Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review - Page 3
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Your clan members are also guilty of a similar lack of depth. They just exist to lead your secondary parties or govern your settlements. They don't even give you any quests like the regular NPC lords do. When it's early access and you click on a dialogue option asking to discuss something with your wife, brother, or companion and are then presented with a dead end with literally zero options, you don't mind too much. But when the same thing happens in a supposedly finished game, it's downright insulting.
Then you go back to check out some of the developer diaries from before even the early access release and you read about these grand plans of complex systems and the next level of medieval sandbox simulation where you'll need to mind your logistics to not starve or how various cultures will have unique breeds of horses.
And the funny thing is, all of that is true on the most basic of levels. So, in theory, you can starve if you don't buy any food, but the stuff is so plentiful that chances are, at some point you'll be getting way more of it just by fighting other lords and forget that it even exists. And yes, there are plenty of horse variations with some being slightly faster and others slightly tougher. But can you actually notice any difference when playing? If the horses are in the same tier, no you can't. And does it have any effect at all on the actual gameplay? I think at this point you know the answer.
At the same time, there are some undeniable improvements in the full version. Faction balance, for example, is much better now. Without your help, there's a constant back and forth now instead of a couple of kingdoms just conquering everything.
The general balance of things has also been adjusted and so now Battanian archers aren't ridiculously overpowered, for example. On the other hand, ranged weapons actually feel underpowered now, with high-end crossbows taking 2-3 hits to kill even mid-tier enemies and barely tickling the really armored ones.
Still, lords and their armies have been tweaked in some ways and now behave more reasonably. Sieges are significantly smoother. There's more scene variety so you're constantly fighting in new places instead of the same forest over and over again.
But as you may expect, this new stuff comes with new issues. Take the rebellion feature where a city may rise against its lord and create a new minor AI kingdom. It sounds cool on paper, but with the way loyalty works right now, a conquered fief will forever have considerable penalties to it.
As such, settlements you own will perpetually annoy you with their lack of productivity as you'll be spending most of the time idling them with loyalty-boosting festivals. But then the kicker is, the developers never bothered making sure the game's AI lords can do the same, so they just keep losing their recently-conquered towns to rebels and there's nothing you can do about it.
The game's main quest was also expanded with a new activity in the form of conspiracy quests. These mostly just tell you to go across the map anytime you're busy with some military campaign. And even if you ignore most of them and let them fail, they seemingly don't penalize you in any way. But at least you get a neat little cutscene once you finish the main quest now.
When it comes to combat, I did enjoy the way you can now slow down time when you're actively issuing orders on the battlefield. Not merely useful, it somehow just feels satisfying.
You also can now place your troops and adjust their formations before a battle begins. Unfortunately, that whole menu seems like it was designed for a controller specifically, as you can open radial menus and press buttons there, but you can't click on things. And, for some bizarre reason, adjusting the camera height with the mouse wheel on that particular screen and it alone is reversed, so you'll be constantly trying to pull out for a bird's eye view but get buried in the ground instead.
