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Game News Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord now available on Early Access

Infinitron

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Tags: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord; TaleWorlds

Before the Kickstarter era, Mount & Blade was considered one of the Codex's great games. In an age of linear popamole, here was a complex sandbox action-RPG and medieval combat simulator, where players could fight on horseback, participate in large-scale battles and lay siege to castles. The definitive incarnation of the Mount & Blade formula was 2010's Mount & Blade: Warband, which was followed over the years by various third party spinoffs of generally middling quality while developer TaleWorlds worked on a proper sequel. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was announced in 2012 and has since become one of gaming's more notorious vaporware titles. Today, seven and a half years later, we at last have a release - not the release, but an Early Access release. Here's the launch trailer and an excerpt from the Early Access FAQ:



Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“While we do not have a set date for a full release at this moment in time, we expect that the game will be in early access for around a year. Our focus is on ensuring that the game is fun and enjoyable rather than imposing a deadline that might have a negative impact on the final product.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“The early access version of the game contains a wealth of content that will keep players engaged for many hours. While the early access version is very much stable and playable, players can expect to run into some obscure bugs and other issues while playing that we intend to locate and fix before the full release.

The early access version will be reusing scenes for different towns, may lack some supporting features, may have a limited number of quests, voice-overs, etc. and may lack localizations for some languages.

Throughout the course of the early access period we intend to introduce the missing supporting features, such as, rebellions, kingdom creation and weapon crafting, while expanding and enhancing many of the existing features that are outlined below.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“In terms of content, the early access version of the game contains all of the main staples of the Mount & Blade experience, with a host of content that is new to the series. Players can create their own character using the game’s character creation system; explore the continent of Calradia; gather their own warband of troops; command and fight alongside their troops in large scale battles using the game’s extensive command system and intuitive skill-based directional combat system; raid settlements; lay siege to and capture enemy towns and castles; trade items and goods using the game’s deep economy system; engage in politics and diplomacy; manage their own clan; upgrade and manage settlements; gather armies and wage war; and much, much more... all in a vast singleplayer sandbox setting where no two playthroughs are the same. The early access version also includes fully supported multiplayer game modes for players to test their combat skills and tactical prowess against players from all over the world.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“There is no plan to change pricing after early access.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“We intend to use a range of different methods to gather player feedback and data throughout the early access period. These include engaging with users directly on our official forum and our Steam forum, requesting specific feedback through questionnaires, hosting and participating in multiplayer events alongside our community, and using analytics tools to gather data.”​

The Bannerlords Early Access is available on Steam for $50 with a 10% launch discount for the next two weeks. That's not cheap, but it sounds like it's pretty good. In these virus-haunted times, the game is sure to do well. Though of course, for that same reason, I'd take the over on its final release date.
 

Konjad

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Finally. I've been waiting for it for years and it is probably the last game I am so excited about for a damn long time.
 

Lycra Suit

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What's the difference between this and regular Mount & Blade?


Next to none. It's a reskin with mangonels. Some people waited ten years for something mods already did for free, and better. I'm glad I didn't. I saw the writing on the wall when I looked into how their studio was run.

Beware though, you'll find plenty of fanboys who are perfectly fine with this being a 60$ second rate mod.
 

Markman

da Blitz master
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178k players peak. They made some serious money yesterday.
Guess the high price for an indie wasnt that much of a big deal. God damn.
 

lightbane

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According to OAG, it has some warning signs. Besides terribad performance, it has blatant PC-friendly characters such as ugly stronk women:

0955e899b965d61e95dff3766878d5b60282b6f5dc92f7251f458f52813cced3.jpg

7d136467095861955a841e1bcd8afd87d66635bf4789ad042a7f205d8b44fa60.jpg

e4bfcc3d4d7ade9d18b00008928bf140fa0e2b21e8357fcacc527c24c1a0b8e2.jpg
 

Burning Bridges

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What's the difference between this and regular Mount & Blade?


Next to none. It's a reskin with mangonels. Some people waited ten years for something mods already did for free, and better. I'm glad I didn't. I saw the writing on the wall when I looked into how their studio was run.

Beware though, you'll find plenty of fanboys who are perfectly fine with this being a 60$ second rate mod.

All this waiting for a new version of M&B?!?

Tbh I stopped watching progress since 2012 or so, but this would a massive bummer. I had actually thought they added new and proper gameplay.

