Circa 2006 when I was playing the mod, there were no villages in the base game, then the modder (Nijis) got hired and they got added sometime after, looks like around late 2007. M&B had been in early access for 2 years by that point and was at something like version 0.800 (with 1.00 being full release in 2008). Here's some screens of what the map looked like back then:
Perhaps im infected with the CK-mindvirus but I thought the Rival Claimant Idea they had in WFAS was a nice touch. In general, I would like to see some actual intrigue and competition between the clans, perhaps different AI personalities (Schemer, Loyalist, Opportunist etc...) and so on. My biggest gripe in general with M&B is how static and lifeless the world feels. People exist, but they dont really do anything. Yeah, they will go around, recruit, patrol and join armies but thats kinda it.
Would say there's not so much progress compare to mount&blade really.
Arent all turks contractually obligated to love this game? I thought thats what taleworlds spend most of the budget on.
Detailed Character Creation+Children Are No Longer Invulnerable
That would leave the door open for the game being good.
The food slot also let you put horses into it and it would convert them into horse meat. I remember being annoyed when they removed that feature because of that, and it still annoys me a bit they never readded a way to slaughter your horses, in either the original or even in Bannerlord.
You can butcher your horses in Bannerlord the same way as cows, sheep and pigs.
Kids in Bannerlord look like actual kids as opposed to the shrunken adults in Viking Conquest, I'll give them that much.Thought I remembered you being able to butcher them in Bannerlord, but it's been a while since I played so I dismissed it as my imagination. At least that's something, took them long enough to readd that.
I wish the Brytenwalda team would do something for Bannerlord, but they don't appear to be, which isn't surprising since they're an actual developer now. They made Viking Conquest which still holds up as way better than Bannerlord. The lack of naval combat feels sorely missing, along with everything else. Not sure if it's just me, but Bannerlord's art direction feels atrocious too to the point it makes it distracting. The environments and towns are alright, but the game's art style feels overall bland and hard to look at like a lot of games that focus on technical graphics improvements over having quality artists. The characters tend to look ugly and goofy with a serious lack of variety in features like hairstyles to differentiate them, and the armour designs almost all look awful. I much prefer Viking Conquest graphically over Bannerlord, and Warband had much nicer armour designs and whatnot than Bannerlord too.
Infact, Bannerlord is the rare fantasy game that does a good, consistent, job of making its prequel actually look like it was set the correct amount of time (210 years) before Warband. The tech level shown in architecture, arms and armor is consistently akin to high middle ages over Warband's late middle ages (where plate is just coming into existence ala late 1300s)
Might as well take l'Aigle for another spin.
Warband was an excellent game and it has far more mods available. But it looks terrible. It looked terrible even at the time it was released and time has not improved it. No amount of modding is going to change that. The only thing that might improve the graphics now is if you replace the entire rendering engine with Nvidia RTX Remix.
Not really an issue for me.
