Mount & Blade II - Now Available in Early Access
 

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is now available in Early Access on Steam with a 10% launch discount and an additional 10% off if you own any previous Mount & Blade, until April 13th.


More information.

Well, like the lemming I am, I bought it. Perhaps there will be mods for this.

The game is pretty fun, but crashes constantly, has severe memory leaks and freezes your computer after playing for a while. Many quests are bugged, and navigating the UI in general feels clunky and bothersome.

This happens with two pretty up-to-date gaming rigs in my household, so it's not an isolated case, or at least not something that happens to me alone.

I do not recommend buying it at the moment.

Can be played via geforce now

I'm glad for all those that will test out the game for us, please feel free to leave any and all comments and I thank you for your service!

Yes, I would love to hear your comments on the multiplayer modes too - do they involve skill?

There's some game play video's over on MMORPG.com under the Article announcement in the comments section for the early release.

Great looking game.

https://www.mmorpg.com/news/mount-an…ess-2000117711

Never played it as it didn't seem like a game, just a war simulator for ancient armies.

LOVED M&B & Warband. That being said I didn't play them until years of patching and mods so will be the same for this but looking forward to it down the road.

And that's exactly what a lot of games are :)

It's very underwhelming. Start with Warband, add 8 years and this is it? :/

Where's the content? No random events, nothing to discover. I kind of feel robbed. After 10 hours I feel like I've seen everything.

You could take a game like HoMAM or Dominions and add real-time battles and blow this game away.

The graphics are good, the combat is good but it's bland and empty and extremely buggy.

I've seen a dozen very obvious easy to fix bugs that indicate its had zero testing. Multiple crashes, freezes. It asks for you to send a crash report but even that system is broken.

I'd have to score it 5/10. Does not live up to my hype.

Edit: Awww, look. Maybe 5/10 is a bit low. I am enjoying playing it. Maybe if I scored it based on what it is rather than what it could have been the score would be more like 6.2/10. If they fix the issues and polish it up maybe even higher. It's just 8 years is a long time in development so it sort of feels like they've been slacking off and don't deserve a good score. But it's still MnB. Not much better than Warband, apart from graphics, but if you love Warband it's still an enjoyable game.

Test and fix. Bannerlord as it is now might be different in the future and not only on the bug side.
They might listen to customers even more.

I bought it as I was a big fan of the original.
Looks like a slightly improved version of the same game but that's not a bad thing to me.

I'll probably play it on a slightly easier difficulty as I got crushed in my first two battles :)

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Seems expensive for what it is…

Personally, I didn't really need quests in a game like this. If that's all they have to offer for single player, along with graphics I don't really need in a game like this, I think I'll stick with Bannerlord for another 8 years.

What they should have done is to improve the mechanics of sieges and battles, generally making them more interesting, as job 1. This looks to me like a case of mistaken priorities.

The quests are badly done and totally optional luckily. I guess the goal is more to give you things to do to set you up if you never played. There are lot of them in town to help a gang against another, or fetch some resources etc..
I have done 2 or 3 to test them, I stopped using them and I am fine.

There is at least a 'main' quest with some mysterious object. They send you left and right to ask questions to some nobles but I did not bother either. Nevertheless, even if they are not the names I got in the log, the game offers me to ask questions about that object each time I meet a noble and the quest gets updated..

There is a 'clan rank' now which will unlock access to some elements (you have to be Rank 1 to propose your service for money to a lord, rank 2 to enter the service of a lord as a vassal etc..) but the conditions to improve are totally in game and not dependent on quests (conditions are on reputation, money, nb of men in your party etc..).
I guess it makes the game more readable for a newcomer.

Well, it has some interesting ideas, making relationships with various kinds of personalities located in settlements via missions. I like the art style, the cultural influences are there but the old engine does show through the better graphics. Will give the single player game a proper go when it is out of alpha. Really imagine the modding community may improve on the base game considerably and it looks like it will facilitate that.