Except for the glorious combat, M&B was actually a quite lackluster shell that had to be stitched together by 2 overworked people. If they just kept everything as it was then this is a massive joke.
 

Lycra Suit

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M&B was actually a quite lackluster shell that had to be stitched together by 2 overworked people.

It's still stitched together by 2 overworked people. The rest of their studio is a glorified daycare for their family members and friends. I also saw some people mention a long time ago that they were taking this long because the Turkish government kept paying them anyway just to keep running.
 

Burning Bridges

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Reminds me of IL2 - Cliffs of Dover, which also took a full decade from first announcement to release, and then was a grossly mismanaged pos. For a time Oleg Maddox had been a star in the industry, now completely vanished from the face of the Earth.

Hopefully it's not that bad thoug.

I will give this a pass for now because I actually have other games to play that demand my attention, and the whole medieval genre is not what I want right now.
 

Tavernking

Don't believe his lies
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This has been a highly depressing wake up call that my computer is too weak to run this game I've been waiting for for years.

PHEW, I almost lost my entire social life here. Now I can go on to pass university and get a good job/family.
 

Junmarko

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On the contrary, it just gave them an incentive to do jack for years and bribe a bunch of people to sit behind desks and watch youtube videos. Reminds me of Mojang before Notch sold them.
Ah. Seriously though, not surprising after Warband's popularity. A handful of sandalone expansions years after, also modders being so rampant on that game still, devs probably needed to go back to the drawing board continuously for Bannerlord to stay fresh.
 

bledcarrot

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It's still stitched together by 2 overworked people. The rest of their studio is a glorified daycare for their family members and friends. I also saw some people mention a long time ago that they were taking this long because the Turkish government kept paying them anyway just to keep running.
Yeah none of that sounds like bullshit...

Sent from my POCOPHONE F1 using Tapatalk
 

deuxhero

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I'm glad this is getting a patch a day, but man a lot of the issues are "how the hell did you miss this" tier
  • Most of the armor is accidentally flagged multiplayer only and unobtainable by the player. I legit thought there was some system that you had to raise your clan tier or the like to access better armor because shops were so empty.
  • Female voice yells infantry when selecting cavalry
  • Sound implementation is bugged and causes massive lag spikes if you don't have well above the recommended RAM or change some settings in Windows.
  • Crossbows cost a several times what other weapons do and are one of the most expensive items in the game.
  • Module dependencies are case sensitive and make the launcher crash on startup if mismached. Two core modules are "SandBoxCore" and "Sandbox" just to be confusing. Not quite as bad as SoC using the real names but horribly misspelled for guns in the file names while mis-IDing the gun in question in the first place (like a Mossberg named "wpn_wincheaster1300"), but still pretty dumb mistake to make.
 
Last edited:

Salmacis

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This is lazy. How is the combat AI still so basic? 10 years after M&B, I was expecting more than blobs of death converging towards a single point.
 

cvv

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Warband was one of the games I simply didn't get. How is this liked by more than 13 people in the world?

Reminds me of what I thought about DayZ or PUBG when I first saw those - cheap, ramshackle, bland jank incarnated. Where the fuck is the popularity coming from? Years ago I actually bought M&B (for like 2 bucks) and tried it when Steam recommended it as an "open world RPG". I booted it up and laughed so, so hard.

But clearly M&B, just like DayZ or PUBG, tapped a previous untapped vein, filled some sort of niche. A p. big niche apparently.
 

Konjad

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Warband was one of the games I simply didn't get. How is this liked by more than 13 people in the world?

Reminds me of what I thought about DayZ or PUBG when I first saw those - cheap, ramshackle, bland jank incarnated. Where the fuck is the popularity coming from? Years ago I actually bought M&B (for like 2 bucks) and tried it when Steam recommended it as an "open world RPG". I booted it up and laughed so, so hard.

But clearly M&B, just like DayZ or PUBG, tapped a previous untapped vein, filled some sort of niche. A p. big niche apparently.
For me it's multiplayer with decent battles. No other game has it. Chivalry and other games are just Unreal Tournament with pikes and swords, whereas Warband supports many more players and gameplay is less "deathmatchy".

But of course if you want a deathmatch it's also available, just like many more options. Maybe so many people like Warband because it's just so flexible, unlike other games of this kind.
 

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