Thursday, September 10, 2020

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord Analysis

Overview

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord was released as an early access title on March 30th, 2020. It was developed and published by TaleWorlds Entertainment, an independent game development company based in Turkey. It is a hybrid game that features elements of simulation, role-playing, and strategy.

Formal Elements

Players

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord's main campaign is single player, but there is a multiplayer battle mode available.

The single player campaign sees the player create a character. You must pick a starting culture, gender, name, appearance, and backstory divided into different lifestages. The culture and backstory strongly influence how you will play the game, as your culture provides different bonuses and alters what backstory events will be available. These backstories in turn provide different starting bonuses to your stats, skills, traits, and renown. Since you can more easily level up at lower levels compared to higher ones, it will become more and more difficult to level up skills as your character level increases. You can control your character either from first or third-person perspective, although the campaign map can only be viewed from a top-down view common to many strategy games.

Unlike most other strategy games, the campaign map automatically pauses when your character is not moving or taking another action, such as raiding a village or besieging a castle or city. This mechanic is the same as the original Mount & Blade, but will be familiar to other players from the more recent first-person shooter/puzzle game, SUPERHOT.

Rules

This is going to be a long section. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord tries to simulate and capture a lot of different aspects in their game, and this leads to a complicated and intertwined rule set.

Combat and Movement

Let's start with the basics. When you are in a town, village, or on a combat map, you use the WASD keys to move around as in most FPS or TPS games. Your mouse will control where you are looking, and space bar can be used to jump. So far, so good, right? In towns and villages, you will not be able to attack anyone, except in special circumstances.

Combat revolves around the title of the game: mounts and blades. You can either use a horse to gallop around the map, or you can run around on your own two feet. Horses provide a huge boost to mobility, but they also penalize your attacks somewhat, and some weapons are not available when mounted. They also make you harder to hit if you remain moving, and you can use them to charge foot soldiers, dealing damage to them just by the impact of the horse's body. The damage of your weapons are also strongly influenced by the speed you are traveling at, so horses can greatly amplify this. Certain polearms can be "couched" when your horse reaches a high enough speed, allowing you to lock it in place and deal a massive amount of damage during a charge.

You can use a large variety of medieval weapons: one- and two-handed swords, maces, and axes, bows, crossbows, daggers, throwing weapons such as knives, axes, and javelins, as well as different polearms. Bows, crossbows, and throwable weapons work much as they do in other games: you must click left mouse button to ready your attack, and then you must take aim, taking into account that gravity will draw your projectile down the further away your shot is. You have a limited amount of time before your arm begins to tire and you must either cancel the shot, or take your chances with a wild one.

The melee combat is based on a 4-axis scheme: up, down, left, and right. You click and hold the left mouse button to initiate an attack, and then you drag the mouse in the direction you wish to attack. Up leads to high attacks, a vertical chop. Left and right lead to slashes, and down triggers a stab or thrust. Releaseing the button triggers the attack animation. Blocking works the same way, although carrying a shield somewhat mitigates the need to match your enemey's attack direction. If you are using a two-handed sword, and your enemy attacks from the top, you need to block using the right mouse button and dragging up. Otherwise, if you are in range, the attack will pass through your guard and deal damage. One caveat is that not every weapon has every attack type. For example, thrusting polearms are never used for slashing, so left/right/up/down all play essentially the same animation. Maces and axes also feature restrictions: they cannot be used for thrusting.

Although dirt simple, this system provides much of the draw for combat in the Mount & Blade series. Complex feints, dodges, and parries are possible when those 4 attacks and 4 blocks are combined with your character's movement. You can also kick or shield bash using F. Some weapons can also be toggled between a one-handed and two-handed mode using X, but this alters their damage and speed profile.

You can fight until you run out of health. There is no stamina system limiting your attacks or your movement, so you can spam the attack button as much as you want, although this will often lead to your death, as enemies take advantage of your recovery to clock you with a mace or rock. Should you die, your fate will be determined by the context of the battle, which will be discussed in the next section.

Battle

Combat in Mount & Blade takes place in set circumstances. It must be triggered by a particular dialogue outcome with an NPC, whether in a town or out on the campaign map. If you have other characters in your party, they will join you in battle. This is where the RTS elements enter. During battle, you can give commands to your party members based on numbered hot keys. By default, companions and infantry are set to 1, archers to 2, cavalry 3, and horse archers 4. There are further categories of skirmishers 5-6, and others, but I personally found I rarely used them. Commands are relatively simple, but powerful. You can indicate that a group of soldiers should advance, retreat, hold/travel to a position, charge, face a direction, take a formation (such as tight, loose, circle, wedge, etc). Mounted troops can be forced to mount or dismount, troops with bows or throwing weapons can be ordered to fire at will or hold their fire. If you prefer not to worry about all the details, you can delegate command to troop sergants, who will issue commands to each category of troop. Again, while simple, these commands add a whole layer of depth to combat, as you could command from the front as Alexander the Great, or stay aloof and issue your commands while staying out of direct combat. You could even do a mix, ordering positions and formations, then entering the fray yourself for a time. Flags indicate the position that troops will take, and which troops are currently selected.

