Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

[vota DC]

Cool, they confirmed dynamic quests, with gamescom I had the impression they scrapped them.

 

[janior]

viking conquest is shit

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

They waste many years and come up with a Warband quest systems with exclamation marks? Talk about disappointing. With their time and resources they could create some AI that would make quest based on the gameworld recent events. Imagine a lord whose castle is being besieged by great forces and hires adventuring parties (player) to help him defend the castle. Difficult job but pays extra.

 

[janior]

less questing more slaughtering

 

[deuxhero]

Just noticed a lack of cost listed for lodging. The cost was always trivial, but no reason to get rid of it. Hopefully it's just missing because clicking on it gives you a menu of how generous you want to be with housing your men.

 

[Makabb]

First off, it’s huge: when you jump into the campaign map to get your bearings you have to scroll back at least three times to get the whole continent on-screen

Bannerlord has hundreds of interconnected, medium-sized areas which you can navigate easily using a fast-travel system that works inside towns and villages, not just between them. It’s a great quality-of-life feature that alleviates some of the game’s many loading screens.

“In [Mount and Blade:] Warband, basically everything was driven through menus and it was still nice, but a little bit clunky. We got rid of those menus and now everything is much more streamlined This is a bit risky, because maybe there could be questions about whether it’s immersive

In single-player, what we are aiming to do is have a seamless progression from being a lonely adventurer to becoming a ruler with armies at your disposal, directing sieges

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord will be available on PC, but there’s still no firm release date.

https://www.vg247.com/2018/09/06/mount-and-blade-2-bannerlord-interview/

 

[Merlkir]

Those are some really old screenshots.

 

[LESS T_T]

Kingmaker: https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/1683675396461761486

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

When you set out on your adventures in Mount & Blade games, you are just a humble traveller with only a sword and a horse to your name. As you progress through the game and establish a foothold in Calradia, you can pledge your sword to a faction and be welcomed into the fold of the nobility. Eventually, you will have the option of branching out and establishing your own kingdom, or, as is the case with Bannerlord, if you have taken a liking to your current one, you can subvert it and seize power for yourself! In this week’s blog, we discuss how players can interact with their fellow nobles after joining or establishing their own kingdom, looking specifically at the kingdom screen, which is an entirely new addition to the Mount & Blade series.

The main focus of Mount & Blade games revolves around the aforementioned journey from rags to riches. Almost every action you take in the game is done in the effort of increasing your wealth, prestige and ultimately, your power. However, in our previous games, there are parts of this journey which were somewhat overlooked during development.

In our previous games, managing and interacting with the lords of your realm is an arduous task that requires some level of patience. The information presented to the player can be hard to locate and the kinds of interactions available are rather limited in scope. This is something we wanted to address for Bannerlord, making the mid-late game a more fluid and enjoyable experience for players.

Our solution was to implement a screen dedicated entirely to this aspect of the game (along with some additional mechanics to expand upon the existing interactions available of course!). The Kingdom screen is split into four separate tabs: Clans, Fiefs, Policies and Armies. These tabs cover practically every piece of information that the player needs to make informed decisions and manage their kingdom effectively. The screen is still a work in progress and new elements are still being added, however, what we are showing you in this week’s blog is something close to what you can expect from the final game.

Clans
The Clans tab shows detailed information about every clan that is a member of the faction. This information includes the clan name, banner, influence, members and fiefs. In this screen, you can lend your support for one of the clans to become the leader of the faction or initiate a vote to have a clan expelled from the kingdom.

Fiefs
The Fiefs tab shows the towns, castles and villages which are under the control of the faction. There is also an option in this tab which lets you spend a large sum of influence to try and retract a fief from another lord. However, this is still subject to a vote from the other lords and the person on the receiving end of this action may not be too pleased with your meddling. If the vote is successful, then a second vote will begin to decide who will take control of the fief.

Policies
The Policies tab allows players to propose new policies or initiate a vote to repeal existing ones. Policies affect the entire kingdom and range from laws which give greater protections to vassals or transfer more power to the ruler.

Armies
Finally, we have the Armies tab. This tab lets you create and manage different armies within your faction. The screen gives you a detailed breakdown of each army, including the lords that comprise the army, the strength and cohesion of the army, and the army’s current objective. Faction leaders are able to assign objectives to the armies through this tab, giving players greater control over the strategic aspects of warfare in the game.

