Mount and Blade II Bannerlord

Out for early access. I loved Warband even if I could never quite get the hang of combat. You have to swing way earlier than you think you would. Anyway, it has the full campaign from grunt to king, but so far I have just had enough time to squeeze in some (terrible on my part) battles:

It's 10% off for now and 20% if you own a previous M&B title...

The first time I zoomed out...

Wow.

I've been looking forward to this one too. How is it so far? What is performance like?

I cannot wait to give this one a try this week. According to Steam, Warband was one of my most played games.

I'm getting wrecked in the combat tutorials. I never could get the hang of blocking without a shield. Runs well so far at 2K with most details on high. Seems to be fewer factions than Warband and takes place 200 years earlier. I am not sure what is not in there for Early Access as I have not gotten much beyond the random battle generator but it has been a blast so far. Was always going to be a day 1 purchase for me anyway...

Here's a bit of the campaign near the beginning. These combats aren't too thrilling as I can't take on very much yet, but you can start to see some of the command overlay. Very familiar feel to it, much nicer visuals and experience overall, can't wait to delve deeper!

That's looking pretty good. The music sounds nice too. I hope overall the world will feel more immersive with maybe some rpg mechanics or at least some better storytelling? That very much looks like M&B in mechanics but hopefully even better across the board including graphics presentation.

Didn't do the previous M&B, but I loved Kingdom Come Deliverance, and as I like anything medieval or Roman/ancient etc, I might just have to get this at some point!

So far it's a much improved version of Warband. It's mostly the same map, just much bigger and the names of the major towns are a bit similar. Combat seems a bit more difficult and faster. Animations, graphics, sound and music are all better. Skills, levels, and attributes all work differently.. There are more dialog options and several of the missions I did seemed to have a couple of ways of doing them with a variety of skill checks that got rolled against. Those missions involved tracking down a "kidnapped: daughter and uncovering a spy operating in a town. All the towns and villages are larger with many more NPCs wandering around them. Also, the default battle size can go up much higher without modding any of the .ini files. IIRC it goes up to 1000 on just the in game slider. I don't know how it runs with a thousand people fighting since I'm still way to early in the game for that. The old Warband would start chopping up as the two armies collided with a battle that large.

Well, I bought it... Keen to get going, but twice now when getting started in the campaign, I get as far as doing the character selection and the back story, then it locks up... bit frustrating!
I'm validating files again and then will try to give it another go...

Did you ever play Defender of the Crown?

Mount and Blade to me is a spiritual successor to that classic game.

Crikey that's an old one... but no, never played it!

There's a lot of people complaining of technical issues, from lots of bugs, crashes, very long load times. I can't say I've had any crashes or problems yet (only about 7 hours total). Only minor bugs like cloaks clipping through a shield on your back. It does seem to be a resource hog and the fans on my PC turn up to 11 while playing more than about 5min, and that's just in the campaign map, sitting in towns and small skirmishes with looters.

Some other things that first looked like bugged missions were due to low stats. For instance, you try hunting down spies, the information you get may not be 100% reliable that you get from the townsfolk and it can make finding the right suspect nearly impossible at very low levels.

I'm holding out for Mount and Blade 3 in VR, I love the idea of a realistic medieval combat game, but 3rd person view mouse clicking just doesn't do it justice IMO.

Turn framerate cap down from 200 and that will help immensely with GPU usage. Set it to your monitor refresh rate.

You can use first person view by pressing "r"

That's even more limited IMO.

I would want to see something like a more refined version of the VR combat in Hellsplit: Arena.

these games are so like exploit ridden... like if you press this and that.. with that or this you can bypass true combat ... the twitch kids learn all this 10 hours a day while we work 10 hours a day..

Yup. This is why I dumped head-to-head multiplayer gaming over 10 years ago.

It doesn't matter what genre any game is... there is always a way to 'game the game', sadly...

FYI Mount and Blade is primarily a single player game.

There's some serious issues in the mid to late game of the campaign. NPC lords and kings now have to recruit from the same pool as you, which I generally like. There's no more defeating a 200 man army only to have it magically pop back into existence as soon as the lord hits a town. On the other hand, bandits still spawn at the cyclic rate, and their size and strength are dependent on the player's level. This often leads to the NPC armies being depleted and getting captured by massive mobs of bandits.

This game is growing on me. At first I was like, "Okay, Warband with better graphics," but now I'm noticing lots of little touches that were added that make it better.

Then I experienced my first siege.

Holy cow.


My daughter loves helping me pick outfits for my characters, and is enthralled by the intensity of the battles.

I also like how the AI will pick up throwing weapons, arrows and shields if they run out or are low. Cav that get a horse knocked out from under them will try and find a riderless mount if available.
I haven't besieged any castles, but the cities are massive and it's just a killing field. I lead a group of infantry to a "open" section of wall figuring we could take the 3-4 archers at that one location between some towers. Turns out the actual infantry weren't just standing on the battlements waiting to get shot by arrows or catapults. They were waiting in those towers until we started getting the ladders up and they just closed up on the wall and butchered us.

If you're having trouble with performance in sieges, turn the number of sound channels down. It makes a big difference in sieges and really large battles.

It's still clearly early access. It has it's problems. The newest bugs I've found are: The game says you get an attribute point every 3 levels, but you only get one every 4. Also, most of the perk points don't currently work. I haven't had any really long loading times, crashes, or broken save files like other people have had though.

Despite it's problems, I'd say it's better than the vanilla Warband. I'm having a blast with it. I would also not blame anyone for waiting before picking it up until some of the problems to get ironed out.

Been waiting SO LONG for this. I got into the first M&B when it was still beta, right after SP was added.

It's so good. I mean, I loved the previous games, and yeah this is like Warband but with more features and better graphics... but #%&*$# what a nice recipe they've been working on for the past decade + . So glad that the release has been successful. Hope the team does very well for all their work.

I was going to just mess around a little until it was out of early access, but I couldn't help just diving into a full campaign. So far, not many game killing bugs, and they're releasing patches regularly.

Battles are better, sieges are way better. I like being a sergeant under command of another general. Still haven't taken command of a whole army yet.

I was a little disappointed that towns still feel lifeless, interactions with the stilted random NPCs are weak. Maybe I've been playing Witcher 3 too much, but non-combat is not very immersive.

Slightly embarrassed to admit that I'm excited they are adding auto-block direction because I stink at manually block control. I'll turn that on as soon as it's available. Just using shields for now.

I am getting better at manual blocking, although I always psyche myself out as to when the attack motion is starting and mess it up, but I like the idea. I think the towns will be fleshed out as they go. It is pretty solid out of the box and I am glad they are doing a bunch of balancing...

Yep, regular patches, updates and communication from the developers... all good.
Even so, there are the usual complaints and constant whinging from the usual people on their forums...