Worried for this games future

[King Henry]

I have around 12 hours in-game so far and have absolutely loved the experience. There are some rough edges around the corner, but thanks to the community I'm confident that the developers will have a plethora of information to continue to shape the game.

Keep in mind however, that I didn't expect every single feature from Warband to be in Early Access, but even without some of the features the game still had it's moments where I was just amazed by what the engine could do. My best memory so far was being given an entire town (that I'll admit I didn't earn, as I was just running around the map trying not to go bankrupt). When I went into the town and saw the architecture my mind was blown away, then knowing that it was mine, I got a rewarding feeling like every battle, every moment lead to being there.

 

[Jezze]

My 2 cents (after 4 hours of playing - didn't try MP yet):

Combat appears to be more challenging/realistic compared to Warband. I consider it a good thing and it takes a bit getting used to, coming from Warband. It takes me quite some effort to actually hit a looter from a horse . It's also much more difficult. I set all difficulty to the highest and it reminded of playing Prophesy of Pendor with a level 1 character. Damn challenging. But that makes it fun.

The game is more immersive.Graphics are gooood. UI as well, compared to Warband. It's just like Warband, but bigger, better, faster stronger. Can't say much about the rest of the features since I did not touch those.

I have random stutters in scenes but for the rest of the performance is quite okay. I can run on medium settings with specs between minimum and recommended. And there a bit too much loading screens, as earlier pointed out. Quick options to talk to an NPC are not really "quick". In Warband, it would generate a small dialog scene that would load within 1-2 seconds. Would be an added value if they put that in again.

There is a bitter aftertaste though, that after so much time in development, we get a product which is a beta. This is quite normal for the M&B games, although my expectations were higher. I agree wholeheartedly what Life_Erikson described in the OP. Although I do believe that all the feedback will make the game much better.

 

[JimmyCakes]

The game will make the developers $100 million, so my concern lies with the devs actually hiring decent programmers and artists instead of plodding along at a slow pace.

 

[k.]

(...)
M&B has always been a slow game but Bannerlord pushes this to the limit of my patience.

Fine with me. I like to play it slow, set my setting to realistic and I feel slow but calm progression.I guess you could change your campaign settings to make it perfect.

-The Map is bigger and full of Mountains and Lakes you have to circumnavigate and Forests you have to crawl through.

Isn't that great?

-Bandits are outrunning your party as you reach party sizes large enough to fight them properly.

That is a little annoying, Im expecting this will change when my character will advance enough in scouting.

-Shops in towns are pretty much empty. Finding items you need is extremely difficult.

There is a setting for this I think.

-Loading times are long and menus are unnecessarily cumbersome.

I agree a little with that. It is cool to see the person face talking to you... But after tenth, hundredth time it become mechanical .

 

[hallavar]

Just wait for mod, everything you complain about (And I pretty much feel th same) can be solve by editing a txt file.

 

[Bran34]

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

Installing the game on SSD makes loadtimes pretty quick. I would heavily heavily reccommend picking up a cheap 500/250gb SSD for games like this.

That is a little annoying, Im expecting this will change when my character will advance enough in scouting.

Unfortuantely this is not true. Scouting doesn't seem to directly influence your movespeed on map. There are a couple perks within scouting that do, but only very minor improvements, like in single-digit percents.

 

[Life_Erikson]

So far it feels a little more Warband 1.5 than Mount & Blade II, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I felt the same way when Warband was released back in the day. It felt more like Mount&Blade 1.5 than a sequel.
I was hoping Bannerlord would be different and grow a bit in gameplaydepth.
So far the most notable differences are only graphics, sieges and lineage for lords and the player.

Bannerlord will replace Warband one way or the other as Warband replaced Mount&Blade becaus it was superior.
But I don't know wether the improvement of Bannerlord over Warband will be a lot larger then that of Warband over Mount&Blade.

In terms of AI I have to agree with you. The AI in Bannerlord is better but just on the level of Warband mods like Prebattle Orders and Deployment.
Overall a bit disappointing espacially as I don't expect that mods can easily fix that.

 

[xHazardous]

I feel like the Devs forgot the Multiplayer a little bit. Where are the community Servers that make the multiplayer alive? e.g. Duel Servers. Next Point is the poor customization in Multiplayer, why can i make an badass looking viking but nobody can see it when i have to wear like Helmets and cant take them off. Same is for Weapons.

Its a nice game in Singleplayer, yeah but i had high expectations that this game is gonna be esport relevant but i got highly dissapointed over this Multiplayer, its not a upgrade from Warband.

 

[MKLVN]

I feel like the Devs forgot the Multiplayer a little bit. Where are the community Servers that make the multiplayer alive? e.g. Duel Servers. Next Point is the poor customization in Multiplayer, why can i make an badass looking viking but nobody can see it when i have to wear like Helmets and cant take them off. Same is for Weapons.

Its a nice game in Singleplayer, yeah but i had high expectations that this game is gonna be esport relevant but i got highly dissapointed over this Multiplayer, its not a upgrade from Warband.

I believe they mentioned custom servers won’t come until the full release. Unfortunate, but at least they’re on the horizon.

 

[Ettenrocal]

Restarted a game after the pacth and it was really easier to kill looters, i'm getting used to the new way of using lance which is not bad. Also once you have some horses in inventory (it increase your party speed) it's really easier to poursuit looters and catch them. I've made my first huge battle and the two armies just run into each others and then it was just a massive brawl, the overall AI is very poor !!! I was thinking we would have something at least like in Viking Conquest ?

 

[Bassario]

Very slow to release yes but it's an independent studio so no expectations there but it is much too early to ask a poll about that still hours after "early access" release. Now they have a million testers so we will either see them really rise up or crumble under the pressure. I rly wish them all the best, bless them for not giving up on making something clearly too huge to be easy.