When do you think they will really properly start 'scene-ing' the game?

[Nordous]

Many seconding:

For towns and castles, that could mean the 3 wall levels, since they're wooden palisades at level 1 and high stone walls at level 3. So then the siege scenes would have to be for each level. All in all, it seems like an very labor-intensive process. I wonder if they would've been better off taking the approach Bethesda used for Skyrim with its dungeons made up of modular pieces that snap together like a lego kit. It might make for more repetition, but it would probably be a lot faster to knock out a ton of different scenes

Being a scener in a mod now I can confirm that this is a hell of a work (after a hell of constant learning with the modding documentation still incomplete). Anyone can watch the fresh tutorials on scenning to have an idea of how complex it currently is, but I can also give you a shorter summary:

• You sculpt the entire terrain OR generate it in something like World Machine;
• You import material maps, texture everything (we talk many layers here) and then you flora;
• You place all the scene objects, having to adjust the terrain times and times again;
• You try to hide the ugly edges of your scene, having to adjust entities and textures for any outer mesh;
• You bake light;
• You do ALL OF THE ABOVE for each season;
• You review all the scene, find clipping, imperfections, missing textures, rinse and repeat many times;
• You place all the spawns for the player, any troops and npcs you want, minding various quest scenarios such as duels;
• You put and set tactical positions;
• You generate, debug, delete and remake by hand navigation mesh, with pathing costs in mind (so no silly routes by bots AND/OR animals);
• You test;
• You optimize;
• You test again. You pray it works;
• You do A LOT MORE STUFF for a siege scene.

You can mess up at any of these points. And there will be bugs. And crashes.

Making a scene in Bannerlord takes a lot of times and PATIENCE. Good luck with unique villages ? Personally I really doubt they will make all the scenes, making all the villages doesn't even makes much sense, while making all unique castles will take no less than a year (form now?).

In TWs' management shoes, I would initially go towards the procedural generation approach, trying to strech it at least to the villages (kind of like in TES 2: Daggerfall), and probably other settlements. A pre-made scene clusters or fragments could probably be combined with procedural generation, although there are no yet definitive examles of this in the whole game dev as far as I'm aware and this would make M&B way more experimental and possibly less certain in development and release. On a flip side, this would give almost endless ease of development and flexibility.

As far as encouraging Town exploration:

1. Hidden items
2. Unique characters with special offers/conflicts that are MOVING thru town not just standing about
3. Potential for dynamic combat
4. Build relations with town by simply being there more
5. Let emergent AI actions take place -dog attacks a kid, people argue and fight, a bard or poet performs with people gathering about
6. Like Bannerpage mod, dont allow interaction with Village chief until at least once travelling to town square to introduce yourself

I like this list of suggestions a lot, something I would add:
4. Gaining tiny relation addition daily by meeting and greeting any known characters; also having to wait for the troops to gather once you recruit them. Soldiers are not expected to just stand there set and ready waiting for you, are they? Need to say good bye to their families and such.

And what if just disable ALL the options except enter the scene? ? That would surely be an rpg!

 

[Dr-Shinobi]

Well i dont work there so have no clue when their work is going to be ready for releasing in to that area, so its hard to speculate on the matter.
Want a guess...i would say 2 months maybe more since they are having identity issues in combat atm

 

[Mushbeast]

Well i dont work there so have no clue when their work is going to be stable for release so hard to speculate on the matter

Fair enough.

 

[black_bulldog]

I think that should get rectified to be honest. I've always found the scenes in WB to be exceptionally useless, just extra pointless loading times. Hopefully in the end BL turns out differently.

I saw an nice idea to address this in another thread. Basically what the poster was saying was have town clothes you can purchase that have a small bonus to charisma, or trading (nothing game breaking) that can only be obtained if you actually go into town/villages. I think it's a great way to encourage players to go into towns without penalizing them if they don't want to or feel rushed.