The multiplayer is rather interesting, although only played three maps so far, battles with 120 players are interesting and you die often from a stray arrow or a hail of arrows or in the chaos of melee, which probably reflects some kind of experience of a pitched medieval battle. There are fixed position catapults and on the rail siege engines and there have been the odd occurrence of tactics. Shields can wear out and intended front line soldiers shields last much longer under blows than light skirmisher shields and so front line soldiers can hold a position as a group (a bottle neck) while archers and skirmishers pick off the enemy as you buy time to defend your position etc. Mounted units can bowl over infantry and dismount and pick up gear from corpses etc. I find the multiplayer interesting. Also using equipment is hard and requires concentration. Oh and probably a good internet.

I still only have a band of 20 people so I cannot comment on that really but the skills I see mention siège engines and construction of better defenses so that's there too probably.

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I'm loving it so far. It's a whole lot of fun. Yes, very similar to its precursors, but for me that's a good thing.

The fighting's great of course :) (But I'll be shocked if I ever learn to block well without a shield)

I'll play this in a couple of years once a good chunk of the bugs are fixed and some more content has been added.

It looks really, really similar to Warband. I know it's a small team, but I don't really understand why the development cycle is so long when 90% of the game is recycled. I found Warband to be addictive in its way, but I crave more bespoke content in a game like this to go in that sandbox. The most fun I had was the Game of Thrones mod, which had more of that than the vanilla game.

M&B has a diffuse information system. It is about hear says. Quests could be possible.

Bannerlord has a complete information system. Lords with troops are known, their distance is known, the army composition is known.

It might change or not but indeed, it serves a lot rushers.


The start seems to be balanced differently from M&B/W. Once in M&B/W, taking your time was straightforward. It was about building a capital to transition smoothly to a upper stage, build solid foundations, prepare. Rushing was not so straightforward.

Coming to Bannerlord with the same mindset makes things feel awkward, things happening very fast.
When starting as a nobody and taking time, it allows to assess the stability of the gameworld, a PC that is irrelevant as a starter is restricted to a witness position. The PC does their things at their level and let the bigger people make the big decisions.

The transition to irrelevant to relevant status could take time in M&B without feeling artificial. In Bannerlord, a different story.

When battles in M&B in an early stage are something to take with care, in Bannerlord, they remind of farming. It is all about operating in a hurry.
Much less incentive to run away in Bannerlord. It is all about farming efficiently, take battles after battles to level up.

They listened to customers.

Depends on what it means to improve on battles and sieges.

In M&B, they tried to aim for slow building up conflicts, starting with skirmishes, culminating with a massive decisive battle that would allow the victor to besiege a holding, the comeback mechanics for the loser was the ability to gather troops from the rear ban to lift the siege.

They are trying to deliver the same in Bannerlord.

Companions come in different stripes, there might be a companion revelling in battles against the odds as in M&B. Or not.

Nevertheless, those against the odds battles are somewhat too easy to matter, overcoming a deficit in 100 troopers is possible.

The issue with battles is that it might get players to feel weak, they come to Bannerlord to dominate, to conquer.

Very hard to understand how they could better fights and sieges when they are meant to be won in the first place so players do not feel insecure.

Reading this, I bet you have never installed any of those games.

This is all a bit moot anyway, this is like Skyrim, the game in itself is goodish/greatish but becomes awesome with mods.
And the huge upgrade in terms of graphics compared to the precedent games and some mechanisms added should bring a lot of good ones.

I thought of the Skyrim comparison too but a little differently. To me, it's like Skyrim was a good game in its own right but not really a big step above Morrowind except for graphics. For some players like me, a bit worse in gameplay.

With about 20 hours in Bannerlord, I'm getting a similar feeling that it's beautiful and large but not necessarily any more fun to play. That may be my lack of familiarity, so I'm continuing. My hope is that the EA's bugs, balancing issues, and omissions are at the root of my hesitation so I'm going to explore all of the cultures for 10-15 hours each as an extended self tutorial.

