Why do you all hate this game?

[hiBoB]

I am quite baffled by the number of threads here where people are just saying the game is trash and Taleworlds should either give up and move on or fix everything instantly by just snapping their fingers very hard.

I've heard that the M&B Warband community is particularly outraged for reasons but having never played Warband it is quite hard to pinpoint exactly what these reasons are. The most hateful posts are usually very thoughtful in their arguments, Critic of the Year Award-worthy stuff like "yeah this game is trash because it's not a good game. So yeah like it is baaaaad, man." Others explain that this early access game feels very unfinished, and yeah, I get it, it's been in development forever but I'd say that the fact that they're not ready to call it 1.0 at this point is rather a good sign, because many big companies release major titles every year with way less content and just as many bugs as Bannerlord... And in fact I could really see some less scrupulous devs calling it 1.0 by now and saying yeah we'll release the rest of the stuff as DLCs maybe at some point and also perhaps fix a few bugs. Of course I would not at all be happy with that and would rather see the game stay in development for many more months but... is the game as it is right now really that bad?

There seem to be so many people who think that absolutely everything in Bannerlord is trash of the highest order and strictly nothing can be saved. And sure, that might not be you but you know who I'm talking about you've seen these guys ****posting on everything that has a comments section. And as a total noob in M&B who in facts finds Bannerlord quite fun, I would like someone to explain to me what is so wrong with this game in the eyes of so many people?

I would like more fleshed out dialogues and NPC interactions, I'd like more battle maps, and I would love more roleplaying options than being a lord but I understand that this is not necessarily what the devs want to do and it is fine with me as long as the game is a good medieval lord RPG. Yeah, content is lacking in some areas but what is so wrong with the core mechanics? Especially when they keep adding more content in the areas that are lacking, they're in the process of adding a lot more maps, new features are coming every few months and even though this is not the most fast paced development I've seen, the updates keep bringing me back to the game because even the small stuff can be really fun with those core mechanics. They added more two handed maces in the latest beta patch? Heck yeah, I'm going to make a new character and go bonk some people in the head cause that's a ton of fun!

I'm not against some constructive criticism. But I feel like if I have to make a post to ask why so many people here and elsewhere seem to hate the game so much, I think that criticism probably hasn't been very constructive.

 

[Poddicus]

I've heard that the M&B Warband community is particularly outraged for reasons but having never played Warband it is quite hard to pinpoint exactly what these reasons are.

I got to here and stopped, you've already answered your own question. You said there's plenty of threads explaining that but you've obviously not bothered to actually read them

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/bannerlord-was-a-grift.443728/

Community Feedback-based EARLY ACCESS ROADMAP - ready for you, Taleworlds!

Taleworlds said "we will use community feedback to bring the game to the level our community expects." But the game still has major problems which buyers complained about since launch two years ago. So: This is a collection of community feedback, to show our expectations, and track if...

forums.taleworlds.com

What else remains to be explained?

I have opened this thread only with the intention of turning it into an informative tool and space for debate without entering into heated discussions about the Bannerlord development process and its launch date. Don't get me wrong, I don't want the question to sound like "have we arrived yet?"...

forums.taleworlds.com

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/what-we-have-in-bannerlord-pre-release-dev-diaries-but-not-in-game-by-now.436973/

A few others which I cba finding
Its okay to enjoy the game, its not a bad game, but when you compare it to its predecessor its pathetic and the amount of criticism is amplified by lack of communication

 

[0tto]

just gonna copy/paste my steam review
6/10
i just downgrade from 10 based on major flaws

1. unit balance is non-existent:

armour's basically 2-3 hit ko, no armour's 1-2 hit ko
arrows ignore armour, from the weakest 0-skill unit to khans guard and fian (last 2 1-shot everyone)

skill progression is... there is none, just perk unlocks. the difference between 50 and 250 is 10%
some skills are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane to level. medicine for example needs 30,000+ casualties for 200, then another 20,000 for 250. i'm not exaggerating... 50,000
to sum up: everyone is looter.


