Bannerlord

I've spent some time with the most recent installment of the Mount & Blade franchise that recently released on steam early access.  Steam says 128 hours so "some time" might be an understatement.  If you liked previous versions of M&B, this might be right up your alley.  Also, everything in here is my personal opinion--I don't speak for my employer yadda yadda yadda (lawyers really do make me saytype these things).

I first talked about Mount & Blade and my modding excursions therein way back here in 2010 taking a prominent place in the first award winning Year in Review posts on this so-called blog.  Warband, the middle installment, shows up in 2011 and 2012 and today I remember it somewhat more fondly than I wrote about all those years ago.  I'll add into the mix a pair of M&B engine games like With Fire and Sword and Caribbean!  I built a fairly successful mod in the original which I won't bother to link to here since it wouldn't run anyway but today we're going to talk about Bannerlord. 

The Good

Wide monitors have their advantages.

It is, as one might expect, a pretty big step up from either of its predecessors but as I understand it, they built a company in the intervening 8 years and rebuilt a lot of their technology.  Gone are the clunky scripting system stuffed into the tuples of python code--it's all in C# now which is both good and bad.  The graphics got a pretty serious overhaul and they've done a pretty good job of optimizing things so even really big battles aren't chug-fests. 

The UI keeps most of its flavor from previous installments, including some of its itinerant clunk, and it super needs a way to move an entire stack of something from one side to another.  I kind of knew how things worked so I didn't have too much trouble with it, but I imagine for a newcomer it would be iffy.  I also super missed things being consistently dropped into the log.  A common occurrence was being called away after a siege to chase some chumps off of a village except that the game didn't seem to provide me a place to find the village after my siege fun.

There's a crafting subsystem which we'll discuss a bit more in the next section.  I generally liked it though I have my gripes.  I'm a fan of being able to customize things to my liking and I ended up building some fancy swords that fit my playstyle even if I constantly forgot to change them.  I do hope they add more to this as they continue to develop the game.

If I had to put my finger on what I thought the best thing was in Bannerlord, it's that the kingdom management stuff is put first and foremost.  The main quest line, clunky and unfinished as it is, guides you through the basics of it ending with a very M&B understated victory dialog.  The game doesn't actually finish after that as far as I can tell, but it's there.  For those unfamiliar, you used to have to retire your character from the camp menu.

As a final note in this section, I didn't realize how much I missed horse archery.  It's been a long time since Warband where I'd built that skill and it has not lost any of its luster.  My old and broken body, on the other hand, has started to fail me.  It's just as satisfying to headshot a chump off of a horse while both of you are galloping at full tilt.

The Bad

Mount & Blade has always had pacing problems.  It's what drove me to mod the original in the first place.    My mod moved at a much faster pace will my playthroughs running 40-60 hours on average.  I mostly unleashed the AI to do what it was already programmed to do through tuning the variables that already existed.  This got a lot worse in Warband.  Steam says I put 393 hours into it which is nigh unto MMO territory.  Eight years ago I had a lot more time on my hands and I ground through it so I'm sad to say that Bannerlord continues in that vein.

Bannerlord is grindy in a way that 2020 old and broken me doesn't appreciate.  While I like the skill system and specializations it takes so freakin' long to train things that it's painfully painful to get good at any one thing much less two or three.  Pick the wrong thing?  Parts of the game are really brutal.  For instance:  if you specialize in bow and not melee weapons, you'll be real sad when you're out of arrows and your mans are being slaughtered at the top of that ladder.  The flip?   Worse.  Didn't get in the front of the line to get on the ladder?  Have fun waiting for your mans to get slaughtered at the top.

Crafting is also grindy--really grindy.  I modded my game (C#, remember?) and even at 25x crafting speed I couldn't unlock enough parts to build reasonable things.  I had piles of materials but no components and before I had more denars than I could spend I couldn't be buying the top tier swords to smelt for a 1 in 20 chance to unlock a random part.  It's only slightly easier if you're forging stuff.  Not cool.  

Lots of pieces of the game aren't well explained, probably because they're still building it.  The original M&B and Warband both lacked good user-facing lord recruitment mechanisms.  They both had them, I just don't think they worked very well.  This continues in Bannerlord.  I had conquered 2/3 of the map before I got my first allied clan and only because I save-scummed to get them.  This pseudo-fixed once I got my victory screen but by then I was pretty much done.  That's the nature of the sandbox, though--you might end up at war with every single faction making the in-game mechanic moot.

Hopes For the Future

We don't often see person-scaled armies in games so if you're interested in that kind of thing I'm not aware of a better choice at the moment.  I hope they continue to license their engine with all of its hundreds-of-actors-strong fights because even with today's supercomputers we're super starved for these kinds of games.  Even though I didn't particular care for WF&S, I'm hoping to see new versions of it and Caribbean! soon.

I still haven't played a game that hooks me on medieval combat the way that M&B has.  The gameplay is better this time around even in its pseudo-finished state, and it looks a lot better than the previous installments.  The worst thing about this game is that I know it's going to eat up a bunch of time when I get back to it to see what fun things they changed.