I fuckin love mount&blade. Is bannerlord worth it though?
Saw that you made this community and reminded me of my many years of playing warband thru childhood. Should I buy Bannerlord for my next playthrough or is it kinda meh? Never heard much about the game.
Old post but here goes: it’s worth it on discount. It lacks some stuff that Warband had (modding being the most important, bannerlord’s modding scene is still in it’s infancy), but has other things that Warband didn’t (Clan system, commander traits, smithing as busted as it is, improvements to AI and combat mechanics). In the end, it depends entirely on you. You souldn’t expect Bannerlord to be Warband 2.0, because it isn’t and I’m not sure it’ll ever be that without some serious elbow grease from both developers and modders, which of course requires quality modding tools, and I’m not sure if they have been improved upon.
TL, DR: Bannerlord is recognizably M&B but feels more like a sidegrade with better graphics and a developing modding scene.
Yes, in my opinion. The game is great for what it is. I can't comment much if multiplayer is your thing, but for me, the vanilla singleplayer experience was overall better than the old games.
There is much more to do given the questing system, making early- and mid-game far more fun. Cruising around as a smallish warband, taking on whatever work you find, becoming a mercenary or a small lord, protecting villages and doing quests, all really felt like what the game was meant for.
Late-game, giant battles are always tons of fun, and sieges generally work better than in the old games, amazingly enough, and have more options for stuff to bring to the field with siege weapons. Siege weapons are bullshit, but with some practice, they can be your bullshit as easily as the enemy's. I have far less trouble getting my troops to actually use the siege equipment than I did in previous games, no more aimless milling around at the base of two stupid ladders propped up against the wall or having your entire army cluster at the base of a siege tower until they're all shot to death.
The enemy AI is generally much smarter and more capable of using field tactics, but to counter this, there is now the glorious F6 button to turn on the AI for your own team as well, letting you rampage around like a homicidal maniac while your squad leaders do all the thinking. Important to remember, where you go DOES matter; the AI is watching you always, and makes its squad decisions based on what it's commander does! It's pretty neat!
Not that there aren't problems, but they're no more major than in previous games. Most of them happen in sieges, shockingly, such as aimless milling about on top of the ladders instead of at the base (slight improvement). There's a weird squad mechanic that lets you distribute your troops before every battle that seems to almost work, but using F6 will reshuffle all the squads and make your own commands kind of useless sometimes. You have to learn to work WITH the AI, as they can do some pretty stupid crap, such as hold all of the archers and infantry and reserve while waiting for you and ten other horse archers to drive a hundred and fifty spearmen into them as if you're a freaking cattle herder and not a half-dead king with a glaive and an empty quiver
Get a long glaive, by the way, that alone practically makes the game worthwhile.
The biggest issue with the game is probably the pacing. The clan system is cool, but on most of my playthroughs, by the time my heir has come of age and is ready to do so much as join me in battle, the war is effectively over. The game is, overall, seems more focused on keeping you moving from combat to combat to combat, which is fun and engaging, but also can end the game fairly quickly when you run out of enemies to fight. Moving nobles around and trying to play the charm game can get tedious pretty quickly, and late game, there isn't much to do other than chase down tiny bands of stray enemy nobles and crush the occasional rebellion.
Overall, I would definitely say worth it. You'll get your money's worth of entertainment out of it and it goes to support the company. The game is a triumph of design on many levels, it's a real shame that they had to rush so much of the final product and botched the release.
IMO, I think Bannerlord is worth it, if only for the fact that Warband's mechanics (while still incredibly solid) are getting a bit long in the tooth, and the engine itself is quite restrictive in terms of what you can do with it modding-wise. It wasn't until earlier this year that TaleWorlds released the tools that made multiplayer mods possible, and mods like Full Invasion and Persistent Empires have given us a small taste of what the new engine is capable of. As time goes on, it'll only get better and better - I know people keep saying that, but it is true!
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