Worried for this games future

Is gameplay an overall improvement to Warband?

  • Yes, period.

    Votes: 90 22.8%
  • Yes, but some things need adjusting.

    Votes: 197 50.0%
  • Its a mixed bag.

    Votes: 71 18.0%
  • Despite better graphics / more features I'm having a bad time too.

    Votes: 36 9.1%

  • Total voters
    394

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Most issues I've had seems to be server side, I have decent computer but not top tier.

I think there's a lot that will "feel" better as you get used to everything that's different from Warband
I agree that the campaign map needs some improvement. It's seriously frustrating to chase looters half across the map and the overall speed should be faster for everyone.

I have no real problems with the combat, it's maybe a bit clunky but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The audio levels need some work, horses are louder than tanks and the 3d sound effects (aka where the sound source is) are weird
 
Just asked for a refund. To much bugs, freezes, performance issues and plain bad gameplay. Will give it another go in a couple of months.
 
So I finally got to play the game I was waiting for eight years and honestly I think its one step forward two steps back from Warband.

Firstly I want to get out of the way that I'm experiencing massive performance issues.
My computer is a potatoe I'm well aware of that. But It can run Witcher3 on highest settings and even Kingdom Come Deliverance runs
reasonably on medium. I didn't expect it to be able to do 200+ size battles in Bannerlord but instead it gets already curbstomped when
more then five people are in a scene.
I will have to buy a new computer anyways but optimization as of now is horrible with this game.

I wanted to get that out of the way first because some of the below may be partially caused by my bad performance.

The combat feels odd. Not odd in just different as I played six hours now and couldn't get used to it but just odd.
Fighting with a lance from horseback in Warband was (rightfully) the easiest thing ever. Now peasants with their
clubs will outreach my lance and hit me or my horse. Hitting anything with that lance is more difficult then ever too.
One cheese I found to counter this was to gitter the mouse a bit while stabbing. But that can't be seriously the solution
to that. Also I can't seem to get used to the new shield blocking. I have an easier time doing directional blocks with the
weapon than the shield. Often that leads to me ending up as a pincushion for all the archers around. Timing is also odd.
Maybe some of that has to do with my low level character or low framerate though.

And last but probably most importantly:

The game feels like a chore to play.
M&B has always been a slow game but Bannerlord pushes this to the limit of my patience.
-You start more underleveled than ever. -Combat Leveling is slower than in Warband. -Map movement speed is slower than in Warband.
-The Map is bigger and full of Mountains and Lakes you have to circumnavigate and Forests you have to crawl through.
-Bandits are outrunning your party as you reach party sizes large enough to fight them properly.
-Shops in towns are pretty much empty. Finding items you need is extremely difficult.
-You are locked out from entering lords halls even if you are a noble.
-Loading times are long and menus are unnecessarily cumbersome.


I simply couldn't bring myself to have fun with this. And I don't think I would have had much fun even if the performance was good.
Combat and overall gameplay feels like a downgrade from Warband (At least in terms of fun). And alot of the highly anticipated new features seem tacked on and
not well thought through.

If this was three years into development and the devs decided to go EA because of money restraints then I wouldn't be worried.
But it has been eight years and not even the basic features that made Warband good are satisfyingly done?
I don't know where this game is headed.


What do you think about gameplay? I seem to be the minority since 80% of reviews on Steam are positive.

None of this is entirely true or a real problem. I'm playing it for several hours already.
-Warband progress was too fast, you start on a decent level, loading screens are not a big problem if you move the game on SSD.
I'm not gonna explain everything.

I didn't have one freeze or crash. Everything is smooth, except low fps during snowing!

I would complain about the illumination system! When is cloudy and dark, you can't see sh't. Everything is gray! Something must be done here!!!
 
I agree with the optimization. I was able to run 500 man battles on big mods on warband with my intel i3 integrated graphics and 8 gb ram. But with that pc I cannot even play bannerlord at all. It won't get past the loading screen. I had to build an entirely new pc for it.

Warband is 10 years old. Did you think the same computer would run Bannerlord as well?

Bannerlord plays beautifully. It is optimized enough to run 2000+ units simultaneously. It has been improved from warband on every level and will continue to improve. There is probably another year left to bring the game out of early access. Multiplayer is play ready, SP is a bonus not yet completed. TW has been open and honest aboutthe state of EA.
 
