Mount & Blade II - Now Available in Early Access

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Spaceman
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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.

Purchase Bannerlord and receive 10% off*! Additionally, owners of any previous Mount & Blade game on Steam will receive an additional 10% off!
*Discount offers end April 13th at 10AM Pacific


About This Game

The horns sound, the ravens gather. An empire is torn by civil war. Beyond its borders, new kingdoms rise. Gird on your sword, don your armour, summon your followers and ride forth to win glory on the battlefields of Calradia. Establish your hegemony and create a new world out of the ashes of the old.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the eagerly awaited sequel to the acclaimed medieval combat simulator and role-playing game Mount & Blade: Warband. Set 200 years before, it expands both the detailed fighting system and the world of Calradia. Bombard mountain fastnesses with siege engines, establish secret criminal empires in the back alleys of cities, or charge into the thick of chaotic battles in your quest for power.

Strategy / Action RPG
Explore, raid and conquer your way across the vast continent of Calradia, making friends and enemies along the way. Raise your own army and lead it into battle, commanding and fighting alongside your troops in the thick of the action.

Singleplayer Sandbox Campaign
Play the game the way you want to play it! Plot your own path to power in a dynamic sandbox adventure where no two playthroughs are the same.

Extensive Character Creation and Progression Systems
Create and develop your own character to match your playstyle. Progress skills by performing actions as you gain access to a selection of perks that represent your mastery of a talent.

Realistic Economy
See the availability of goods ebb and flow in a simulated feudal economy, where the price of everything from incense to warhorses fluctuates with supply and demand. Turn anarchy to your advantage by being the first to bring grain to a starving town after a siege or reopening a bandit-plagued caravan route.

Multiplayer Game Modes
Put your tactical prowess and combat skills to the test against players from all over the world in a variety of different multiplayer game modes, ranging from small-scale skirmishes up to huge and epic sieges with hundreds of players.

Skill-Based Directional Combat System
Vanquish your foes using the game's deep and intuitive combat system that is easy to learn but difficult to master.

Breathtaking Battles
Take to the field of battle and experience the brutality of medieval combat in first or third person perspective with hundreds of on-screen units, each with their own detailed AI.

Extensive Modding Capabilities
Customise the game to experience an entirely different adventure of your own creation. The engine and tools used to develop Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord are being made available to the community, so that modders can re-interpret Calradia or create their own worlds!

More information.
 
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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.
 
Never played it as it didn't seem like a game, just a war simulator for ancient armies.
 
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Oct 18, 2006
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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!

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.
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2011
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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...
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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.
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)
 
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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.
 
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