Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

[Ezeekiel]

The game has long been ready, but they can't release it until they've published all their inane devblogs. Probably.

 

[Derk Derm]

The game has long been ready, but they can't release it until they've published all their inane devblogs. Probably.

Maybe, maybe not, PC Gamer had a little interview with Armagan recently and while the article mainly dealt with the origins of Mount & Blade as a franchise (while never mentioning its initial name, WarRider), the spot where Armagan says he's stressed about Bannerlord being late gives me the impression that they've got bugs up their ass, or that they're still busy rewriting and redesigning everything.

 

[deuxhero]

We use two different colours for each faction in multiplayer: dark as the primary (team 1) and light as the secondary (team 2).

No 3 way multiplayer fights?

 

[LESS T_T]

Pocket money: https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/2504443199094163392

Also they skip E3 in favor of Gamescom.

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

The ultimate goal for most players of Bannerlord will be to carve out their own piece of Calradia through bloody conquest, however, Mount & Blade games are about more than just raising an army and leading it into battle. A big part of the game revolves around plotting your rise to power and building up a war chest that is capable of making your ambitions a reality. In this week’s blog, we will take a look at one of the ways that Bannerlord’s deep economic system enables players to raise the funds needed to equip themselves, gather an army and set forth on a military campaign: productive enterprises.

For those of you that have played previous Mount & Blade games, you will already be familiar with productive enterprises, but for those who are new to the series, allow us to give you an overview of what they are and how they work. Productive enterprises are business which players can set up in towns across Calradia. They provide a way for players to earn a steady income by taking the raw materials created in villages and producing crafted products to sell to merchants. As with real-world economics, prices fluctuate according to supply and demand, so a good knowledge of the supply chain is essential if you want to maximise your profits or prevent your business from grinding to a halt.

There are a number of different productive enterprises in Bannerlord, which are:

• Brewery (produces beer from grain)
  
• Butcher (produces meat from livestock)
  
• Linen Weaver (produces linen from flax)
  
• Mill (produces flour from grain)
  
• Olive Press (produces oil from olives)
  
• Pottery (produces pottery from clay)
  
• Smithy (produces weapons and armours from iron)
  
• Stable (produces horses from… well… horses!)
  
• Tannery (produces leather armours from hides)
  
• Weavery (produces cloth and clothes from wool)
  
• Wood Workshop (produces weapons and shields from wood)

One of the key changes that we made from Warband is that productive enterprises are now linked to physical locations in each town. Players can enter a town and walk around to find their preferred location for their business from a number of different rentable buildings. Not only does this help us to achieve our aim of improving the overall immersion of the game, but it allows us to expand on productive enterprises as a gameplay mechanic as a whole.

Having various locations for productive enterprises in each town means that players and AI lords can establish multiple businesses, which actually has a wider implication than it may seem at first glance. By allowing both players and AI lords set up multiple businesses in a single town, they can act in direct competition with each other and have a negative impact on each other's profits. This can be quite useful if you already have a reliable source of income and you want to ensure that a rival lord doesn’t gain a financial upper hand, but it can be quite a nuisance if you are struggling to make ends meet and production is halted because your business can no longer turn a profit. Likewise, crafty players can monitor what businesses their rivals own and buy up any raw materials or flood the local market with crafted goods to influence market prices, effectively putting a choke hold on rival operations.

As a side note, expanding this feature of the game was actually quite a big task. We had to create a huge number of interior scenes to match the architecture of each different region of the world map and then decorate these scenes to match each productive enterprise. To decorate the interiors, we used a system that allows us to tag objects and automatically replace the default entities placed in a scene using the properties of a new shop. In Warband, the simplest way to do this would have been to create a new scene for each shop, but we think that the current method we are using for Bannerlord is a much more elegant and practical solution (and we are sure that modders will find some inventive uses for it).

And finally: In the past few weeks, some people have asked us if we plan to attend the next E3. After careful consideration, we have decided against it, and we won’t be going to Los Angeles this year. The preparations needed to attend an event such as E3 takes a lot of time, effort and resources, and right now we think it is better to focus on the development of the game. However, that does not mean that you won’t see anything of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord during the summer: Gamescom is on the horizon!

 

[Zanzoken]

As a side note, expanding this feature of the game was actually quite a big task.

That sucks because I'm pretty sure you could have cut it completely and no one would have given a shit. M&B is about being a warlord not running a business.

 

[Nutria]

It would be a nice feature to have in a DLC, but there's no reason to hold up the release of the base game for it.

 

[LESS T_T]

I think the system is a good part of being a lord and should have in the game, but yeah this could be just text-based rather than full 3D scenes you'll likely never visit again after the first time. Unless you can physically sabotage rivals' enterprises or something! (edit: Oh wait I shouldn't give them a new idea...)

 

[vota DC]

Well....they developed cape and cloacks but not flails and slings....