2. economy is either simple or neurotic meta. there's no in-between
the AI is not neurotic meta. they're all bankrupt
(still basically looters) [this is fixed in 1.72]

3. faction interaction with other factions and the clans is non-existent
they're just bandits or not
they want 10k/day for truce after i kill em 3:1 and have all the lords prisoner
break truces in a week
never-ending merc village raids
mesui was passed over for 20 fiefs by mochung, is broke, under 100 troops, and has 100 relation with me. refuse to join me
akit has 3, lots of troops and money, i executed one of their members. joins easy
(still, basically looters...)

4. there's no growth/progress/soul whatever you want to call it, everything you do is meaningless

take care of a village till it has 100 milita and 800 hearths? merc bro w/ 30 peasants demolish it
or they'll need 30 horses and want some bandits killed, demolishing themselves
defeat 5 1000 armies? get ready to do it again just as frequently.
make best friends with everyone, its a influence discount
imprison 1/2 a nation? they all escape in a week

Jesus, i can fill a steam forum page with #4...
the game in its entirety can be summed up in a looter encounter repeated endlessly, the player is also a looter.

it's disappointing. i aint angry or sad about it, just bored



#4 is my biggest gripe, there's no point in doing anything, and no impact to actions. everything gets back to equilibrium almost instantly

 

[KEYFEKEDER]

Most of the Bannerlord "haters" are seasoned Warband veterans, so i can understand why you might feel gaslighted to a certain extend if you are new to the series. If you take Bannerlord as a game independent from the M&B title, yeah it's indeed a nice and fun game. But as a newbie in M&B, you should know that Bannerlord has a long list of promises and hype built up over years all the way from 2012 to 2020. And not to mention its literally a sequel to Warband too (technically a prequel according to the lore but whatever).

I personally hate the fact how TW failed to fulfill the potential of this game rather than the actual game itself. Now we started to see some nice improvements with the 1.8.0 but the game is unfortunately still far from being the Bannerlord we all longed for years and the worst thing is, TW is reluctant about solving this problem

 

[sh1ny4]

The common point in these threads is the disapointement.
Bannerlord had been in devellopment for what, 13 years now ? and at least for me it feels like it's only starting to catch up with warband in many aspects. Yes battles are significantly better in terms of possibilities. Yes the game's engine is much better, but the gameplay quickly runs into a loop.

I don't hate this game, I would be stupid to after spending almost 500 hours in. I hate what it isn't but should have been two years ago, and some at best questionnable choices from TW.
I am really glad we have gotten the last few updates, and that future ones are great looking, but many of them should have been in for a long time.

While I remain optimistic about the futur I can understand why peoples complain, even more so considering that I am fairly new with this franchise, some here have been playing for almost 10 more years than me, and have been expecting a lot more from this game

 

[Namakan]

from a multiplayer perspective -
to keep this short and to the point, look at the two screenshots in my signature, compare to whats in the game now. you can click on them to go to their respective source.

I really, really want to like this game, but TaleWorlds makes it really, really hard when 3 years after alpha, there still are CORE features missing and we still play the "2 steps forward, 1 step back" game every patch.

 

[bunions]

From my steam review:



I should amend the part in the review about Taleworlds being obstructionist with the code to modding. TW have been pretty good about it since I wrote that review. I guess I will update my review when they update their Early Access write-up on Steam to acknowledge that it won't only be in early access for: "around a year".

P.S. / TL;DR - I don't hate the game, I hate what Taleworlds has failed to achieve with it.

 

[hiBoB]

I got to here and stopped, you've already answered your own question. You said there's plenty of threads explaining that but you've obviously not bothered to actually read them

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/bannerlord-was-a-grift.443728/

Community Feedback-based EARLY ACCESS ROADMAP - ready for you, Taleworlds!

Taleworlds said "we will use community feedback to bring the game to the level our community expects." But the game still has major problems which buyers complained about since launch two years ago. So: This is a collection of community feedback, to show our expectations, and track if...

forums.taleworlds.com

What else remains to be explained?

