Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Game revisiting

Revisiting 02 April 2020, 16:13

Playing Bannerlord I Have One Question: Why Did They Need a Decade?!

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 Warband has reached 3,5 million users, including those who took advantage of the free weekend and those who bought the game at the big sale. Either way, it seemed the budget for the sequel was at least adequate.

Fighting peasantry – clearly, the rough beginning of the game.

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?

The map is big, aesthetic, and clean.

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.

As in the original game, the artworks are just sublime.

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. 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).

Army commandment hasn't changed at all, but it's still a lot of fun.

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.

Does it feel exactly the same as the original?

Yep. Playing Bannerlord feels exactly the same as a decade ago. Especially the beginning of the game, where we essentially are medieval plankton. If we piss off a namby-pamby knight, when our "banner" consists of 20 angry peasants, the only feasible redemption lies in escaping to an unspecified destination, where we can continue to kill and plunder until we have enough resources to go back besiege his castle, consequently getting more resources – just like in real life.

And things go back to where they used to be. I definitely appreciated the new character development system. It's much more complex. What I can say about the interface is that it works and I got used to it fairly quickly – let's remember that the game includes management systems in bulk, including character, inventory, estate, and so forth. In this respect, the game hints Paradox' grand strategies such as Stellaris (Paradox published the original Mount & Blade).

That's a fine castle you've got there yourself, sir.

Still, I can't help but wonder: what took them so long? Certainly not conceptual work. This is not what we've come to expect from 10-years' worth of development, even if we allow for the particularities of this game. The improvements in graphics are considerable, but the gap between the major league is still evident; you're also not telling me that there was a huge amount of testing done, since bugs are plentiful. What is this about? I do not know.

WHY IS MORE OF THE SAME THING BAD?

I loved Mount & Blade, but no one can deny it was shallow. You really could do a lot, but it just ended up in a loop. This one-of-a-kind sandbox was... empty inside. As I was waiting for part two – and that was, as we know, quite a few years – I was imagining we'd get everything the first game offered, plus a few new things. Be that managing production in our cities (with workshops needing resources, ability to lead a raiding expedition in person, or set out as a merchant), farming, designing siege engines, or weave court intrigues. That a simple, yet addictive little game will become the medieval baron simulator. Maybe I was expecting too much.

Very pretty inside, too, sir. But... where are all the people?

Maybe the modders will fix it

My own theory is that the creators of Mount and Blade deliberately made a simple game with a small number of novelties, instead striving to accommodate the game and its technology for modders. If that were to be the case, we could expect the sturdy, original framework of this game to be filled with content generated by fans. Expanded quests, vehicles of all kinds, complexified management of land, and so on. This still doesn't answer my question about the time frame here, but at least that's a hope.

It was announced years ago that Bannerlord would be even friendlier to modders than Warband. However, it will be at least a few months before we see some really big modifications. At the same time, the game itself will also be developed and expanded. After all – this is Early Access. It's still not the real thing. Now the question is how long the game will be supported for, if creating it, essentially a Warband 2.0, took a decade? This brings me to another good question, which is: maybe if playing it safe seems to work so well for Mount & Blade, my concerns are all unwarranted?

I grew some.

Is it worth paying for?

This is not a review, since this is not a complete game. And that's good, because if I was to rate it right now, the score wouldn't exceed 7/10. Mainly because the technical condition is poor, and the game looks more like a remaster rather than a sequel. On the other hand, it's still the worst 10/10, quirky and addictive game that I fell in love with a decade ago, spending untold amounts of time in it. And I'll probably spend as much here.

Playing Bannerlord is a pleasure, and my only real problem is that it feels exactly like Warband. Strongly recommended.

Martin Strzyzewski | Gamepressure.com