Game News Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord releasing on October 25th

[Infinitron]

Tags: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord; TaleWorlds

Taleworlds announced today that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will be leaving Early Access on October 25th, bringing an end to another famous vaporware saga of the past decade. My understanding is that Bannerlord's time in Early Access has been uneven, with some of our users claiming that the game made little tangible progress after its Early Access launch in 2020. Its release date announcement trailer seems impressive enough, though. According to their announcement post, Taleworlds plan to continue updating the game "in the months to come".

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

We’re thrilled to announce that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will release on PC & Consoles on October 25th, 2022. It will be available on Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox One X and Xbox One S.

We have developed Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord as a multi-platform game since day one. The console version will as such have the same gameplay features as the PC version. The currently available PC Early Access, will also move on to full release, along with the console launch on the same date. But do not fret - While this marks an important milestone for the game, it is not the end of the road for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, which will keep receiving updates in the months to come.

“These two years have been a long and challenging road. Developing a massive and complex game such as Bannerlord, for several platforms, and in the middle of a pandemic, is no easy task and I’m incredibly proud of our team for its relentless, brilliant work. Despite the challenges, it’s also been a rewarding path: we’ve found many synergies that we weren’t initially expecting between consoles and PC, synergies that have made the game grow and be better than it would have been in other circumstances. We’re looking forward to putting the game in the hands of our amazing community, which has been supporting us on consoles since Warband.”

~ Armagan Yavuz

We’ve also made our way to this year’s Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The Covid-19 pandemic meant that the physical part of Gamescom had to be canceled during the last two years. This, in combination with the opportunity to showcase and let you experience Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord on consoles, makes us all the more excited to be meeting you here again. You can join us at the Gamescom Public Area in Hall 9, Booth 22. We will also be present in the Business Area in Hall 4.

We will be sharing daily updates of what’s happening on-site through our social media channels (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook). We’ll have some rewards to give out so stay tuned!

The game is available for pre-order now via the Playstation and Xbox stores as well as major retailers.​

As mentioned in the announcement, Bannerlord is being exhibited at Gamescom this week. It was not featured during today's opening night event, but perhaps something will come up later on.

 

[Zeriel]

What a scam this game turned out to be. Ye olde "take a broken alpha build and release it as final once we have our console cash grab lined up".

 

[Jenkem]

they've updated the game to a state where it has more than warband already but retards like the above keep spewing the same bullshit.

2022 is the Year of Bannerlord.

 

[Zeriel]

they've updated the game to a state where it has more than warband already but retards like the above keep spewing the same bullshit.

2022 is the Year of Bannerlord.

I know it's fun to lie and everything, but they haven't implemented crime in the game so you aren't gaining any villainy points for being a douche on the internet unless you use a mod.

 

[deuxhero]

I'd say it has made progress, but not full release in two months level. 11 of the 35 kingdom policies are varying degrees of non-functional, perk and policy math is inconsistent in OOO and rounding direction, and I'm not sure every village and city has a unique scene yet.

 

[madbringer]

Kike and blade

 

[Late Bloomer]

Anyone playing? Hows optimization?

 

[Konjad]

Anyone playing? Hows optimization?

Since 1.7 the game runs like shit even on high end systems, although previously it was smooth like a butter

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Are there modding tools for this?

 

[Jenkem]

Judge the release version when it releases, friends. We are all Butterlords, here.

 

[Fedora Master]

Judge the release version when it releases, friends. We are all Butterlords, here.

You don't even play the game, why are you shilling this hard.

 

[Jenkem]

Judge the release version when it releases, friends. We are all Butterlords, here.

You don't even play the game, why are you shilling this hard.

I've played about 12 hours or so since the EA release and have been mostly waiting for it to fully release. Keep crying.

 

[Fedora Master]

Judge the release version when it releases, friends. We are all Butterlords, here.

You don't even play the game, why are you shilling this hard.