I have opened this thread only with the intention of turning it into an informative tool and space for debate without entering into heated discussions about the Bannerlord development process and its launch date. Don't get me wrong, I don't want the question to sound like "have we arrived yet?"...

forums.taleworlds.com

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/what-we-have-in-bannerlord-pre-release-dev-diaries-but-not-in-game-by-now.436973/

A few others which I cba finding
Its okay to enjoy the game, its not a bad game, but when you compare it to its predecessor its pathetic and the amount of criticism is amplified by lack of communication

Okay so let's go up from the bottom. Threads 3-4 basically complements number 2, which is a very well made list that I had skimmed through a couple times. And before discussing that whole super long early access thing, I want to briefly touch on No Man's Sky. As you probably know, NMS generated a galaxy-sized amount of hype when it was teased, launched very bare and full of bugs, not even calling it an early access or beta and that generated a ton of hate, but the devs didn't run away with the money and kept working and now the game is widely seen as a success and very positively reviewed. Why this thread brings this to mind is because their was a similar sort of thing but in the form of a spreadsheet for NMS, with all the features that were promised at some point pre-launch and wether they were present in-game or not. And it feels like when this spreadsheet was starting to show as much green as you can see in the list you linked, people were already kissing Hello Games' buttocks super hard.

That being said, I totally agree that this was a very miscalculated early access launch and they probably shouldn't have released that soon, probably could have made more progress since, but hey, we don't know for sure what motivated these decisions (I mean, money obviously, but in detail we don't know) what happened during the development cycle and stuff.

Which brings me to the first thread you linked, that I had not read and which is closed for new replies. I sincerely hope we can keep a civilized tone here.
But basically what I have to say about what OP wrote, point by point, is this :
1. You don't know. Yes he can do a back of the envelope calculation and come up with a rough estimate but I can also do a back of the envelope calculations and estimate that his margin of errors are too big for his calculation to be meaningful. Plus, for-profit company made money so boo-ooh? What's the logic here? This is absolutely the kind of irrational rant I was referring to in my original post.
2. He says the game lacks content and is absolutely bare-bones with nothing to do, my 452 hours of play time disagree, and then he says I don't like singleplayer so the game is trash. Well the devs decided to make a mostly singleplayer game, some people do like these games, and as long as they make a good singleplayer game that is fine. You can't call a game trash because it was not made with you in mind, if you want that then make your own game and see how hard it is. That being said, I do understand that the community might feel let down by the devs that they previously supported, and yeah, it is truly a shame. But in the end, it's their jobs, it's about their lives, not about ours. We have other games, they don't. They do what they want with their product and in the end we're still free to buy it or not.
3. Modding tools and early access games don't go well together, and again, I think they screwed up the early access launch, game wasn't ready enough, probably still isn't. And now they have to update the modding tools and modders have to update their mods every 5 minutes but nobody got time for dat so mods get abandonned and that's bad. Yep. Let's just hope modding gets better and more stable in the future, the devs said it would be the case at some point, probably gonna have to wait a long time for that though. But although I do feel empathy for people who were hoping for a great multiplayer mode and got basically nothing, I feel that such a profusion of hateful comments might discourage the devs and thus ruin the experience of people who do also enjoy singleplayer.
4. Time. Well, people always seem to assume that a game with an abnormally long development cycle is necessarily going to be a masterpiece when reality has shown time and time again that it is not true. Cyberpunk 2077 was disappointing (7-8 years development I think), recently ArmA Reforger came out 9 years after ArmA 3 and crashed every 10 minutes at launch, Duke Nukem Forever took 15 years and was just wholly unexceptional and there are many more examples I've heard about but these are just games I played that come to mind. If a pregnant mother doesn't give birth after 24 months you don't go "Surely that's gonna be the best baby ever!".
It's mostly a sign that something went wrong in the development cycle. Could be money, mismanagement, major technical hurdles, a global pandemic, sometimes a mix of all that... It's so common that I'll even do a prediction : Kerbal Space Program 2, planned sequel to the beloved KSP 1 my favorite game ever, was due to come out "in 2020" when it was announced. That was pushed back several times and this time they say have a "for sure" release date of Q1 2023. People are saying oh that's good they're taking the time to polish their game and they're going to come out with a really good and well finished product. My prediction is, and I'd be willing to bet quite a lot on it, that they are just being pushed by their publisher to release the game in fiscal year 2023 because that will look good in their annual revenue even if the game is crap given that it is highly anticipated, so the game is going to be at best a buggy mess at launch and people are going to get frustrated.
As for what went wrong with Bannerlord's development, I'm willing to bet that it is : something. Yeah I would assume that something went wrong but we don't know what because we don't work at TaleWorlds, and imo speculation is useless other than for the purpose of pure entertainment.

