Mount and Blade Bannerlord: My quartly addiction

When I was a young lad and actually had time to play video games, I discovered the Mount and Blade series. I sunk maybe 10 or 20 hours into Warband. It was fun, but it was also a lot to learn.

Fast forward a couple years and I eagerly downloaded Bannerlord while it was still in Beta. This was around the time where I was dipping my toe into modding, so I had a few mods going for it as well. It was fun.. but boy, the game felt rough. The downside of running mods on a game in Beta is with the frequent updates, a lot of times the mods break. And boy, did they break.

It wasn’t until last year that I really got into it. You have to understand though, “really into it” for me is like a 3-5 hours a week. I know, I know, noob numbers. In total, I have 84 hours in Bannerlord, which is good enough for like third-ish in play time from my library. I’ve gotten to what I would call “mid-game”. I have a beast of an army, I’ve declared for a kingdom and spend my time sieging the castle walls and kicking ass.

It may not seem like a lot of play time for some people, but it’s significant for me. I wanted to talk a little bit about my experience with the game.

Vanilla is ass

There. I said it.

The base game is not a great experience. At all. If it weren’t for mods, I definitely wouldn’t be as invested as I am in this game. I don’t even go for crazy mods, just basic ones that make sense and fix a lot of shit.

My current mod list is as follows:

• Detailed Character Creation
• Realistic Battle Mod
• Diplomacy
• DismembermentPlus

That’s it. Of course, to make those work you have the extra things such as Mod Configuration Menu, Harmony, Butterlib and UiExtendedEx, but those don’t really count in my book. They’re there to make the other shit work.

Realistic Battle Mod is the single-most noteworthy mod. It completely overhauls the armor, hitboxes and a ton of other shit. It makes the gameplay so much more immersive and, ya know, your armor actually fucking work.

DismembermentPlus is a guilty pleasure cause it’s freakin’ awesome. There’s no other hype like running full charge, swinging the blade and the slow motion activating as your behead a foot soldier. Ehem. Wow. That sentence really makes me sound not great. Anyway. You get what I mean.

The world is.. a lot

The world is fucking huge, man.

It is so easy to get lost in the sheer vastness of it. The game also doesn’t do a great job at pointing you in any one direction. You get a little tutorial, kind of a “main” quest, then it’s alright soldier good luck!

It can be a little overwhelming on your first playthrough. Then you become like me and think you have it figured out, only to realize there’s a whole side of the game that you haven’t even explored yet. There’s forging in this game. You can make weapons. I literally didn’t know that, nor have I pursued it in any of my playthroughs.

I mainly play this game to have huge battles and siege castles, so I don’t really focus on the other aspects. Maybe that’s on me. There’s definitely a lot of diplomacy stuff involved with your clan and kingdom. Honestly, I have to Google a lot of stuff.

A little repetitive

This may sound a little silly after just saying I don’t explore the game to its full potential, but it can definitely get repetitive. Once your are established, get a castle or two.. it really becomes a rinse and repeat. You have a good army, good armor and, usually, plenty of money. That takes care of a lot of the shit you grind for in the beginning. So what’s left?

Battles and diplomacy. I don’t know about you, but I’m not much of a diplomat. The only time I really care is when I need a governor for my newly acquired castle. Also, fuck you, marriage proposal rejected for my daughter.

The battles are epic, I won’t lie, but there’s a limit to how much you can keep repeating. My problem lies more with the AI than the actual battles. If left to their own devices, they’ll keep fighting over the same castle. Over and over and over again. Even if there is an easier, better target right next to it.

That means it’s up to you to make yourself an army and fuck up some castles. That’s fine, I just wish the AI was a little more conscious of strategy. Like bro why are you going for the castle in the middle of enemy territory that’s immediately going to be recaptured.

The voting systems when you conquer a castle are… interesting. You either get no votes, or they won’t stop giving you fucking castles. I’ve had to spend influence to not get a castle cause they kept feeding them to me.

Am I being nitpicky here? Probs.

I’m a fan

Regardless of the drawbacks. I’m a fan. It’s a fun game and there’s nothing else truly like it. From what I’ve seen, the community is a little frustrated with the lack of updates from Tale Worlds, but the modding community more than makes up for it. There’s a whole ass Discord dedicated to making it a MMORPG type game, which is wild. Hell, there’s a Game of Thrones mod!

The game? Cool. The game with mods? Fuckin’ awesome.