Oh by the way, something I forgot to say and I could only see after few hours of game: The battles are HUGE. I joined a battle with over 600 people fighting and they were all of them on the battlefield in one go and no more like in BL or M&B, split in several waves.

These are bots, not real people. The server maximum is 250.

While Skyrim has graphical content gated behind loading screens, there are incentives to go through these loading screens.

Bannerload shows graphical improvements with fewer incentives to go through. The demand to access options without entering a location is older than Bannerlord but takes a new dimension in it.

In M&B, by design, players are led to learn the geography of a location to speed up the search process. In Bannerlord, there are fewer incentives to enter a location and arrowed NPCs removes the requirement of learning the geography.

That growing sense of settling in by becoming familar to a place through geography is gone. Everything that is conveyed through architecture to learn about a faction is somewhat lost as entering locations is an afterthought.

So tons of graphics have no game use. Pointless to enter towns, cities etc

While stepping back, even though there is no in game measure of it, a meaningful time is spent navigating menus, trading menus, recruit menus, unit management menus.

Graphics might influence the strategical map, it is quite large, packed with locations. The sense of travelling is affected, time spent on travelling from one place to another is usually short, weakening the sense of travelling.

Village, menu,fast travel to another place,menu,menu, menu, move to another place, menu, follow bandits, battle, menu, go to location to sell loot, menu, menu etc

Jumping from a menu to another.
A menu navigator.

Sure, it's quite a expected in SP. The limitation existed with the previous version were when you had more than 180 the battle was split in different stages of 180.

Again, you don't know the game, you just have looked a Youtube video where the guy hit the ALT key to highlight the important NPC and locations but did not tell you he did.

Everything in this game is optional, you can even sit on the map without playing the game. It's just possible. You can avoid all the quests and play the sandbox or you can try to do them all because you like that.
You can visit the locations in detail, all of them, or visit and press a key to highlight the NPCs or even just use a menu if you don't care about visiting each place because that is not why you play the game. I never do.
It was also possible to do exactly the same in M&B and in BL, did they tell you that in YT?

Well, I've played over 20 hours, now, and it's starting to feel a bit grindy and the progression of the map isn't well aligned to your character progression.

A lot of kingdoms have been wiped out, including the one I accidentally joined early on, but, even though I've been constantly raising my Renown though battles, my clan rank and what little bonus I have though the Steward skill still only gives me a unit limit around 110.

So, if I try to siege a castle or city on my own there will almost always be a counter-attack army of over 200 who arrives and then there's the town millitia and garrison of 200 to 400.

So, I can't really bring my kingdom back from 0 towns. It takes a lot of grinding to build up enough Influence to convince allied Clans to join my army and they seem to get bored and abandon me before I can march them across the world. The alternative is to wait for them to form and army and join up, hoping they do something useful, but, more often than not, they get caught in a situation where they'll chase one army who runs then give up and chase another back the other way, give up and start chasing the first one. Days pass and they're pretty much running in circles so food starts to run low. If they do start building a siege camp 9 times out of 10 they abandon it to fight the countering army. It's just not really working.

So, I abandoned the kingdom which takes me back to just fighting trivial looters and bandits. Maybe I could save up a bit and buy a passive income workshop or caravans, but I already have the best gear I can find.

I suppose now I have to join one of the steamrolling kingdoms and just follow them around as they make terrible decisions. Essentially just grinding until I have the influence (which is spent like a currency) to take lead. But there also appears to be an influence cap based on clan rank so I'll have to grind that up before I can get any serious help.

I don't know. It's starting to get old. The tournaments never have any upgrades, anymore. I can't really do anything without involving stupid AI kingdoms. I'm very good with a lance and can rack up 50 kills in a battle. Most of the time I'll end up the last man standing and have to start over again recruiting troops, grinding bandits to level them then they just get wiped out, maybe I get thrown in a dungeon and have to wander around to gather up my companions. It's all getting a bit tedious.

