you to jump in the campaign of a random player or a friend to take control of the bots in his campaign, or an ally army and help them or fight them in their single player campaign. But in Bannerlord, no such thing. Why?

That's a HUGE potential for fun that is lost. I have friends playing Bannerlord, and I can't play with them. We do mostly coop and we are not used to playing against each others. Maybe other players we don't know, but never against each others. It's too bad, really.

The second part is that the game is "closed". I mean, the beginning of the game is fun. You are low level, you are happy to recruit troops, to see them level up, find companions, get some money, buy some stuff, make more money, build a clan, own a village, upgrade etc... But at some point the game goes "meh". And the fun ends. Right now, I have a huge amount of mules or whatever to carry all the stuff I want. I travel the world, make money, trade, attack, the missions aren't fun to do, I send a companion and troops to do it mostly. Some missions require weird skills I don't find in my companions, so I can't do them. So I pass... And... I'm bored. I'm bored. I have money, troops, companions. And I'm bored.

Can't we make the things really exciting? Like allow the player more freedom. Give the ability to build cities. New cities. Put troops with food and money in a camp to train while you are roaming the map, giving you elite troops after a few months. Then you can send these elite troops to conquer the world. Give the money some real power in the game. Because right now, money is useful, but not all powerful.
Imagine a wargame where you get rich and powerful and then... Nothing to do. Money is a mean to an end. Once you have a strong economy, you build a strong army and conquer the world.

Bannerlord got the technology to allow us to make a real wargame. Give the player the feeling of being a Gengis Khan or something of the kind. With a huge complex world to conquer in many different ways. Diplomacy, economy, war, culture, intrigue etc...

And about the modding community, the player can only be lost in a sea of mods. And most modding teams have like a few coders to add new mechanics and an unlimited supply of artists and texture makers. In Warband I remember having huge mods with tons of horses, armors, colors, arts etc... But the only interesting thing in the whole mode was a salt mine to put your prisonners to work to make some money. And the salt mine was poorly coded. Selling slaves was still a better option most of the time.

In a game open to modding, we need quality filters. Maybe the original DEVs should pick the successful mods and add them to the game. Because you can't expect from a player to have the time and resources to try all these mods and find the right ones. Most will download the most downloaded mod and miss the good stuff.
 
And about the modding community, the player can only be lost in a sea of mods. And most modding teams have like a few coders to add new mechanics and an unlimited supply of artists and texture makers. In Warband I remember having huge mods with tons of horses, armors, colors, arts etc... But the only interesting thing in the whole mode was a salt mine to put your prisonners to work to make some money. And the salt mine was poorly coded.

Not really a big issue; the most popular mod in Warband was Diplomacy/Dickplomacy and it was ported into everything modded imaginable. I imagine any truly popular systems are going to get spread around like seed grain in a fresh plowed field.
 
The big and huge thing missing in Bannerlord, would be coop multiplayer. I know it wasn't there in the older version. But eh, why it wasn't there in warband? I'm just surprised why I can connect to multiplayer and fight other players, showing that there is already a multiplayer system. But I can't invite my friends to join a battle and help me out in a siege. Many games, like the Total War franchise got the hot seat option that allows you to jump in the campaign of a random player or a friend to take control of the bots in his campaign, or an ally army and help them or fight them in their single player campaign. But in Bannerlord, no such thing. Why?

That's a HUGE potential for fun that is lost. I have friends playing Bannerlord, and I can't play with them. We do mostly coop and we are not used to playing against each others. Maybe other players we don't know, but never against each others. It's too bad, really.
You'll be happy to know that there is a Bannerlord Coop mod in the works already. So far they've managed to sync up the campaign map and parties over network, and are now working on battles which will probably be the real test. As far as I know, Talesworld couldn't agree on the mechanics with time-pausing (such as when you're in a city, or in a battle -- it would pause for every player) but the mod's answer is to simply... slow down time.

Still very early but it's looking promising, and considering Bannerlord is meant to be leagues better for creating mods, it could very well become a possibility. I believe a dev from TW even stated at some point that it should theoretically be possible through modding.