So in conclusion, yeah the game is not perfect, but fortunately it is also being worked on, and if you are disappointed by the lack of a good multiplayer mode I understand, that sucks. But I think people shouldn't be bullying the devs away from developing at least a good singleplayer game.

 

[Mad Vader]

I am quite baffled by the number of threads here where people are just saying the game is trash and Taleworlds should either give up and move on or fix everything instantly by just snapping their fingers very hard.
...
I'm not against some constructive criticism. But I feel like if I have to make a post to ask why so many people here and elsewhere seem to hate the game so much, I think that criticism probably hasn't been very constructive.

You seem to have cherry picked the toxic ****posting threads and generalized the BL trashing there to the whole veteran community.
In reality, MOST posters, not the loudest ones, engage with constructive posts, often to little avail. Many have done this since the MP beta or the EA release and there have been a few frustrating years for them, not counting the waiting for any release at all.
The problem is that the devs simply ignored plenty of good advice based on massive player feedback, seemingly out of carelessness, indifference and/or hubris. This made many well-intentioned players who wanted the game to succeed frustrated and even angry. The MP players were especially screwed and ignored from the beginning.

Be advised that the smart thing to do now is to leave the day-to-day following and waiting for patches, and come back in a few years when mods will fix the game and make it fulfill its potential. Taleworlds could have done this too, but they mismanaged the project in a big way and now they are reduced to fixing the remaining issues of their existing features. It's too late for anything else as they lost experienced devs and the team was presumably reduced by transferring devs to a new game development team.

As for what went wrong with Bannerlord's development, I'm willing to bet that it is : something. Yeah I would assume that something went wrong but we don't know what because we don't work at TaleWorlds, and imo speculation is useless other than for the purpose of pure entertainment.

We actually do know what went wrong, not thanks to Taleworlds sharing their internal secrets. The base issue is project mismanagement and lack of planning and oversight, resulting in major waste of time and resources (main source of this are Glassdoor reviews by ex-employees, but you could guess it even if you didn't know what's going on internally).
The other issue is that at some point they decided the game should appeal to the more casual player as a quick-paced action game (with some thought about console release) and intentionally threw out some game mechanics complexity that was highly desired by core fans. They are unrepentant about this.
Why are you assuming that if you don't know, then no one else knows is beyond me. You could just ask us.

 

[hiBoB]

just gonna copy/paste my steam review
6/10
i just downgrade from 10 based on major flaws

1. unit balance is non-existent:

armour's basically 2-3 hit ko, no armour's 1-2 hit ko
arrows ignore armour, from the weakest 0-skill unit to khans guard and fian (last 2 1-shot everyone)

skill progression is... there is none, just perk unlocks. the difference between 50 and 250 is 10%
some skills are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane to level. medicine for example needs 30,000+ casualties for 200, then another 20,000 for 250. i'm not exaggerating... 50,000
to sum up: everyone is looter.