That's a lot in twenty hours. I've played for only 4 or 5 but I have restarted 3 times already after being destroyed by bandits early on.

Anyway, lots of mods now available

PC Gamer: The best Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord mods.
https://www.pcgamer.com/best-mount-a…nnerlord-mods/


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You know, I think this is going to happen regardless of which release you pick.
The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing solution that's just good enough.

Except for Tournaments, where I'm forced to use whatever they give me, (plus whatever armour I'm using. Also worthy of note is your companions will often be the enemies so taking off their hats gives you a massive advantage) I only fight on horseback. If you're walking you're dead.

The trouble with blocking is it doesn't give you any advantage. If there was stamina that drained then you could block a while and counter when they're exhausted or if there were some form of riposte you could parry to do damage. But, as it is, they just keep wailing away at you, gradually wearing through your shield, so it's better to take a purely offensive position.

Fight on horseback. Keep your speed up. Beware of ranged attacks. Get a Polearm with the Couch Lance property. When going full speed you press X to lower your lance then just ride into them. This is most useful VS other mounted units. VS large packs the extra arc a normal attack affords you lets you keep just outside their reach whereas the couch attack often runs you into the middle of them; bringing you to a standstill. You can easily and slowly work your way through a pack of 100 killing 1 every pass. Eventually they'll route before you've had to kill all 100.

Fighting like this has got me a long way but you really can't be a one man army. Other than the fact it just takes too long, you will make a mistake every now and then and take a little damage. Especially as you get bored that the battle is taking so long and take greater risks.

https://i.imgur.com/PaLX2h2.jpg

The mark, conciliating the opposites, quite often paired with the inability to conciliate what is not opposed. There is a cause behind it, two centuries of running a certain thing. It explains how those people came to worship guns so much as guns are by design meant to shoot at the direction it is pointed at the exclusion of any other direction.

Design is claimed as having no direction, no cost in allowing to do one thing and its opposite.

M&B started with a mandatory entrance to locations, then devs were pressured into adding features of convenient accessibility. Bannerlord brings it to a new level.

Now this is claimed as a costless decision: players can play it the way they want, it has no consequences.

It does not part users in two categories, those who make use of the conveniency features and those who do not. It does not bring an issue of knowing how to allocate resources between the categories of users, which features to further and how.

Conciliation of the opposites: stay at home, go out to work.

Progression is fast in Bannerlord.

Due to players insisting to play PCs that are disproportionately powerful compared to other units, early battles are a matter of collecting aggro (according the PC rides a horse) and manipulate enemy troops to provide an engagement advantage to own troops)
Basically, at start, a PC is worth 5 to 10 enemy units (when making use of support troops)

Later on, while the number of enemy troops could dilute the awesomeness of a PC, it also is possible to offset a 2 vs 3 disavantage.

As it must.

Bannerlord could have expanded on its core features. The issue is that players had different expectations about what M&B should be, that were conflictual with the devs' vision.

BG set a starting point, an origin that is now being pushed toward BG3. BG3 is the future of BG. Which was hard to determine when playing BG. When looking at it, it is clear that for players, bettering BG meant removing quite a lot of core features, it was not about bringing them to a higher level.

Bannerlord is the future of M&B.

Oh yeah I have always disliked that mechanic so I don't play that way. I am also trying to roleplay a falx man.

So I am artificially making it harder but more enjoyable for myself…

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Mods already, and it is in alpha? That was fast. I am going to stop playing single player and what until its final version comes out.

Tons of mods.

I got the one where tournaments give xp already. I'll have a look at a few others soon.

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Which can take time.

Mods are essential for players who keep their interest high through a constant flow of new content. Management of content inflow is vital.
Devs do it: they unlocked like over one hundred pieces of equipment. That is dilution of content to keep content drainers on board.