Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the long-awaited sequel for the Mount & Blade: Warband which invented a new skill-based competitive gameplay around the medieval theme. It's also a single-player experience for those who want to simulate being a warlord in the medieval. But here's the catch; game is absolute trash in the vanilla state, like most of the Bethesda Game Studios games. The modding community is the backbone for this title yet they don't care about it by releasing inconsistent patches that broke mods. Base game is also not improved enough with necessary Quality-of-Life features and still lacks content so the campaign is not enjoyable for my taste, even worse than the first game. For example, you always raid the same map when you find the bandits' hideout; it sure is not acceptable for an AAA title that is developed with government aid. The worst thing is, the government aid they're relied on is being cut from my salary every month and I absolutely hate this shit.

After about 8 years in development, the highly-awaited sequel to Mount and Blade: Warband is finally available--in early access. What was Taleworlds doing the whole time? Socking back ale and slathering butter all over the offices? We might never know, but I'm grateful to at last have the opportunity to play the game.

First of all, a disclaimer: I understand that reviews on Glitchwave are supposed to "stand the test of time," but given that Warband is an early access title, it's sort of impossible to give such a review when the game is constantly updating and changing. For this reason I'll list this as a commentary, but it will be quite some time before anyone can give a proper "review" of this game according to Glitchwave standards. Have mercy on me, mods.

Second, a warning: Long development cycles are a massive red flag for game quality, as was the case for John Romero's infamous Daikatana. The average development cycle for a game seems to be between about 3 to 6 years, depending on the size and scope of the content as well as the manpower and funding available to propel production. When a developer fails to end the development cycle after that aforementioned window of time, it can bespeak one or a few things: One, the developer had unrealistic expectations for the scope of the game and the breadth of its feature set; two, some unforeseen disruption, like the flooding of the Hello Games studios during the development of No Man's Sky, has put a serious monkey wrench in the studio's developmental gearbox; three, the game was never intended to be complete and is instead a cash grab; four, the developers are incompetent and fail to meet their deadlines because production is glacial and mismanaged. Is this the case for Bannerlord? Let's find out.

Some games never actually end their development cycle and instead stay perpetually in "beta" or "early access." I'm worried about Bannerlord, but perhaps I'm simply having DayZ-based flashbacks. There is some reason to believe that Taleworlds could pull it off, given that what they have already accomplished covers the bulk of the content available in Warband. Everything essential is there and functional, minus a few glitches or crashes: The graphics engine functions well and the game looks lightyears ahead of Warband; animations are more fluid but still have that classic readability and gameyness, the sound engine works fine and all the music has been finished by the sounds of it, trading and bartering is fully-featured and seems to work alright, combat feels complete and functional, party management works fine, the inventory system seems finished and is actually quite good, quests and dialogue are clearly unfinished but are at least about equivalent in quality to Warband's, influence and relationship systems are there and seem to be working despite being rough around the edges, and multiplayer appears to be pretty well assembled.

Of course, what really matters is what is missing on the launch of early access. Taleworlds has been fully transparent about this matter, so props to them for handling launch impressively well. They have been releasing bug fixes almost daily, and despite the fact that their physical office is closed due to the pandemic, they're evidently working very hard.

Anyway, one of the most obvious missing features is unique scenes for each village, castle, and town. This doesn't materially affect gameplay very much, but it's less captivating to walk into several different towns or villages to complete quests and to see the exact same layout rather than new environments to explore. There seem to be enough overland battle maps to keep things fresh out in the field, however.

Smithing, a highly touted feature from the pre-release Gamescom demo, is sadly incomplete. There is still plenty to do with the system, but it is not fully featured and could probably use reforging. Not all weapon types seem to be available, and I couldn't find any way to make a bow, or a one-handed pole arm, for example. There was no way to forge shields, and it doesn't seem like there is a way to forge or modify armor (not sure if they intend to add this at a later date or not.) Still, it's pretty cool that I can make my own swords, for example, and modify the stats to suit my play style.

Quests are present but mostly bare bones. Like in previous titles, the player can seek out quests from guild masters, village elders, lords, ladies, and certain NPCs to gain gold and renown. These are typically mundane tasks, like herding cattle to a city, transporting goods between towns, escorting caravans, killing outlaws, or rooting out spies. Each quest turns out the same way each time and is repeatable, typically presenting the player with only one or two choices for different outcomes. To Taleworlds' credit, the outcome of each choice is made abundantly clear. For example, there is a quest in which the player illegally buys goods from a merchant for a discounted price in order to sell them in a distant city for profit. If the player buys the goods, he or she will be confronted by another merchant, who knows that the transaction was illegal. The player is then given the choice to either return the goods to avoid earning a criminal reputation, or to take the goods anyway and risk earning criminal status in the town. All of the consequences for these choices are explained in the dialogue, and it's a welcome change from other games in which the outcomes of certain choices aren't totally obvious (Fallout 4, Mass Effect, Witcher 3.) Still, the quests are quite boring right now and largely unworth undertaking, even if they are a bit less tedious than they were in Warband.

Campaign AI is in a pretty sorry state. Taleworlds' developers have stated that they wanted to create an AI system in which other lords do not have to cheat in order to stay competitive against the player, but unfortunately, lords have proven to be just a little bit too dumb to get by without intervention. Every lord's party is in a perpetual state of starvation, as lords frequently forget to buy food at villages. As a result, lords' parties quickly bleed troops due to starvation deaths and desertion, so often their numbers fall to as low as 10-0 troops, meaning that they can't even reliably defeat looters or bandits in combat. This leads to a struggle loop in which all the lords' troops die of starvation, leaving them with no money to recruit new troops and no ability to fend off looters, so all lords of a faction might actually just constantly be fighting and dying to bandits, leaving them open to be steamrolled by another faction until the whole map is controlled by one. This issue is kind of funny actually, and reminds me of the difficulties Bethesda had at creating truly independent citizen AI routines in towns for Oblivion, which eventually led them to just strip away autonomy and give the NPCs schedules. I feel like something similar will happen to Bannerlord--the lords will be given their cheats back. Anyway, this problem kind of ruins the course of campaigns, so hopefully it is patched soon.

For the most part, however, Bannerlord is in a functional and playable state. It's only a matter of time until it gets modding tools and becomes for all intents and purposes a better game than Warband ever was as well, so surely there is a bright future ahead of its release.

I struggle to say I'm disappointed with the state of the game on early access launch, even if it has left more than a little to be desired. The combat is much improved over Warband with the addition of combos, directional shield blocking, and an overall nerf of speed bonus (you won't get one-shotted by crazy spinning 360 bamboo spear ninjas anymore!) The graphics are better, everything feels very smooth, and most of the features that drove Warband have gotten a much-needed expansion--think "Native Enhanced" style mods for Warband ratified and incorporated into the base game. Even more impressive is the addition of a legacy feature, which allows the player to marry and have children, who then become playable when they come of age and the player character dies. This enables ironman playthroughs in which the game doesn't always stop after the PC's death, which is really awesome. It almost reminds me of Crusader Kings, minus the court intrigue.

Overall, if you enjoyed Warband, you will most likely enjoy what is already here, but be wary about early access in general. An 8-year-long development cycle isn't something to treat lightly, and even if Bannerlord has been somewhat impressive so far, keep in mind that it took Taleworlds 4/5 of a decade to produce a playable but incomplete game. Are campaign-breaking AI bugs and non-unique castle sieges worth an 8-year wait? That's for you to decide. Buy with caution, but perhaps be optimistic.