2. economy is either simple or neurotic meta. there's no in-between
the AI is not neurotic meta. they're all bankrupt
(still basically looters) [this is fixed in 1.72]

3. faction interaction with other factions and the clans is non-existent
they're just bandits or not
they want 10k/day for truce after i kill em 3:1 and have all the lords prisoner
break truces in a week
never-ending merc village raids
mesui was passed over for 20 fiefs by mochung, is broke, under 100 troops, and has 100 relation with me. refuse to join me
akit has 3, lots of troops and money, i executed one of their members. joins easy
(still, basically looters...)

4. there's no growth/progress/soul whatever you want to call it, everything you do is meaningless

take care of a village till it has 100 milita and 800 hearths? merc bro w/ 30 peasants demolish it
or they'll need 30 horses and want some bandits killed, demolishing themselves
defeat 5 1000 armies? get ready to do it again just as frequently.
make best friends with everyone, its a influence discount
imprison 1/2 a nation? they all escape in a week

Jesus, i can fill a steam forum page with #4...
the game in its entirety can be summed up in a looter encounter repeated endlessly, the player is also a looter.

it's disappointing. i aint angry or sad about it, just bored



#4 is my biggest gripe, there's no point in doing anything, and no impact to actions. everything gets back to equilibrium almost instantly

well I think 1 and 2 both got slightly improved in the latest beta which I have not tried yet so at least that's a good sign. I agree with #3 and #4 and especially #4. Basically the only way to dominate a nation is to have both the riding and scouting perks that together let you keep prisoners forever, then you just have to defeat the armies once. But the fact that the only way to feel like you have a meaningful impact on a war is to have these two perks (or to execute everyone) is really bad and I can't wait for that to be fixed either by the devs or by modders.
I recently made a execute everyone playthrough because that is basically the only way to permanently defeat a faction at the moment, and coming from total war games I wanted the ability to do that. I was extremely disappointed to see that when I finally defeat a faction by beheading their last noble, all their territories don't go to my kingdom but to some other random faction. I say random, it might not be, there might be some factor that determines which faction gets their cities but I can't pinpoint what this factor would be and act in consequence.

Basically it's frustratingly difficult to "win" the game by conquest and I understand that it is meant to be a sandbox game that you can keep playing on the same save for a very long time but I think that having the possibility of conquering the world to 'finish' your playthrough before starting a new one wouldn't hurt.

 

[hiBoB]

The problem is that the devs simply ignored plenty of good advice based on massive player feedback, seemingly out of carelessness, indifference and/or hubris. This made many well-intentioned players who wanted the game to succeed frustrated and even angry. The MP players were especially screwed and ignored from the beginning.

I didn't follow the early developments because I had never heard of Mount and Blade until march of last year or something like that, but if I understand correctly it's not that they never asked the community for their opinion, but rather that they did ask for feedback and then proceeded not to listen?

Why are you assuming that if you don't know, then no one else knows is beyond me. You could just ask us.

Well I wasn't trying to pretend that I know everything better than everyone else or to antagonize anyone, but I just thought it was safe to assume that no one knew, or rather that no one who really knew could tell what went wrong, because NDAs usually are a thing when you're working on these kinds of projects. It's often very hard for a project manager to identify and correct the systemic flaws that lead to situations like this, so for people who weren't there it's usually impossible. (Although sometimes it can be obvious, I'll admit)

For instance if you ask people what went wrong with Cyberpunk, you'll get lots of answers. Some contradicting others.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

I guess the server change ruined my emoticons, I though it was a trickster mod at first, but it seems to be all old posts.

 

[Poddicus]

Plus, for-profit company made money so boo-ooh? What's the logic here? This is absolutely the kind of irrational rant I was referring to in my original post.

You're missing the point. They made a ton of money at release from all the hype so they have no reasonable excuse to **** up this badly.
As to why they released the game way before it was ready into early access I believe they just ran / were running out of money, which makes sense with that amount of time they wasted / spent since 2012 at least.