I am sure there are deeper problems with your System not running Bannerlord properly, and I honestly can't fathom that Witcher 3 runs well, considering it didnt run all that good on my old PC which was still better than your Machine now, but atleast a Dev got on it quickly, concerning the other points, I am entirely happy after 7 hours of gameplay for an EA Title, but to each their own opinion
 
-You start more underleveled than ever. -Combat Leveling is slower than in Warband.

Not entirely sure I agree. The new perk style system means there's now two levelling systems in play, and I'm not sure yet which one is the more influential (I suspect perks, given levelling only seems to chuck a focus point your way). I'm not really finding myself under level at the beginning of the game though - I've won several melee tournaments already despite having dumped pretty much all of the starting skill points into bows and riding.
In terms of speed gaining levels does seem slower, though at present it seems faster than skill gain. I've only been mucking around for a couple of hours, and I've hit character level 4 yet skill growth is pretty stagnant - riding has increased by two (the only time I've not been fighting from horseback is during tournaments), bows not at all and a single point into one handed despite that being probably the most used skill at present (won a nice sword in a tournament, so plans for horse archery currently out of the window).

Obviously early days at the moment, but initial impression is that the skill point gain for low level skills (my one handed started at 15) should be a bit quicker; ideally let me hit that first perk or two relatively quickly then make me work to increase that skill.
-Loading times are long and menus are unnecessarily cumbersome.

Part of that is going to come down to your system, particularly the load times. It's not particularly bad for me (SSD), but it's still somewhat annoying when you click on one of the 'quick' options to talk to a character then have it transition to the 3D scene to talk to them. Surely the point of a quick option is for it to be quick?
What do you think about gameplay? I seem to be the minority since 80% of reviews on Steam are positive.
So far it feels a little more Warband 1.5 than Mount & Blade II, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. My main disappointment so far is that the AI doesn't seem to have changed, well, at all. It's still dumb as a brick with the tactical nuance of a dead gerbil, and it still seems to favour the 'everyone chase around like a horde of wasps' approach to combat. I wasn't expecting miracles, but after eight years it'd be nice if it had at least a simple understanding of concepts like not getting in the way of each others attacks, or how to actually surround a target so they're not all futil
 
My complaint so far is, unfortunately, solely with the campaign performance.

Every interaction I have takes longer than it feels like it should to load, every battle I’ve had- even if it’s just fending off 6 forest bandits with my 20 men- is too laggy for me to take part in. I have to just command my troops as I get stuttering as soon as I engage my character.

It’s quite odd. Every dialogue screen, fief, or scene takes noticeably long to load. It may be because I installed to an HDD instead of an SSD but I won’t be able to confirm that until I can get my hands on an SSD.

The weirdest part of the performance issues is that I can make a custom battle of 800 people and it runs smooth enough that I can take part in the battle. But as soon as I get into campaign the game becomes almost unplayable performance wise.

My specs are below. I figure I ought to get more RAM and an SSD but I don’t think that explains the HUGE difference in performance between a custom battle and a campaign battle.

Ryzen 5 1600
Radeon RX580 4gb
8GB DDR4 RAM

I'm in the same boat except instead of custom battle it's the multiplayer. I dont know my entire specs (I'm not a big computer guy just enjoy gaming) but I could run the multiplayer with full lobby's on the preset high. I cant even run the campaign on low quality without issues. I was super excited and still am to.play this game but in the current state I'm not able too. It's a letdown to not even have the ability to play the game. These are the specs I know ur was able to find.

Prosesser: I7-6700
Ram: 8GB
Graphics: Geforce GTX 960M

Like I'm not asking to run this game on very high or ultra but I'd also like to know if I'm just crazy for thinking this game should run on low
 
I think the only gripes I have is, some followers are leveled way past being able to work them into slots you'd prefer, cant follow caravans for escorting, and obviously the missing features that I know will be in soon.
 
Hi, apologies for your bad experience because of the performance. Can you post or send your specs to me so that I can pinpoint the issue for us to fix in the future patches? Also, with those information, I may be able to give some quick tips so that you can start enjoying the game as soon possible.
Im big fan of warband and im stuck trying custom battle to see how performance will go. This is what i say in other topic:

"I have some stuttering too.Even when its 70-80 fps looks laggy and i trieed put graphics in medium and low battles to 350 and still not really smooth. Lower battle size will be as warband almost and didnt tried yet XD
My rig is ryzen 3600, 16 ram and gtx 1660. Im playing 2k and my grphic card its not great but, should handle a medium with decent battle size?."