I agree with the rest of your post as well, after I have built myself a decent army it seems to lose a lot of it's charm and I end up fighting just for the sake of fighting. Hopefully this will all be remedied with more content down the line.
 
You'll be happy to know that there is a Bannerlord Coop mod in the works already. So far they've managed to sync up the campaign map and parties over network, and are now working on battles which will probably be the real test.
That's great news.

But I really don't understand why it's so hard to make it work. I'm an ignorant person when it comes to coding, but I can name plenty of games that had coop campaigns and different concepts to add coop.

Let me give you an easy one from the top of my head:
1) You have one player playing his campaign. When a battle starts, he can invite other players to take control of his companions/soldiers. Just let them choose an unit and join the battle.
2) After the battle, the players can disconnect and keep playing their own campaign. Or spectate the player. Maybe receive a screenshot from time to time to see what the main player is doing in the campaign.

And here, you have a workaround the coop campaign.

Now tell me where is the fancy difficult part in this? I don't see it.

The hard part is the decision. And that's an easy decision to make because there isn't a market, or an anti-hack protection to deal with. Just give the players as many protocols as possible and let them choose.

The pausable campaign option is possible too. And it's not new. I saw it in many other games. Like aircraft simulators with time compression. I remember my Eurofighter simulator. You had to travel for hours between your base and your target location (bombing runs). So they gave us a time compression system. In multiplayer, the mission was using the lowest time compression value requested by the players. If you had to travel, you put 12x. But if at the same time someone was dogfighting, the time compression went to 1x. It was understandable. A bit annoying for some. But as you were playing with friends in a simulator, it was more than okay. And now, we are in 2020, we have affordable tools to communicate and we pass time talking about our jobs, wives and problems. It's fun too.

I mean THERE ARE SOLUTIONS!
 
Not really a big issue; the most popular mod in Warband was Diplomacy/Dickplomacy and it was ported into everything modded imaginable. I imagine any truly popular systems are going to get spread around like seed grain in a fresh plowed field.
Well, friend, I don't have your patience. I'm happy to find a few hours to play after work and the ticket price is too expensive for me in many cases.

I gave up. Truth be told. In a moment, I managed to find the motivation, started installing mods one after one (when playing Warband). And it was GB and GBs of textures. Samurai armor, samurai sword, yellow horse, red horse, pink horse, jade armor, pink shield... And some mechanic you have to play for hours to explore them and see if they are useful or not.

I Gave up.

A bit like I gave up with the trading system in Bannerlord. They made an update and started writing prices in red, blue and green. I had no idea what it meant and couldn't find a clear description of these values.
Can't we have a system like in most trading games? Like just "you bought these items at this average price." so if you sell them for more, you profit, if you sell them for less, you lose money.
THERE!!! Easy!

How am I supposed to know the price of a cow in a medieval fantasy world? I mean, I don't know how much a cow is worth in real life. Is it cheap or expensive? Green is good and red is bad? My brains are hurting trying to figure it out.
So I took a spreadsheet and wrote the max and minimum prices and made the average price for each item. And of course, I lost interest and went hunting criminals and destroying their items at the forge to level up.

I waited for years for Bannerlord. and now I have 34hours of gameplay in it. It's not normal. I've spent more time download and installing updates than playing it.
 
And about the modding community, the player can only be lost in a sea of mods. And most modding teams have like a few coders to add new mechanics and an unlimited supply of artists and texture makers. In Warband I remember having huge mods with tons of horses, armors, colors, arts etc... But the only interesting thing in the whole mode was a salt mine to put your prisonners to work to make some money. And the salt mine was poorly coded. Selling slaves was still a better option most of the time.

In a game open to modding, we need quality filters. Maybe the original DEVs should pick the successful mods and add them to the game. Because you can't expect from a player to have the time and resources to try all these mods and find the right ones. Most will download the most downloaded mod and miss the good stuff.
You must've been playing the wrong mods. Most of the best mods brought a LOT more to the table than new textures and salt mines
 
That's great news.