Overall, we think the Kingdom screen is a welcome new addition and helps to enhance the mid-late game experience for players. Information is presented in a much more streamlined and aesthetically pleasing way and the new additions of clans, policies and armies all come together to give a more accurate representation of an actual medieval kingdom, especially when it comes to internal power struggles.

 

[deuxhero]

I just noticed they translate their dev blogs to lots of languages. That has to burn up a lot of money.

 

[Makabb]

Official gameplay

 

[Merlkir]

Yeah, I think that's a bunch of old videos cut together.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Yeah, I think that's a bunch of old videos cut together.

At least the retard is trying.

 

[Zanzoken]

The additions to kingdom management look pretty solid, particularly the ability to assign specific objectives to your vassals.

Hopefully the AI will be able to utilize this to build and command armies effectively. The trash mob spam and nonsensical strategy of enemy kingdoms in WB was a major detriment to the game.

 

[LESS T_T]

This week's devlog is techie thing, Gantlet, their own UI framework: https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/3648371458947851581

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Game development can be a tricky business. Sometimes an existing technology or tool just doesn’t do quite what you want it to do or it isn’t as efficient as you would hope. This leaves you with a difficult choice to make: change your design or create your own bespoke solution.

This is something we came to realise while working on the User Interface (UI) for Bannerlord. Previously, we were using a combination of Flash and Scaleform to create our UI, which is actually a pretty common method in the game industry. We would start out by creating the UI in Flash, before using Scaleform to make the UI work in the game. Technically, both Scaleform and Flash functioned perfectly and provided us with the capability to implement the UI in the way that we liked. However, it wasn’t too long before we noticed some issues with the overall process of creating and implementing the UI that we thought needed addressing.

To start with, the process was actually quite slow. Any changes to the UI had to be made in Flash, before being implemented in the game to be tested. As the screens grew in complexity, the .swf file generation would take longer. And with each change we made, the game would need to be reloaded to see the result. Even a small change, such as moving an element 5 pixels to the left, would require going through this entire process.

Additionally, Scaleform and Flash are both third-party frameworks that we had limited control over. The difficulty of changing and modifying these systems, depending on our needs, made us question the effort that we were putting in just to make it work.

Eventually, we realised that the time and energy we were spending on UI was really holding us back, and the only way to have a UI that would fit our vision for the game would be creating our own UI library. After all, some problems are just opportunities in disguise!

Now, that was a really scary prospect because we had already invested thousands of man-hours into the existing UI. Fortunately, early in the development process, we had decided to use a paradigm called MVVM to create the UI. This meant that part of our code was in neat C# classes that did not depend on any specific UI library, and we would be able to re-use this part of our work even if we had to re-do the rest. Yay!

Next, we had to decide what our new UI library would be like. We came up with a list of requirements:

• The new library had to be fast and snappy. Our engine team worked really hard to shave off a single millisecond from our render cycle and they wouldn’t appreciate the UI wasting away their savings with poor performance.
  
• The new library also had to be very easy to work with and make changes on the fly. It would preferably use a text-based specification file format, such as XML, since text-based files make collaboration by multiple developers so much easier.
  
• The system had to make it easy to create highly interactive UIs.
  
• The UI layout had to be independent of how it would look visually. This would allow the UI designer to work independently from the artist.

We decided to name our new UI framework Gauntlet (for no other reason than we thought it sounded cool!). With Gauntlet, we can make changes on the fly. This means we can edit a screen without closing the game once, with no file generation or any additional steps needed. When we make changes to the .xml file of a screen, we see the results as soon as we save that file. And because we have full control over the system, we can make changes to the system as our needs demand it.

So how does it work? Well, the system is actually pretty simple. We couple a .xml file to a screen in the game, which the game loads when the screen is opened. All of the layout information for the screen is specified in this file. We can also reference other .xml files in each .xml, which means that if we create a UI element that we know we are going to use more than once (i.e. in other screens) we can just refer to that element. This allows us to make changes to the file and have these changes occur anywhere that we reference this .xml.

We also have a set of separate XML files that specify how various elements will look, much like CSS files are used for HTML pages. This skinning system is very powerful and the artist can easily specify every detail about how a UI element will look and behave. For example, a button can change colour when the user moves the mouse over it and it can go through an animation when the user clicks on it.

Inventory screen .xml

Inventory screen in-game

We hope that Gauntlet will come as a welcome addition for our modding community. In Warband, editing the UI was always a bit of a headache and there were some limitations that couldn’t be overcome. With Gauntlet, modders will have total control over each screen, with the only limitation being their imagination.


