
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
🙂1
76561197968510931

There's good stuff in here and it does things no other games do... There are alot of systems in this game, and every single one of them so incredibly half-baked. You can tell there's a fantastic game at the end of the tunnel, but nothing is done to completion. Half baked mechanics: - Diplomacy is very limited - The dialogue system has alot of "fluff" for what should probably just be a menu... - Voice acting is in there, but very barebones. - When running a kingdom the game wants you to rely on vassals and other parties, but the AI is so awful at controlling these that it just leads to frustration trying to rely on them. You can't give them specific orders or goals to alleviate it either. - There's a criminal gang system, but it's very barebones. - Because the AI is awful, the difficulty is spiked to compensate by it getting extra troops and money and probably by teleporting, but it becomes more frustrating than interesting as "defeated" factions will continuously respawn hordes of lords with tiny 10 men armies which distract friendly AI's and raid villages. There's a jail, but this only puts lords in a temporary time-out before they "escape". Which leads to it essentially being necessary to execute hordes of lords which the game mechanics discourage you from doing. It alternately makes it mandatory to grind a companion governor with unlocked "prison escape chance" reduction simply to stop the endless respawning of troops. Very "gamey" and more importantly, is a distraction from everything that's actually fun in the game... - The AI does very illogical things, like chasing parties it cannot possibly catch due to speed difference and getting distracted from big goals like taking castles or towns by small irrelevant groups or because it felt it was more important to raid an inconsequential village. - There's a bunch of governor traits, but your main character cannot be a governor... which is a bit weird. - Pathfinding is quite buggy with units often getting stuck when complex geometry is present. A unit trying to reload a catapult may get stuck on the catapult for instance or take extremely long paths. - There is an order system for ordering troops in battle, but is also barebones. You cannot tell your units to target specific units for example. - Lots of pointless clicking... For example, units gain XP and prisoners can become recruitable, but upgrading and recruiting requires alot of periodic clicking. This could and probably just should be an "on/off" toggle to auto-recruit or auto-toggle... - You can't automate alot of boring kingdom management tasks... for example by telling a partymemeber to continually go fetch recruits. - Placing units during a town defense can be quite messy. Basically I just wish the game was actually finished. Even when you want to give it a chance there's just constantly bugs or crashes which will ruin the experience.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
🙂1
76561197968510931

There's good stuff in here and it does things no other games do... There are alot of systems in this game, and every single one of them so incredibly half-baked. You can tell there's a fantastic game at the end of the tunnel, but nothing is done to completion. Half baked mechanics: - Diplomacy is very limited - The dialogue system has alot of "fluff" for what should probably just be a menu... - Voice acting is in there, but very barebones. - When running a kingdom the game wants you to rely on vassals and other parties, but the AI is so awful at controlling these that it just leads to frustration trying to rely on them. You can't give them specific orders or goals to alleviate it either. - There's a criminal gang system, but it's very barebones. - Because the AI is awful, the difficulty is spiked to compensate by it getting extra troops and money and probably by teleporting, but it becomes more frustrating than interesting as "defeated" factions will continuously respawn hordes of lords with tiny 10 men armies which distract friendly AI's and raid villages. There's a jail, but this only puts lords in a temporary time-out before they "escape". Which leads to it essentially being necessary to execute hordes of lords which the game mechanics discourage you from doing. It alternately makes it mandatory to grind a companion governor with unlocked "prison escape chance" reduction simply to stop the endless respawning of troops. Very "gamey" and more importantly, is a distraction from everything that's actually fun in the game... - The AI does very illogical things, like chasing parties it cannot possibly catch due to speed difference and getting distracted from big goals like taking castles or towns by small irrelevant groups or because it felt it was more important to raid an inconsequential village. - There's a bunch of governor traits, but your main character cannot be a governor... which is a bit weird. - Pathfinding is quite buggy with units often getting stuck when complex geometry is present. A unit trying to reload a catapult may get stuck on the catapult for instance or take extremely long paths. - There is an order system for ordering troops in battle, but is also barebones. You cannot tell your units to target specific units for example. - Lots of pointless clicking... For example, units gain XP and prisoners can become recruitable, but upgrading and recruiting requires alot of periodic clicking. This could and probably just should be an "on/off" toggle to auto-recruit or auto-toggle... - You can't automate alot of boring kingdom management tasks... for example by telling a partymemeber to continually go fetch recruits. - Placing units during a town defense can be quite messy. Basically I just wish the game was actually finished. Even when you want to give it a chance there's just constantly bugs or crashes which will ruin the experience.