2. He says the game lacks content and is absolutely bare-bones with nothing to do, my 452 hours of play time disagree, and then he says I don't like singleplayer so the game is trash. Well the devs decided to make a mostly singleplayer game, some people do like these games, and as long as they make a good singleplayer game that is fine. You can't call a game trash because it was not made with you in mind, if you want that then make your own game and see how hard it is. That being said, I do understand that the community might feel let down by the devs that they previously supported, and yeah, it is truly a shame. But in the end, it's their jobs, it's about their lives, not about ours. We have other games, they don't. They do what they want with their product and in the end we're still free to buy it or not.

A high play time doesn't mean the game isn't empty/barebones though. The people I play with and I all have over a thousand hours on BL and are still unwilling to pick the singleplayer back up yet. Why would I when vanilla Warband's SP just has more in it?
This game is a sequel so by definition the players of the older games should be part of the target audience, no? The game they showed, advertised and hyped up all this time was the sequel we wanted, but its nowhere near the same to what we got.

Warband was a singleplayer focused game too yet it had a thriving multiplayer community, my hours on that game are split 50/50 between SP and MP. Why shouldn't we expect the same from BL? I've no problem with waiting until the SP is finished in order for MP to get more love but its their design decisions to do with MP that are killing it, not just time or the lack of content. Things like the class system, game modes, combat fluidity/responsiveness, etc.

So in conclusion, yeah the game is not perfect, but fortunately it is also being worked on, and if you are disappointed by the lack of a good multiplayer mode I understand, that sucks. But I think people shouldn't be bullying the devs away from developing at least a good singleplayer game.

Nobody is bullying the devs away other than the occasional trolls sperging out. The devs have already refused to implement things into that singleplayer that would be obvious improvements and help the feel of immersion which has been asked for countless times on the forums. Refused in terms of posts, not just lack of communication. Doesn't matter to me what state the MP is in right now, the singleplayer ****ing sucks and everytime I try to play it without a horde of mods taking the role of band-aids I just switch back to Warband's SP instead.

The battles in BL are fun, better than the previous game even, but when that's 100% of the SP's content it gets old really fast. Its soulless.

 

[0tto]

That being said, I totally agree that this was a very miscalculated early access launch and they probably shouldn't have released that soon, probably could have made more progress since, but hey, we don't know for sure what motivated these decisions (I mean, money obviously, but in detail we don't know) what happened during the development cycle and stuff.

it was a good beta release, helped with lockdowns.

honestly, i think the lack of balance/features/etc is due to trying to fix the massive, massive, ungodly number of bugs and crashes. if you read the patch notes they dominate every list since release, doubt they were prepared for them but to their credit the game is much more stable and smooth

also, there's a language barrier and Turkey's currently going through massive inflation

 

[_COS_]

It's really hard to not hate this game from multiplayer perspective.

nice bait

 

[BigFat]

The series is very unique so for an outsider looking in, it's normal I guess to be confused out why people are/were so upset. For people with a lot of time invested in previous titles, it was a baffling experience to play the early access and being missing so many things that were promised, or quality of life changes that should have been obvious from mod downloads, and missing at the heart of it all: soul. You bring up NMS and Cyberpunk hype letdowns but I can't help but feel biased when I say that the hype for those was largely artificial. People criticize this so harshly because they genuinely love M&B and it's kind of frustrating to see some of the decisions that were made for bannerlord.

 

[Nurthis]

 

[rapsodie]

I don't hate the game. I just want TaleWorlds to release the damn thing so that that the modding community can fix it.

I don't know what went wrong but the modding community behind the Mount & Blade series is superior to the actual developers. If they were smart they should have hired hired some of those people prior to making this game. They updated the graphics but literally nothing else about this game is better than the previous one.

 

[five bucks]

I've heard that the M&B Warband community is particularly outraged for reasons but having never played Warband it is quite hard to pinpoint exactly what these reasons are. The most hateful posts are usually very thoughtful in their arguments, Critic of the Year Award-worthy stuff like "yeah this game is trash because it's not a good game. So yeah like it is baaaaad, man."