In next week’s blog, we will talk to Assistant Designer, Cihan Şekercioğlu. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

 

[LESS T_T]

Talk about their general approach to game design: https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/1687054365774952367

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are unable to do the Q&A with Assistant Designer, Cihan Şekercioğlu that we announced last week. But, it is Thursday my dudes and the show must go on... Instead, in this week’s blog, we will talk about how we approach game design here at TaleWorlds, giving you a brief insight into the general process of taking an idea and turning it into a game feature.

Game design is possibly one of the most rewarding jobs in the game industry. Seeing an idea come to life and being enjoyed by others is most certainly a fulfilling experience. However, it is also one of the most difficult jobs that the industry has to offer. Something which might seem great on paper may turn out to be rather dull when implemented into a game. And to even get it to this stage, you need to be able to formulate your idea in a way which makes sense to your peers.

At TaleWorlds, we feel that for a game to be fun, it should be built around a solid core mechanic. In the case of Mount & Blade games, this is the combat system. We think that the combat system in our games is fun, intuitive, easy to learn, but difficult to master. And, in the end, if the core mechanic isn’t fun, then whatever is built around it becomes irrelevant.

With Bannerlord, we are building on a solid foundation of what we had achieved in previous Mount & Blade games. But, at all times, we keep it in mind that the combat is the main draw for the game. We always aim to ensure that any new mechanics we add don’t adversely affect this core mechanic. This was something we had to consider when we decided to implement directional blocking for shields. We had to ask ourselves questions such as, “does this actually enhance the combat in any way, or are we interfering with something which already works and is enjoyable?” (Ultimately, we decided that directional shield blocking actually fits in really well with the skill-based design of our combat system.)

We try to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to the design process. Everyone in the studio is a gamer (after all, we all got into this business because we love to play games!) so we try our best to make use of this wide range of opinions and experiences when it comes to designing our own game. But that’s not to say that we don’t have professionals who specialise in this aspect of development, only that we understand the importance of hearing the different opinions and thoughts of everyone in our company. And in many instances, this kind of approach allows us to highlight potential issues early on in a design as people visualise the idea differently in their own head.

With this in mind, we tend to include everyone who would be involved in implementing a feature in the design meetings alongside the game designers. Not only to offer their feedback on the actual design but so a plan can be formulated for the implementation of the design. The professional expertise of the people responsible for implementing each design is required to ensure that any new feature or mechanic is technically viable and can be implemented into the game. And in many cases, these professionals have unique solutions to any problems that arise.

Following design meetings, a document is created which the team can then refer to. This process of holding meetings and revising the design document is repeated until we feel that the design adds an additional layer to the game in a way which is positive and enjoyable for players.

We can’t say for sure if this is the best approach to development, but we certainly feel that it works well for our company, and has led to the introduction of some features that otherwise might never have seen the light of day!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Space Satan]

 

[Merlkir]

It has not been 8 years. People are being ridiculous with this revisionism.

 

[Aemar]

It's been 6 years. The game was announced on September 27 2012 via the above video.

 

[unfairlight]

It's been 6 years and it still doesn't feel like the game is finished.
They have 100 employees and made a fuckload of money off of Warband, how could this possibly still be in production?

 

[Nutria]

Maybe they'll release the game after they find Khashoggi's body. Let's keep our fingers crossed. That's probably the last bottleneck for them.

 

[Aemar]

https://goodgamers.biz/development/turkish-minister-of-economy-visited-local-game-developers/

I blame it on Erdogan. He must have told them through the Turkish minister of economy (seen here playing Warband) that there is no point in rushing the development of Bannerlord, since, according to the article, the government support in the money department is quite significant.

 

[Makabb]

I blame it on Erdogan. He must have told them through the Turkish minister of economy (seen here playing Warband) that there is no point in rushing the development of Bannerlord, since, according to the article, the government support in the money department is quite significant.

That's actualy plausible

 

[Aemar]

On a more serious note, I think the real reasons for the delay are detailed here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mountandbl...rkish_interview_with_armağan_yavuztranslated/

Armağan: Our game is a complex game and maybe we are very perfectionist company. When these two factor comes together, some process can be prolonged. For example, our UI were made from scratch for 3 times but we are so happy about the third one. Another example is that we made our main map from scratch with a new techonology just a few months ago. So we can remake some features from scratch again and again until we are happy about it but I think we are at the end of the process of remaking things again and again.

 

[Butter]

They need Sawyer to teach them about managing scope.