I've played about 12 hours

lmao

 

[RobotSquirrel]

The multiplayer is at least alright but that's it. The singleplayer is pretty garbage. It's rare you ever get those fun moments with big battles, the rest of the time feels like a monotonous grind.
Last game I ever support TaleWorlds with that's for sure.
(105 hours with Bannerlord according to Steam)

 

[Aemar]

Inb4 they start announcing new DLC factions as soon as the game exits EA.

 

[Lord of Riva]

I have it on wish list, please keep us posted guys for release. I am looking at it from a SP perspective though, what RobotSquirrel says doe not bode well.

 

[thesheeep]

I'm mostly interested in the modding tools.

The Warhammer mod looks and plays quite nicely already, despite its VERY early state.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I have it on wish list, please keep us posted guys for release. I am looking at it from a SP perspective though, what RobotSquirrel says doe not bode well.

I can elaborate further. The main issue this game has is that its completely railroaded, the AI is programmed in such a way that one of the major factions will always try to conquer the world before the player has the chance to find their footing in the world. So you're doing grinding with a countdown timer so there's no real time for you to consider and plan out your playthrough, you're expecting to spec combat, you're expected to either join a faction or start your own early on they don't give you the time you have to min-max your playthrough otherwise the AI will have already won in that time leaving nothing for the player to do.

The gist of the new features:
- Families and Children
- Deaths and Execution
- Order of Battle (similar to Total War)
- Political Systems for your kingdom
- A very broken Smithy system that breaks the ingame economy STILL
- Better visuals than Warband
- Seige Engines which are actually better than Warbands and the AI doesn't get stuck on them!

I think the mod community will do some amazing work with the game so its worth waiting and picking the game up for <$20 like with Warband, what we've seen from modders is already super impressive so there is that. I felt the price during EA was ridiculously exploitative considering the game immediately went on sale a month or two after that initial EA launch, no doubt the same will happen for 1.0. This is why I feel very bad and salty towards Taleworlds because I've supported them since MB's Alpha version.

Hope you like bandits cause you gonna be fighting a lot of em.

Hmm, interesting. So, is this better than/on the same level as Warband/With Fire & Sword/Brytenwalda/Prophesy of Pendor?

The combat is better, the Campaign is significantly worse. I would say if you play mostly for the battles and will be mainly going multiplayer you might be able to justify it, but if you're purely single player and play mainly for the campaign I'd skip out on it until its cheaper because its not really worth it. Multiplayer would be because 1.0 would have very high playercounts. I'm a big fan of the Seige gameplay mode, its a lot of fun and reminds me of Medieval Planetside 2. The Troop mode was a lot of fun too, I like its mechanics. I felt the default battle mode was a bit dull, its very samey to the same experiences you'd get with Chivarly but that game does it way better.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Not sure how this will be able to run on consoles with good performance.

 

[Lokiamis]

I can't think of a single time Early Access was beneficial for consumers. Just a cash-out option for developers who don't believe in their game.

 

[gerey]

I think the mod community will do some amazing work

I mentioned it before in the Bannerlord thread, but TW has done everything in their power to sabotage and alienate the modding community.

From stubbornly refusing to remove hardcoded variables despite everyone in the modding community pointing out they were completely unnecessary, served no purpose and stiffed mod development, and only relenting when the vast majority of modders threatened to boycott further modding support outright if things didn't turn around, to the refusal to release the promised modding tools, to constantly breaking mods for years on end because they kept releasing frivolous patches.

I fully expect TW to fuck the modding community over when it comes to the modding tools since they view them as direct competition to all the DLCs they have planned.

If you look over at Moddb or the Nexus the number of new and updated mods has really dried up, the only projects still left are the big ones, and even they are moving at a glacial pace.

