Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - Reporting from Gamescom 2019

During this year's Gamescom trade fair, TaleWorlds Entertainment surprised everyone with an Early Access release date announcement for their upcoming sandbox RPG Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. With that in mind, the latest developer blog for the game brings us a general Gamescom 2019 update and invites us to apply to take part in Bannerlord's multiplayer closed beta.

On top of that, we can now check out this IGN interview with TaleWorlds' community manager Callum McGlinchey:

PC Gamer shares this interview with the studio's CEO Armagan Yavuz that focuses on Bannerlord's upcoming Early Access phase. An excerpt:

"We can test one path quite easily," he said. "But with a game as ambitious as Bannerlord, we need to test and check out maybe a million different paths."

That's functionally impossible for TaleWorlds' team of around 90 developers, and it's something that offering the game to early adopters on Steam can help solve. What that means, of course, is that people who buy the game on Steam in early access are effectively functioning as beta testers.

"What it will be mostly for is making sure all these different interactions work, and the players are happy and have good feedback about all the different features," Yavuz said.