I'm not against some constructive criticism. But I feel like if I have to make a post to ask why so many people here and elsewhere seem to hate the game so much, I think that criticism probably hasn't been very constructive.

Here OP, you can read this thread for constructive feedback.

Community Feedback-based EARLY ACCESS ROADMAP - ready for you, Taleworlds!

Taleworlds said "we will use community feedback to bring the game to the level our community expects." But the game still has major problems which buyers complained about since launch two years ago. So: This is a collection of community feedback, to show our expectations, and track if...

forums.taleworlds.com

We've been giving constructive feedback for two years. The reason the feedback stopped getting constructive is due to feeling like the feedback was being ignored, sometimes being told that our feedback was only a "minor subset of players" or that it "conflicted with Taleworlds' vision", entirely justified frustration with a lack of communication, or a general feeling that the development is taking too damn long. With all this said, 1.8 was a good patch... which took 7 months, but a good patch.

Of course I would not at all be happy with that and would rather see the game stay in development for many more months but... is the game as it is right now really that bad?

What makes a game fun is a fair challenge of the player's skill or decision-making abilities. What makes a game replayable is balanced variety, so you can go through the same game with different content.

Pre 1.8, As a strategy game Bannerlord was not fun or fair challenge due to the AI being frustratingly dumb and the player not being able to make much impact in politics or diplomacy without using exploits.

As a tactics game Bannerlord did not challenge the player's decision-making abilities since weak armour made archers/horse archers super overpowered - thus the obvious choice - melee cavalry and most infantry was too weak to be worth using, and battles would end too fast to make tactical decisions.

As a fighting game Bannerlord was not a fair challenge as even in the best armour you could die to a couple of stray arrows instantly ending your ability to join large battles, and it lacked balanced variety between weapons.

As a roleplaying game Bannerlord's skills were severely imbalanced making the decision of which ones to take very obvious, the quests are mostly quite basic and very imbalanced which leaves no decision making challenge. And it was frustrating to level up because it was way too slow.

Among many other severe balance issues, design flaws, and bugs.

Post 1.8, from my current playthrough it is a bit more fun as a strategy game due to AI changes, bit more fun as a tactics game and first person slasher due to the cavalry knockdown/melee armour changes, and a bit more fun as a roleplaying game due to the levelling changes. There is still a lot that needs to be done though.

 

[NPC99]

I don't hate the game. I just want TaleWorlds to release the damn thing so that that the modding community can fix it.

I don't know what went wrong but the modding community behind the Mount & Blade series is superior to the actual developers. If they were smart they should have hired hired some of those people prior to making this game. They updated the graphics but literally nothing else about this game is better than the previous one.

Modders will not fix the game. They can increase player options, provide alternative balance, add features and vary the worlds and settings for those players who choose to try something different or who have specific interests that the base game doesn't cater for. TW has not been quick, but it has listened to the modding community and is working to improve Bannerlord's singleplayer moddability. Anything modders add will depend on the underlying Taleworlds game engine. IMO the engine has been highly optimised and is extremely powerful. My only regret is Taleworlds commercial decision to tie Bannerlord to a low minimum pc spec and console ports. This suggests that increasingly powerful pcs will continue to hit ceilings such as the 2048 maximum number of agents in a mission scene.

I've heard that the M&B Warband community is particularly outraged for reasons but having never played Warband it is quite hard to pinpoint exactly what these reasons are.

Warband had/has an active multiplayer community. Multiplayer was in Beta prior to the game's EA release. However, AFAIK (as a singleplayer) progress on multiplayer has been glacial, spawning increasingly toxic feedback as that situation drags on. For example there is no confirmed date for the release of custom multiplayer servers, which means that multiplayer modding is effectively on hold and will continue to be so. As a spectator the official servers hosting multiplayer games appear to have been dogged with problems and crashes throughout EA.
On the single player front, I like Bannerlord, merely wish it allowed more interaction in its fabulous scenes and that the dialogue/NPC interactions were much more challenging and complex.