 

[Derk Derm]

Well....they developed cape and cloacks but not flails and slings....

I don't think there are any objects that deal damage purely via the physics engine in the game whatsoever, at least they haven't shown or written anything about that. Wouldn't strictly stop them from adding in slings or flails, but they'd probably be traditionally animated, at least when actually attacking.
Come to think of it, I wonder if that'd be moddable? Allowing weapons to differentiate between an active (attacking/preparing to attack) state and an inactive (just holding in hand) state, then actually applying cloth physics to certain parts when inactive would be a neat thing.

 

[Merlkir]

It would be a nice feature to have in a DLC, but there's no reason to hold up the release of the base game for it.

I'm 99% certain it's not "holding up" the release.
(not one single feature is, btw, that's not how development works)

 

[Zanzoken]

You shouldn't pin it on one feature but given a 7+ year dev cycle it seems clear that the project has been ineffectively scoped and managed.

Any reasonable dev in the modern era would've first implemented the core gameplay loop (battle --> get money --> train troops --> more battle) and released to Early Access. Then grow the game over time with all of these secondary systems.

M&B is the perfect type of game for lots and lots of iteration and community involvement. It doesn't make sense to treat it like a wedding cake.

 

[Merlkir]

given a 7+ year dev cycle

The game was announced in 2012, by that point it was either not in production, or very very early in development (wiki claims it started in "summer 2011", not sure where that's from). So even then it's more like 6,5 years of development.

I've said this before, I believe the game was either held back by Paradox for quite some time, or mismanaged by them until Taleworlds broke off partnership. (release of War of Vikings iirc curiously coincided with TW starting the dev blogs)

 

[Alfgart]

Look at this, from Gamescom 2015

There is no notable differences with more recent videos in terms of gameplay or graphics. At first glance it looks like there is almost no progress in development. And considering that in that same video you can see they have worked in extremely stupid and useless shit like board games. it's clear there is some serious development and management issues here

 

[Tito Anic]

I do not understand its appeal: no story, no plot, no c&c? Why do people play it?

 

[Beowulf]

It's quite simple, you just have to play a little bit by yourself.
Ride to battle or engage in a siege with dozens or hundreds of characters.

If you will find no fun in that, then the game is not for you.

 

[Alienman]

And the design of the game is very "dwarf fortress". Sandbox done right and fun, lots of systems interacting with each other.

 

[Cyberarmy]

I do not understand its appeal: no story, no plot, no c&c? Why do people play it?

It's simple fun. Like the games of old.

 

[Spectacle]

I do not understand its appeal: no story, no plot, no c&c? Why do people play it?

Have you ever heard of something called "gameplay"?

 

[Merlkir]

The game is prettier and bigger than Warband in every aspect. Assets take time and of course, so does a lot of gameplay they can't show of in trailers easily.
Also they're developing their own engine for this, and we know they're constantly optimizing it.

Even gameplay trailers can be deceptive in how much effort it takes to implement a prototype of a feature versus actually implementing it properly for release. For a lot of stuff you can throw together a functional prototype in a couple of weeks and it'll look "like nicer Warband" if you record it at the right time and in the right circumstances.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

no c&c

Says who?

 

[Makabb]

Star Citizen or Bannerlord, which will release earlier and why ?

 

[curry]

Star Citizen or Bannerlord, which will release earlier and why ?

Discuss??

 

[ntonystinson]

I do not understand its appeal: no story, no plot, no c&c? Why do people play it?

It lets you create your own story and path in a believable world that carries on with or without your input. Characters arent just chanter's boards with quests for you, they have their lives to live and actually live it(not just give you the illusion of doing so). How could you not love a game where a girl you are courting can be married off to another Lord or Noble?

 

[Zanzoken]

The game is prettier and bigger than Warband in every aspect. Assets take time and of course, so does a lot of gameplay they can't show of in trailers easily.
Also they're developing their own engine for this, and we know they're constantly optimizing it.

Even gameplay trailers can be deceptive in how much effort it takes to implement a prototype of a feature versus actually implementing it properly for release. For a lot of stuff you can throw together a functional prototype in a couple of weeks and it'll look "like nicer Warband" if you record it at the right time and in the right circumstances.

You have worked on games and I have not, so your word carries more weight than mine. To be honest though I am just not buying it. When they announced the game in 2012 on the website they said the game was "in development". I understand that probably doesn't mean in production but it leads one to believe that they were working on it in some form. The game is big but again, overly ambitious scope is also a sign of bad project management.

Also if Paradox caused significant delays in development then why not come out and say that? If they are paying attention to the community at all then they know people are frustrated. "Blame the publisher" is gamedev 101 for when things go wrong so why not go that route -- especially if it is actually true.

 

[janior]

I do not understand its appeal: no story, no plot, no c&c? Why do people play it?