But I really don't understand why it's so hard to make it work. I'm an ignorant person when it comes to coding, but I can name plenty of games that had coop campaigns and different concepts to add coop.

--

I mean THERE ARE SOLUTIONS!

I agree, I'm not too sure why they couldn't make it but from what I gathered it came down to disagreements within the team. In terms of limitations, I'm not quite sure if we can have massive 1000 vs 1000 battles over network yet, but I've got my fingers crossed.
 
Hello everybody,

First, I want to say that I love M&B, I played the older versions and spent a lot of time on warband and waited for Bannerlord for years. I'm still exploring Bannerlord, as you know, there is a lot of content. But here are my first impressions: Please allow me to be somehow negative, I'm not here to list the good stuff, I bought the game because I loved the good stuff.
I'm here to talk about the room for upgrade. So, let's not forget that we are all on the same team and let's talk together in good spirit.

The big and huge thing missing in Bannerlord, would be coop multiplayer. I know it wasn't there in the older version. But eh, why it wasn't there in warband? I'm just surprised why I can connect to multiplayer and fight other players, showing that there is already a multiplayer system. But I can't invite my friends to join a battle and help me out in a siege. Many games, like the Total War franchise got the hot seat option that allows you to jump in the campaign of a random player or a friend to take control of the bots in his campaign, or an ally army and help them or fight them in their single player campaign. But in Bannerlord, no such thing. Why?

That's a HUGE potential for fun that is lost. I have friends playing Bannerlord, and I can't play with them. We do mostly coop and we are not used to playing against each others. Maybe other players we don't know, but never against each others. It's too bad, really.

The second part is that the game is "closed". I mean, the beginning of the game is fun. You are low level, you are happy to recruit troops, to see them level up, find companions, get some money, buy some stuff, make more money, build a clan, own a village, upgrade etc... But at some point the game goes "meh". And the fun ends. Right now, I have a huge amount of mules or whatever to carry all the stuff I want. I travel the world, make money, trade, attack, the missions aren't fun to do, I send a companion and troops to do it mostly. Some missions require weird skills I don't find in my companions, so I can't do them. So I pass... And... I'm bored. I'm bored. I have money, troops, companions. And I'm bored.

Can't we make the things really exciting? Like allow the player more freedom. Give the ability to build cities. New cities. Put troops with food and money in a camp to train while you are roaming the map, giving you elite troops after a few months. Then you can send these elite troops to conquer the world. Give the money some real power in the game. Because right now, money is useful, but not all powerful.
Imagine a wargame where you get rich and powerful and then... Nothing to do. Money is a mean to an end. Once you have a strong economy, you build a strong army and conquer the world.

Bannerlord got the technology to allow us to make a real wargame. Give the player the feeling of being a Gengis Khan or something of the kind. With a huge complex world to conquer in many different ways. Diplomacy, economy, war, culture, intrigue etc...

And about the modding community, the player can only be lost in a sea of mods. And most modding teams have like a few coders to add new mechanics and an unlimited supply of artists and texture makers. In Warband I remember having huge mods with tons of horses, armors, colors, arts etc... But the only interesting thing in the whole mode was a salt mine to put your prisonners to work to make some money. And the salt mine was poorly coded. Selling slaves was still a better option most of the time.

In a game open to modding, we need quality filters. Maybe the original DEVs should pick the successful mods and add them to the game. Because you can't expect from a player to have the time and resources to try all these mods and find the right ones. Most will download the most downloaded mod and miss the good stuff.
A few friends and I have had some of the same ideas about a co-op campaign mode which sounds possible, but have no idea how to implement them, how can I go about it,we were thinking that if TaleWorlds would implement a 2 person co-op campaign mode in which the other player plays as the brother (only available after saving him) and you can chose to rule the lands together as a large clan or choose to battle forever until one has conquered the whole land, only an idea and we believe it is a reasonable co-op idea which doesn't break the immersion of the great game,
Any criticism is welcome
 
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