I do not have much hope in the longevity of the game.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I think you're probably right, but you'd be surprised how some persistent reverse engineers can be with games sometimes. So I will say I made that statement in spite of Taleworlds not in favor of them, they have done everything they could to turn modders away from their game and full on lied pre-EA and during EA about the mod capabilities we were getting. But as I've said there's already things out there that are pretty great.

I feel like you could replace TaleWorlds with Creative Assembly and almost everything is identical here lol. Ugh sigh. Yeah, I probably should've known better but I bought it when covid lockdowns were at their worse so I'd have something to play.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I think the mod community will do some amazing work with the game

I think there was an issue where a lot of shit in Bannerlord are closed-sourced or hard-coded that the biggest mod-makers from community complained and made an open letter. Has that been fixed? Because otherwise some stuff are plainly un-moddable from what I understand and thus no complex mod will be possible

 

[cpmartins]

Remember: Always pirate before a purchase. There are no exceptions to this rule.

 

[thesecret1]

I've played this game a bunch since release. Overall impression is that combat has improved a lot since warband – the battle AI is much better, staying alive is overall significantly harder (mostly because the AI can actually aim in this game), graphixx are pretty (if you care about such a thing anyway), and I can have a 500 vs 500 units battling it out simultaneously while the game runs better than 150 vs 150 in warband.

On the other hand, everything not-battle experienced a massive downgrade. The economy is a joke, the AI snowballs super fast (hell, it often starts before you even get your first fief!), AI is all kinds of retarded in many different ways, there are broken systems galore, nothing seems balanced at all, and the quests... Yeah, okay, the quests are just as shit as in Warband, no downgrade there There are also new features added, such as minigames in taverns (who the fuck cares???), being able to have a kid (uh, okay?), and being able to kill enemy lords (YES! FINALLY!). There's also a kingdom management system that seems interesting but needs quite a bit of work before it stops being gamey and kinda stupid.

The good news to take from this is that all of the bad shit seems to be contained in the campaign part, and that part tends to be the easiest to mod, or such is my impression, at least. I truly believe that mods will be able to turn this game into a 10/10 experience, just gotta wait for them to come out (I have my eye on In The Name of Jerusalem II, and Shokuho). As for the base game... It's fun when you just want to go and fight some battles, just don't expect anything more from it.

 

[Theodora]

I can't think of a single time Early Access was beneficial for consumers. Just a cash-out option for developers who don't believe in their game.

It definitely helped make Subnautica a better game, which doesn't seem bad for consumers -- though admittedly that also takes developers knowing how to filter feedback in a productive manner. Hades was similar, and it's pretty hard to argue they weren't already putting serious resources into it even during EA. To call it a 'cash-out' is a non-starter, not only because Supergiant is one of those devs that relies on their reputation.

I don't know what niche, prosper-tier games codexers buy in EA that warrants this attitude, but I really don't get it. Maybe it was valid in the past when garbage peddlers' asset flips were being given equal attention by Steam algorithmically, but that's nowhere near as prevalent today. Are there lazy cash grabs still? Sure, but you can usually identify a developer's attitude towards their product fairly quickly. People who care about what they're making aren't going to suddenly bail with some token cash and a tarnished name.

Further examples of Early Access titles that turned out great (and where EA served more than merely finding bugs): DUSK, Hunt: Showdown, Factorio, Kenshi, Slay the Spire, Battle Brothers, Rimworld, Jupiter Hell, and Crypt of the Necrodancer. Hell, near everything by Klei starts in EA these days. I think the format makes perfect sense for roguelites and roguelikes especially.

tl;dr there are genuine benefits to EA beyond some amateur QA, and a big gap between an unfinished game being released in EA by indie devs, compared to an unfinished title being released as a whatever jumbo-bonus collectors edition by Ubisoft for 120 euros. There's nothing wrong with selling a WIP as long as you're honest that that's what it is.

Judge the release version when it releases, friends. We are all Butterlords, here.

You are normally insufferably shrill over developers choosing to use Early Access models, what gives that you're suddenly defending TaleWorlds over it?