Being trying 50% infantry and 50% cav.
 
I enjoy the combat. It feels more clunky so far and I am okay with this, the character feels slower. What has stood out for me the most is how much more important distancing yourself from an enemy is to get the full power of your swing or just bouncing off the enemy. Also the maps are amazing. Combat feels tougher imo and there are extra smaller mechanics that give it some depth. I am still early game though.

The only issues that have really stuck out for me are the optimization and long load times. Some scene changes take nearly a minute to load. Yet sometimes they load instantly so I don't know what is going on there.
 
As most of your fears seem to revolve around balance, I wouldn't worry too much. They explicitly said pre-release that balance would be screwy and that it's part of the reason they opted for early access; so our feedback could help them balance the game to the community's specifications.
 
I'm bloody serious. I don't know why it runs so well either. :lol:

Witcher 3 seems to be an extremly well optimized game anyways.
The few options I disabled barely changed the look of the game and I got pretty stable 30fps
I just searched in Youtube that GPU and Witcher 3 and performance was barely 30fps on low graphics. According to userbenchmark.com, my cpu is about 75% better, but my GPU is 500% :lol:
 
Im big fan of warband and im stuck trying custom battle to see how performance will go. This is what i say in other topic:

"I have some stuttering too.Even when its 70-80 fps looks laggy and i trieed put graphics in medium and low battles to 350 and still not really smooth. Lower battle size will be as warband almost and didnt tried yet XD
My rig is ryzen 3600, 16 ram and gtx 1660. Im playing 2k and my grphic card its not great but, should handle a medium with decent battle size?."

Being trying 50% infantry and 50% cav.
The game is probably having CPU side spikes. We will be checking those within our profiling environments. Your GPU and CPU should be able to handle big battles easily. 1660 is nearly enough for 2K but it can have issues when the camera is very close to a big group of soldiers(hundreds). For this, we are planning on enabling the "Dynamic Resolution Scale", so only for those instances you would not need to lower the overall config.
 
Bannerlord is really good, don't get me wrong but i think they don't have the step back vision of really long time Warband players we are (when we play: they work). They have been into this for years. I think the combat system is really good: it's like Warband but with more subtilities (really enjoyed the tutorial). I'm little surprise by the calvary like leif-erikson: it is now really hard to kill looters with a basic cavalryman (it's feel like the lance is too short and you miss quite much of your hits also i have an hard time place well my lance) but maybe it's more realistic like that ? A bunch of looters are quite hard to kill for a lonely cavalryman in reality i think, for sure it was maybe too easy in Warband. We are too much used of Warband that we played for years. There is maybe some adjustments to do there something half way between Warband and BL now.

I was a little bit frustrated too, looters outruning you. Most castles halls i go to are empty, i would have like to see a "court" there: some nobles and rich merchants of the cities, why the "notables" are only wandering into the streets ? I don't understand why much of notables are artisans, why artisans can allow you to recruit troops ? Even if the lord not here we should have a seneschal or chancellor here to handle affairs for his lord. Castle halls are so nice but so empty: they deserves more life. In the same spirit we could have like a "roman forum" place where merchants are trading not like a market that we have now but like a guildmasters place where caravans and all this are set and rare ressources are trade "macro trading". Finding merchants talking in a backstreet is realistic ok but doesn't reflect well their power. I kind of miss the guildmaster, i was thinking they would have expand the concept.

There is some castles scenes looking like towns with merchants with empty inventories. Placeholders ?

About performance i think it's not that bad but will maybe need to be improved (frankly i'm happy i've upgraded my system just before BL), we ave to keep in mind all those models and graphics that the engine have to handle !!!

The most important for me is that engine and combat system are basically good, all the rest can be fix, that's what an early access is for after all !
 
It took a bit of getting used to, but I can easily solo looter bands of 40+ by myself with a horse and a knights lance, so im not sure why people are complaining about it. It just requires you to pick them off from the corners, then they rout from losses, and you get to mop up.
 
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