You can only enter a battle if your character's health is 20% or higher.

Any character in battle can be killed or wounded. If the character is wounded, it will eventually heal after the battle and return to full health. If the character is killed, it is removed from the game permanently. You can turn this feature on for companions, but by default companions and named NPCs cannot be killed in battle. If you fall in battle and your troops are all killed, you will be captured by the enemy and you will have to bribe your way out, wait to be ransomed, or wait until your character escapes (after a random time). Most of your inventory will be gone, and your companions might have escaped before you, or they may still be prisoners. If you were attacking a bandit camp, your troops will drag you out and you will be able to heal and try again later.

Inventory and Party

The inventory system is basically a weight based system. All items have a weight and take away from your carrying capacity. Mounts and soldiers increase your carrying capacity, so for example, when you are by yourself and you have one mount, you can usually carry about 30kg, while an army of 150 troops, with about 50 spare mounts might be able to carry 5000-6000kg, depending on the exact type of mounts. You can exceed your carrying capacity, but this drastically reduces your campaign map speed. Why would you need to carry so much, you might ask? Well, there are a lot of reasons. One is that you will probably spend a large amount of time fighting bandits or other lords' armies, from which you will receive a lot of loot. And I mean a lot of loot. So much so that by the mid or late game, you will not be able to sell all your unwanted loot in a single town. You will receive 20,000 or 40,0000 denars, which will clear out the town, and you will have to travel to another because you still have a ton of junk. And you need the money to pay your soldiers.

That carrying capacity will also come in handy to feed your soldiers, and to trade, should you decide to do so. Your soldiers need to eat, and you need to carry enough food to feed them. If they don't get enough food, or if you can't pay them, they will desert and leave your party.

Regarding your own personal inventory, and your companions, you can hold four different weapons at any given time, although bows and arrows are counted as separate, so you need two slots for a bow/crossbow to be effective. Your armor is divided into head, shoulders (no, not knees and toes, fuckwad), chest, hands, and feet. Because these areas are different in terms of hit detection and intrinsic damage resistance, you need to prioritize good armor in vulnerable places. The head, of course, is a smaller target than the body, but it leads to quick fatalities, while the body still offers a lot of damage and a much larger target. The arms and legs can receive fatal wounds, but the probability is much lower. Your personal mount and saddle also occupy their own equipment slots. Lastly, there is a "civilian" tab in your inventory, which allows you to select clothes for when you are walking around towns and villages. As of June, 2020, there is no effect of these civilian clothes, besides their armor ratings, by which I mean that different factions will not respond to you based on what you are wearing, nor will different groups, such as commoners, criminal gangs, and nobles respond to you based on your clothes.

OK, time to dive in to discussing parties. Your party consists of yourself (the party leader), your companions, your troops, and your prisoners. Your companions are special NPCs that you can recruit from taverns around the game world. They have different backstories, cultures, appearances, starting inventories, attributes, and skills. They can contribute to your party/clan in many different ways. You can assign them roles such as engineer, surgeon, quartermaster, etc, which then makes them responsible for sieges, healing troops, and feeding troops, respectively. This means that they will gain experiences points for completing those actions, and also that their skill in that action controls its success and speed. Having a surgeon with 200 skill in medicine, for example, means faster healing compared to a surgeon with 50 skill in medicine. Companions can also be sent out on quests, provided that they meet the requirements. This allows you to take other quests yourself, and expands the rate at which you generate gold, positive relationships with others, and renown. You can also have companions form their own parties or trade caravans. Parties can be called on if you declare war and need additional soldiers for your army, while trade caravans travel from city to city and generate a fluctuating amount of gold. There are two more benefits or uses to mention. First, you can assign them as the governor of fiefs you own, increasing their efficiency and utilizing whatever special governor bonuses the companions have. Second, depending on their combat skills, they can make a powerful addition to your army. Having a master archer with a high tier bow and arrows equipped, or a two-handed weapon master with tier 6 long sword might not turn the tide of battle by themselves, but they can certainly help.

Like your companions, your troops are also recruited, but they will likely come directly from cities and especially from villages. If you have a high positive relationship with the elders of a village or the influential NPCs of a city, you will have access to higher tier troops, but without that leg up, you can only recruit the more basic tiers. Each culture in the game world has a different troop tree, and there are several special troop trees based on unique factions and starting troop types. As they make kills, they will receive experience and level up, increasing their armor and weapon quality, as well as their attributes and skills. Unlike your companions, your troops can be killed in battle, so you need to think carefully before attacking another army or besieging a city.

Lastly there are prisoners. When you wound an enemy in battle, they become available to take prisoner. They can be ransomed at a tavern, or if they are below tier 5, you can wait and you might eventually be able to recruit them. Noble prisoners can either be released or taken prisoner, and once captured, they can be executed or ransomed. Be careful about executions, as this has a massive impact on relationships with their clan and faction.

