This has been addressed a thousand times before, but I am frustrated and going to express them all again. These are all issues from the start of development to now. Fundamental issues.
Stance- Why is this a feature? Warband didn't need stances, Chivalry and Mordhau didn't need stances either. This introduces a new level of complexity for absolutely no reason and needs to be removed. Four attacks you can do whatever you want with and four blocks that allowed you to break the game in whatever way you wanted was enough for Warband, and that model of having a few, consistently reliable attacks seeped into Chivalry and Mordhau. I don't know where Dev's got the impression that there weren't thousands of hours of stuff to master in Warband, but this, in particular, was a braindead choice. It feels like RNG and adds people who know how to punish it to break past any defense, but the major draw of high-level Warband is you died if you made a mistake.
Kick- Literally... Make it slow and hard to land like war band and give a free punishment if you land it but easy to punish if you don't. I don't know what was so complex to port kicking from Warband into Bannerlord or why there's some dogged persistence into not tweaking it to exactly what it was in Warband. Watching high-level duels of Bannerlord is a clown fiesta because of kick spam and abuse of stances that results in even high-level fights to be major RNG fests. Kicking was not a huge issue in Warband and mostly punished laziness from the other player or lack of awareness, which was a good, fun way to add variety to fighting. Slow it down, make it need to be more precise, and result in a free hit afterward.
Blocking- The animations are not crisp or reliable, nor will it ever truly feel the same when an enemy can combo past your blocks or do some weird **** to break your block. As a core concept, in Warband, in the flowchart of duels, and why Warband combat was so satisfying was because if you were patient, you could kill anyone. There needs to be that satisfaction of blocking instantly and hearing that thing that comes with thousands of hours of mastery and relying on your skill just isn't there in bannerlord, not to mention the animations are simply ugly. Not the charming ugliness or functional ugly of Warband but simply ugly for no reason.
Feinting- While many considered this as a huge issue in Warband, it added a lot of fun skill ceiling and excitement to high-level Warband fighting. Where is this? Where is the draw of Bannerlord that is going to build a long-lasting community that is passionate and loves the combat? All the animations look the same, combo-ing is broken and there are exploits that are far worse than anything you could exploit in Warband.
Game modes can be solved by mods. New features for SP and MP can be slowly spoon-fed.
But these are CORE issues that needed to be solved, not given a foresight or given minimal attention if Bannerlord multiplayer is ever to succeed. It doesn't matter if anyone can see their deaths or not (funny change to cater to carebear mentality btw) if nobody is playing your game because the core mechanical loop is not rewarding. It's not. Shoring up the mechanics and making sure the game is actually fun comes before all the extra bull****, all the extra game modes people are crying for, or any small balance tweaks.
The class system can be fixed, the extra **** can be done later. There's no reason for these four fundamental mechanics to not be the first things fixed in all of these patches and updates.
Performance upgrades are important too because you shouldn't have to have a GTX 3060 to play a game that looks like minecraft.
Stance- Why is this a feature? Warband didn't need stances, Chivalry and Mordhau didn't need stances either. This introduces a new level of complexity for absolutely no reason and needs to be removed. Four attacks you can do whatever you want with and four blocks that allowed you to break the game in whatever way you wanted was enough for Warband, and that model of having a few, consistently reliable attacks seeped into Chivalry and Mordhau. I don't know where Dev's got the impression that there weren't thousands of hours of stuff to master in Warband, but this, in particular, was a braindead choice. It feels like RNG and adds people who know how to punish it to break past any defense, but the major draw of high-level Warband is you died if you made a mistake.
Kick- Literally... Make it slow and hard to land like war band and give a free punishment if you land it but easy to punish if you don't. I don't know what was so complex to port kicking from Warband into Bannerlord or why there's some dogged persistence into not tweaking it to exactly what it was in Warband. Watching high-level duels of Bannerlord is a clown fiesta because of kick spam and abuse of stances that results in even high-level fights to be major RNG fests. Kicking was not a huge issue in Warband and mostly punished laziness from the other player or lack of awareness, which was a good, fun way to add variety to fighting. Slow it down, make it need to be more precise, and result in a free hit afterward.
Blocking- The animations are not crisp or reliable, nor will it ever truly feel the same when an enemy can combo past your blocks or do some weird **** to break your block. As a core concept, in Warband, in the flowchart of duels, and why Warband combat was so satisfying was because if you were patient, you could kill anyone. There needs to be that satisfaction of blocking instantly and hearing that thing that comes with thousands of hours of mastery and relying on your skill just isn't there in bannerlord, not to mention the animations are simply ugly. Not the charming ugliness or functional ugly of Warband but simply ugly for no reason.
Feinting- While many considered this as a huge issue in Warband, it added a lot of fun skill ceiling and excitement to high-level Warband fighting. Where is this? Where is the draw of Bannerlord that is going to build a long-lasting community that is passionate and loves the combat? All the animations look the same, combo-ing is broken and there are exploits that are far worse than anything you could exploit in Warband.
Game modes can be solved by mods. New features for SP and MP can be slowly spoon-fed.
But these are CORE issues that needed to be solved, not given a foresight or given minimal attention if Bannerlord multiplayer is ever to succeed. It doesn't matter if anyone can see their deaths or not (funny change to cater to carebear mentality btw) if nobody is playing your game because the core mechanical loop is not rewarding. It's not. Shoring up the mechanics and making sure the game is actually fun comes before all the extra bull****, all the extra game modes people are crying for, or any small balance tweaks.
The class system can be fixed, the extra **** can be done later. There's no reason for these four fundamental mechanics to not be the first things fixed in all of these patches and updates.
Performance upgrades are important too because you shouldn't have to have a GTX 3060 to play a game that looks like minecraft.
Last edited: