Mar 04, 2017 Why Bannerlord Is Delayed For So Long - Dev Interview - Duration: 11:20. Ironhawk 174,942 views. Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Taleworlds Entertainment - Duration: 4:58.
Revisiting02 April 2020, 16:13author:Martin Strzyzewski
Mount and Blade 2 enters Steam – it's early access, but still. You can pay and you can play. I played, and you know what? It feels exactly the same as in the original, with emphasis on 'exactly the same.' What have they been doing these 10 years?
The review is based on the PC version.
Mount and Blade Warband was released on Steam in March 2010. It's been almost exactly 10 years. At the time, the small Turkish studio called TaleWorlds Entertainment was able to make a living from selling its game and releasing its separate modules as standalone products. SteamSpy indicates that Warbandhas reached 3,5 million users, including those who took advantage of the free weekend and those who bought the game at the big sale. Dungeon siege 2 pc iso completo hot. Either way, it seemed the budget for the sequel was at least adequate.
The world has moved on…
So, while they created in peace, I patiently waited. I waited and waited, and then I finally played it. And you know, I don't want to come across as malcontent, but.. hear me out: My adventure with the series began in 2009, when I got With Fire & Sword. 2009 was the year when the world tried to cope with the swine flu outbreak, and we were all excited about Assassin's Creed II. The world has moved on since. I mean, people who weren't born back then can probably read well today, ever thought about that?
With Fire & Sword was for me what the Hearts card game was for the characters in Stephen King's Heroes of Atlantis. I went to college in the morning, then caught the second shift at the grocery store. I'd finish at 10pm, closed the cash register, take the bus home (I was still living with my mom, it really was that long ago). Then I would play until three or four in the morning. I'd get up at seven and start all over. Good times.
…Mount and Blade has not
Mount and Blade, on the other hand, seems to be comfortable exactly where it is. If you played Warband, you'll hit the ground running here; the controls are identical. The combat system.. no substantial changes. Commanding armies? You can arrange them in formations, but I've seen that in mods before.
The singleplayer campaign also begins in a typical manner. The character editor is more extensive, but we still end up in the middle of a big map and start making money. At first, we of course run errands for nobles and fight half-savage bandits. It felt a little bit like I was running a thrift store because in the early hours of the game, I mostly sold old rags looted off enemies. Then I played a merchant, plundering villages, and trading according to a simple principle – buy goods in one city, sell them in the other corner of the map.
Wait, is that exactly what I did in 2009 in Fire and Sword? It is.
Or maybe..?
Is it really the same game, only prettier? Well, it certainly looks a whole lot prettier. It compares to cutting-edge games of today exactly as the original compared to AAA games of the time, such as the aforementioned AC II. In other words, Bannerlord is outdated, but it's a lot better than the first game.
Is he really the same? I admit, there's a little novelty here and there. You can make your own weapons in a forge. Open gho extension file. You can get married. You can send your men on expeditions. You can fire a trebuchet during a siege. There are several new types of quests. Does that change the gameplay? Absolutely not, and I've seen mods that change the game more. Take Viking Conquest, for example, which added a dog, boating, or religions. And that was, after all, just a mod – limited by the capabilities of the game itself. Bannerlord is a game created from ground-up (with a much smaller budget than AAA games, but still decent).
WHY MARRY?
Bannerlord has a permadeath mode. It's still possible to continue playing after the protagonist dies – if we produced an offspring, we become him or her. It seems a really interesting solution, and the system might receive new, official elements and mods.
Honestly, you wait the best part of a decade for some of your favourite franchises to come back and then two of them arrive in the same month. Typical, isn't it?
Not only did March see a new Half-Life game from Valve, but for some of us there was an equally big surprise: the honest to God release of Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. Well, not quite the full release, it's in Early Access for the time being, but for those of us that have been following its development for eight years now, we'll take it. We'll absolutely take it.
Now, as you might have seen already, I did find myself briefly sidetracked by a now-patched bug that allowed me to ride around the world of Calradia as an actual baby, slaying bandits and ne'er-do-wells as I went. But aside from that I've also managed to clock up nearly 20 hours with Mount and Blade 2, and there's a lot to take in.
Perhaps I should start by saying that if you tend to avoid Early Access games because they sometimes make you feel like an alpha tester, rather than a paying customer, you might want to hold off on Bannerlord for the time being. The developers have said they don't expect a full release for another year or so and to be honest, that sounds a little hopeful to me. Parts of the game are either incomplete or broken and there are plenty of bugs to be found, some of which are much less amusing than the aforementioned Bannerlord Baby. And yet, despite all of that, I think this is totally brilliant.
If you've played the original Mount and Blade, or more likely its standalone expansion Warband, you'll know roughly what to expect. After creating your character and blitzing through a short tutorial, you're dropped headfirst into an entire Early Medieval continent of possibilities. You'll begin alone with just a few coins, a couple of weapons and a horse to your name, as you ride from village to village, recruiting just about anyone who can hold a sword. The more men you enlist, the more food you'll need to provide and wages you'll need to pay, which means you'll need to start earning a bigger income too. And so you'll take on quests from the locals, hunt down raiding parties, compete in tournaments and before you know it, you'll have gone from leading a handful of nobodies, to a small army of seasoned veterans. Those same bandits who used to chase you across the map now flee before your might.
Bannerlord, just like its predecessors, is a game about acquiring power. At some point you'll realise you're no longer required to be just another cog in the machine. Why protect other merchant's caravans, when you can establish your own? Perhaps it's time to swear fealty to one of Calradia's many kings or emperors, in exchange for political power and your own estate? Maybe you don't want to be someone's vassal? How many men would it take to create a kingdom of your own? How much gold would you need to defend it? These are the questions that drive you.
And then there's the battles themselves! Again, there's an intoxicating sense of escalation here. Your early hours may be spent leading a dozen or so recruits against local outlaws, who charge you en masse wielding clubs and pitchforks, but eventually, you'll be at the head of an army, one that needs its formation carefully decided, with infantry, archers and cavalry all under your command.
Although it's entirely possible to give orders to your troops from afar, you'll more likely want to lead from the front, charging into battle with whatever weaponry you've decided to specialise in. And here, the combat is still an awful lot of fun, despite it remaining somewhat clunky. In fact, I've been surprised by just how little has changed since Mount and Blade: Warband on that front. For a series that has no doubt inspired countless medieval combat games over the last decade, I would have expected it to have learnt a little more from those imitators too.
This is perhaps made most apparent during the tutorial at the start of the campaign. You're asked to duel two different swordsmen, a rookie and an expert. The latter is armed with a two-handed sword and isn't actually all that difficult to best, as he'll struggle to defend against most of your attacks if you're quick enough. The rookie, however, comes equipped with a sword and shield and he's so much tougher as a result. You're given such a tiny, tiny window between his attacks to land your own and he makes for a really challenging opponent, despite the game suggesting otherwise. Adjusting the difficulty will help, of course, but it seems a shame that swords and shields seem to trump all others when it comes to one-on-one combat when the game offers such wide variety in its weapon choices. I don't know, maybe that's a balancing issue I need to take up with medieval history, rather than Taleworlds Entertainment, but after so long in development, I'd expected Bannerlord to have ironed out some of those legacy issues of the series.
I imagine as Mount and Blade 2 continues to be fleshed out and some of the late-game systems are polished, it'll be things like Bannerlord's faction politics and ambitious kingdom management that really separate this game from its forefathers, but right now, that stuff all feels quite bareboned. But that's not to say things aren't different here, compared to Warband. Just compare the world maps, for a start:
And then there's the dynamism on display, as merchants really do buy and sell the goods they transport between each city, altering the price, supply and demand just like you. Or if you follow another lord or king around the map, you'll see them stop at villages and hire recruits, potentially emptying the pool of new soldiers before you get there. At present, the game isn't necessarily balanced, but it is surprisingly fair. Every character is playing by the exact same rules, including you. And seeing all of that in motion is just wonderful. It's a true sandbox experience in a way that even other Mount and Blade games never managed.
Once you've gotten through the early game, the battles become something else entirely too. Join a faction and start taking part in the big multi-army battles and you'll see ranking generals step up to command the entire force, while you're responsible for your own division within that. Then there's the sieges! Oh my gosh, the sieges are something else. The scale here is just leagues ahead of anything I've experienced beforehand. You'll quickly feel lost in the chaos of it all, as hundreds of troops clash with one another, with catapults, ballista and trebuchets raining destruction down upon them. You'd think you were playing a Total War game, not Mount and Blade, if it wasn't for the fact that here you are, experiencing it from a third-person perspective.
Bannerlord may not be finished and I suspect it won't be finished for a long time to come. It can be repetitive and unfair, many of its systems aren't up to scratch just yet and it's not uncommon to see the game crash or for you to run into some bizarre bug along the way. But at the same time, despite all of that, it is so much bloody fun. This is the very definition of Eurojank and I couldn't be happier to have it in my hands after all this time.
The wait for harvesting season is finally, finally over. I can barely believe it.
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Mar 04, 2017 Why Bannerlord Is Delayed For So Long - Dev Interview - Duration: 11:20. Ironhawk 174,942 views. Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Taleworlds Entertainment - Duration: 4:58.
Revisiting02 April 2020, 16:13author:Martin Strzyzewski
Mount and Blade 2 enters Steam – it's early access, but still. You can pay and you can play. I played, and you know what? It feels exactly the same as in the original, with emphasis on 'exactly the same.' What have they been doing these 10 years?
The review is based on the PC version.
Mount and Blade Warband was released on Steam in March 2010. It's been almost exactly 10 years. At the time, the small Turkish studio called TaleWorlds Entertainment was able to make a living from selling its game and releasing its separate modules as standalone products. SteamSpy indicates that Warbandhas reached 3,5 million users, including those who took advantage of the free weekend and those who bought the game at the big sale. Dungeon siege 2 pc iso completo hot. Either way, it seemed the budget for the sequel was at least adequate.
The world has moved on…
So, while they created in peace, I patiently waited. I waited and waited, and then I finally played it. And you know, I don't want to come across as malcontent, but.. hear me out: My adventure with the series began in 2009, when I got With Fire & Sword. 2009 was the year when the world tried to cope with the swine flu outbreak, and we were all excited about Assassin's Creed II. The world has moved on since. I mean, people who weren't born back then can probably read well today, ever thought about that?
With Fire & Sword was for me what the Hearts card game was for the characters in Stephen King's Heroes of Atlantis. I went to college in the morning, then caught the second shift at the grocery store. I'd finish at 10pm, closed the cash register, take the bus home (I was still living with my mom, it really was that long ago). Then I would play until three or four in the morning. I'd get up at seven and start all over. Good times.
…Mount and Blade has not
Mount and Blade, on the other hand, seems to be comfortable exactly where it is. If you played Warband, you'll hit the ground running here; the controls are identical. The combat system.. no substantial changes. Commanding armies? You can arrange them in formations, but I've seen that in mods before.
The singleplayer campaign also begins in a typical manner. The character editor is more extensive, but we still end up in the middle of a big map and start making money. At first, we of course run errands for nobles and fight half-savage bandits. It felt a little bit like I was running a thrift store because in the early hours of the game, I mostly sold old rags looted off enemies. Then I played a merchant, plundering villages, and trading according to a simple principle – buy goods in one city, sell them in the other corner of the map.
Wait, is that exactly what I did in 2009 in Fire and Sword? It is.
Or maybe..?
Is it really the same game, only prettier? Well, it certainly looks a whole lot prettier. It compares to cutting-edge games of today exactly as the original compared to AAA games of the time, such as the aforementioned AC II. In other words, Bannerlord is outdated, but it's a lot better than the first game.
Is he really the same? I admit, there's a little novelty here and there. You can make your own weapons in a forge. Open gho extension file. You can get married. You can send your men on expeditions. You can fire a trebuchet during a siege. There are several new types of quests. Does that change the gameplay? Absolutely not, and I've seen mods that change the game more. Take Viking Conquest, for example, which added a dog, boating, or religions. And that was, after all, just a mod – limited by the capabilities of the game itself. Bannerlord is a game created from ground-up (with a much smaller budget than AAA games, but still decent).
WHY MARRY?
Bannerlord has a permadeath mode. It's still possible to continue playing after the protagonist dies – if we produced an offspring, we become him or her. It seems a really interesting solution, and the system might receive new, official elements and mods.
Honestly, you wait the best part of a decade for some of your favourite franchises to come back and then two of them arrive in the same month. Typical, isn't it?
Not only did March see a new Half-Life game from Valve, but for some of us there was an equally big surprise: the honest to God release of Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. Well, not quite the full release, it's in Early Access for the time being, but for those of us that have been following its development for eight years now, we'll take it. We'll absolutely take it.
Now, as you might have seen already, I did find myself briefly sidetracked by a now-patched bug that allowed me to ride around the world of Calradia as an actual baby, slaying bandits and ne'er-do-wells as I went. But aside from that I've also managed to clock up nearly 20 hours with Mount and Blade 2, and there's a lot to take in.
Perhaps I should start by saying that if you tend to avoid Early Access games because they sometimes make you feel like an alpha tester, rather than a paying customer, you might want to hold off on Bannerlord for the time being. The developers have said they don't expect a full release for another year or so and to be honest, that sounds a little hopeful to me. Parts of the game are either incomplete or broken and there are plenty of bugs to be found, some of which are much less amusing than the aforementioned Bannerlord Baby. And yet, despite all of that, I think this is totally brilliant.
If you've played the original Mount and Blade, or more likely its standalone expansion Warband, you'll know roughly what to expect. After creating your character and blitzing through a short tutorial, you're dropped headfirst into an entire Early Medieval continent of possibilities. You'll begin alone with just a few coins, a couple of weapons and a horse to your name, as you ride from village to village, recruiting just about anyone who can hold a sword. The more men you enlist, the more food you'll need to provide and wages you'll need to pay, which means you'll need to start earning a bigger income too. And so you'll take on quests from the locals, hunt down raiding parties, compete in tournaments and before you know it, you'll have gone from leading a handful of nobodies, to a small army of seasoned veterans. Those same bandits who used to chase you across the map now flee before your might.
Bannerlord, just like its predecessors, is a game about acquiring power. At some point you'll realise you're no longer required to be just another cog in the machine. Why protect other merchant's caravans, when you can establish your own? Perhaps it's time to swear fealty to one of Calradia's many kings or emperors, in exchange for political power and your own estate? Maybe you don't want to be someone's vassal? How many men would it take to create a kingdom of your own? How much gold would you need to defend it? These are the questions that drive you.
And then there's the battles themselves! Again, there's an intoxicating sense of escalation here. Your early hours may be spent leading a dozen or so recruits against local outlaws, who charge you en masse wielding clubs and pitchforks, but eventually, you'll be at the head of an army, one that needs its formation carefully decided, with infantry, archers and cavalry all under your command.
Although it's entirely possible to give orders to your troops from afar, you'll more likely want to lead from the front, charging into battle with whatever weaponry you've decided to specialise in. And here, the combat is still an awful lot of fun, despite it remaining somewhat clunky. In fact, I've been surprised by just how little has changed since Mount and Blade: Warband on that front. For a series that has no doubt inspired countless medieval combat games over the last decade, I would have expected it to have learnt a little more from those imitators too.
This is perhaps made most apparent during the tutorial at the start of the campaign. You're asked to duel two different swordsmen, a rookie and an expert. The latter is armed with a two-handed sword and isn't actually all that difficult to best, as he'll struggle to defend against most of your attacks if you're quick enough. The rookie, however, comes equipped with a sword and shield and he's so much tougher as a result. You're given such a tiny, tiny window between his attacks to land your own and he makes for a really challenging opponent, despite the game suggesting otherwise. Adjusting the difficulty will help, of course, but it seems a shame that swords and shields seem to trump all others when it comes to one-on-one combat when the game offers such wide variety in its weapon choices. I don't know, maybe that's a balancing issue I need to take up with medieval history, rather than Taleworlds Entertainment, but after so long in development, I'd expected Bannerlord to have ironed out some of those legacy issues of the series.
I imagine as Mount and Blade 2 continues to be fleshed out and some of the late-game systems are polished, it'll be things like Bannerlord's faction politics and ambitious kingdom management that really separate this game from its forefathers, but right now, that stuff all feels quite bareboned. But that's not to say things aren't different here, compared to Warband. Just compare the world maps, for a start:
And then there's the dynamism on display, as merchants really do buy and sell the goods they transport between each city, altering the price, supply and demand just like you. Or if you follow another lord or king around the map, you'll see them stop at villages and hire recruits, potentially emptying the pool of new soldiers before you get there. At present, the game isn't necessarily balanced, but it is surprisingly fair. Every character is playing by the exact same rules, including you. And seeing all of that in motion is just wonderful. It's a true sandbox experience in a way that even other Mount and Blade games never managed.
Once you've gotten through the early game, the battles become something else entirely too. Join a faction and start taking part in the big multi-army battles and you'll see ranking generals step up to command the entire force, while you're responsible for your own division within that. Then there's the sieges! Oh my gosh, the sieges are something else. The scale here is just leagues ahead of anything I've experienced beforehand. You'll quickly feel lost in the chaos of it all, as hundreds of troops clash with one another, with catapults, ballista and trebuchets raining destruction down upon them. You'd think you were playing a Total War game, not Mount and Blade, if it wasn't for the fact that here you are, experiencing it from a third-person perspective.
Bannerlord may not be finished and I suspect it won't be finished for a long time to come. It can be repetitive and unfair, many of its systems aren't up to scratch just yet and it's not uncommon to see the game crash or for you to run into some bizarre bug along the way. But at the same time, despite all of that, it is so much bloody fun. This is the very definition of Eurojank and I couldn't be happier to have it in my hands after all this time.
The wait for harvesting season is finally, finally over. I can barely believe it.