But just because the free exchange of goods and services is good, it doesn't mean that corporations are magically not to blame when they spend a literal decade promising something explicitly and then refuse to do that thing.
Viking Conquest was a better game than Bannelord and it was made a decade ago by modders. It had more roleplaying and better combat tactics features than Bannerlord, despite being years older and made by a smaller team. There's no excuse for why Bannerlord doesn't exceed the very low bar of "what a team of literal fans already did ten years ago".
Spare me the Zen bull**** about how the real disappointment is in my heart and I can just let go.
Why is it that when a corporation takes a **** in my sandwich I'm supposed to accept it with grace but if I take the piss out of the corporation then white knights come galloping out to preach?
Yeah, it's exactly as you said. Literally logged in to quote you after a year or so not even caring enough about Bannerlord to check the forums. Couldn't agree more, and seeing the white knighting is disheartening. It's the "own nothing and be happy or I'll call you names and shut you down" kind of people doing it most of the time.
Imo, Taleworlds is a company that very cleverly capitalized on a fluke, a perfect storm of a game that came out at the right time and found the right community which helped it flourish beyond belief, pushing it from being a 2000 copies sold game to having a big spotlight over it as a major Indie success. But the community that helped it become the success it ended up being couldn't give Taleworlds the kind of money they had in mind for their future endeavor, it's a niche community after all. So they went for accessibility and disregarded ALL constructive criticism from the very same people who supported them when they were a tiny company. They did it knowing that, no matter the state it was in, it would sell well (because it's past 2020 and kids will buy anything that can give them that sweet dopamine hit) and that there would be heaps of people defending it blindly while literally using it as a 15 minutes casual medieval battle game. They were right of course, they might be sleazy used car salesmen kind of developers but they're very clever and with good business acumen, at least on the short term.
Bannerlord, as far as Taleworlds is concerned, was never supposed to be a good game or a revolutionary game. It was supposed to be more content for the sake of making money using the IP. The fact it also came out in Early Access and improved little in two years was and still is an absolute travesty of course, but there's your very positive reviews on Steam. There's the millions of copies sold. There's the huge majority of the playerbase that has never even HEARD of Warband or Mount and Blade and they will be what Taleworlds care about and cater to. Why should they care about the rest of us? We're just a vocal minority, and most of us have moved on. I just check the forums once a year at this point, and wouldn't have even posted if the person I quoted didn't write exactly what I was thinking about. And I'm someone who bought literally all of their games, starting with Mount and Blade.
Long story short, this was all an extremely well-done grift that could have been a magnificent game and is a mobile-level battle simulator good for killing a couple hours a week instead. You can deny it's a soulless, grindy game good for casuals and people with a really low quality bar and that the developers said untruthful things over and over again just to create hype and make more money, but it won't make it any less true.