Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord Impressions

With Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord now out of early access, Eurogamer brings us this article with some early-game impressions from a newcomer to the series. If you're curious what playing Bannerlord would be like for someone who doesn't have at least a few hundreds hours in Warband, you should check it out.

A few paragraphs to get you started:

When captured - and I like this mechanic- you're carried around until you either bribe someone or find another way to escape. It's a neat way of making you experience defeat without outright dying. So, I'm carried around by these bandits, on the world-map part of the game, and they're moving around apparently at random - sometimes standing by a settlement, sometimes hiding in the trees - and the game seems to just forget about me. Nothing happens.

I'm beginning to wonder whether something's gone wrong, which is not an uncommon thought in the game, because it has a kind of endearing scruffiness - and whether I should be seeing the simulated world as brazenly as this, whirring away without any apparent need for me, the player - when the game suddenly seems to remember and says something like, "Oh, you found a way to escape," and spits me back out. And then I'm back into trying to break into it again.