Skills and Attributes

Nope, we're still not done talking about the rule systems. Bannerlord has six attributes: Vigor, Control, Endurance, Cunning, Social, and Intelligence. Each attribute influences your learning rate for three skills.
  • Vigor: influences One-handed weapons, two-handed-weapons, and polearms.
  • Control: influences bow, crossbow, and throwing weapons.
  • Endurance: influences riding, athletics, and smithing.
  • Cunning: influences scouting, tactics, and roguery.
  • Social: influences charm, leadership, and trade.
  • Intelligence: influences steward, medicine, and engineering.
Each NPC and player character increases these skills in the same way: by engaging in actions linked to the skill. If you want to increase leadership, you need to lead a large army and maintain high morale in your armies. Medicine skill is increased both when troops are wounded and when you heal them, whereas riding is increased by riding a mount at high speeds and doing damage while mounted, in addition to simply having a mount equipped while moving around the campaign map. You get the idea. This is the same system, essentially, as The Elder Scroll Series. Thus, every skill has its own XP gauge, and every 25 skill levels, there is a perk you may unlock. Sometimes these are singular, but for others there are choices. For example, you may have to choose between increasing every party members' XP by a small amount each day, or increasing tier 1-2-3 troops' XP by a medium amount each day. Your character's level is also determined how many skill-ups you receive. To go from level 3 to level 4, you need to receive 15 skill-ups, while going from 13 to 14, you need 65 skill-ups. You receive a focus point every time your character levels up, and every three level ups you receive an attribute point as well. Let's cover focus points first. Each skill has 5 slots for a focus point. Adding a focus point to a skill increases your learning rate and learning limit for that skill. So, effectively, if you receive 50XP in smithing, but you have all 5 focus points invested in it, and have an endurance of 5, your XP might be multiplied by 11, giving you 550XP. Both attributes and focus points have this multiplicative effect, but attribute points have a more pronounced effect. Both attributes and focus points influence your learning limit, and this is an additive operation. You can level up beyond the level limit for any skill, but your leveling will be much slower. It appears that the multiplicative effects are cancelled out beyond the learning limit. Much like other RPGs, the amount of XP needed for each successive level increases. Because of the rarity of attribute points, and the previously mentioned fact that you level your skills more slowly as your character level increases, it is important to pick your character's backstory carefully to get the attribute points you need in skills important for your playthrough. If you plan on being primarily a trader, you need to get a lot of points in social to begin with.


Crafting

Crafting is a new addition to the Mount & Blade series. In the base game, only weapon crafting is allowed. To craft an item, you need to have all the required materials available, and you need to have its parts unlocked. In the beginning, you will have only a few basic parts for each weapon unlocked, and some weapons may be totally out of your reach because of this. As you perform blacksmithing actions, your skill will increase and you will also unlock new parts. These appear to be random. To craft a one-handed sword, you need a blade part, pommel, guard, and handle. These exist in many different forms, and can be mixed and matched freely. Other weapons have different part categories. Each part has different ingredients, and so slightly alters the necessary materials. They also modify the attributes of the weapon, its swing speed, attack damage and type, cost, weight, etc. Once a weapon has been crafted, you can name it anything you want. Blacksmithing actions drain a special resource that you can replenish by resting in a town or village. You can also dismantle unwanted weapons into their parts, which also gives you a chance to unlock new parts.

Questing

With the exception of the main quest, questing in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord works much the same as in Mount & Blade: Warband. There are village elders in each village, shop owners and gang leaders in each city, and hundreds of lords and ladies belonging to each faction to be found wandering the map, in castles, or in cities. These NPCs will randomly generate a problem for the player to solve, which will persist for a certain amount of time whether you accept them or not. Once accepted, you usually have a limited amount of time to complete them. Village quests include training troops, protecting the village from extortionists, giving a village leader access to another village's grazing land, rescuing a village leader's daughter, solving a family feud, delivering a good to a city NPC, and others. City quests include supplying goods to an artisan, selling the artisan's goods somewhere else, escorting a caravan, supplying weapons for a gang leader, attacking a rival gang, rescuing a henchman, removing poachers, and others. Noble quests include tutoring a noble, finding a spy, supplying advanced troops for a garrison, and others. If you fail one of these quests, your relationship with the quest giver will decrease, leading to reduced troop recruitment options and a chance that the NPC might not trust you with another quest in the future. Completing quests allows you to improve your relationships with NPCs, which can lead to better troop recruitment, more quests, money, and renown.

Relationships

As you meet NPCs, you will begin to form relationships with them. Attacking an NPC will cause them to be hostile to you, as will laying siege to one of their fiefs. Completing quests for them and giving them gifts are early ways to increase your relationships, and as a vassal or a lord/lady, you will be able to vote on who receives fiefs and on whether to adopt certain policies. These offer other ways to modify your relationships. You can also court NPCs of the opposite sex, get married, and have children, who will age and one day take your place if you die. As one last point, your relationship status with NPCs will also affect what castles you can enter. If you have a neutral or positive relationship, you will be able to enter, but if your relationship is negative, you will be barred from entry.

Procedures

Completing a quest

Completing a quest could involve a wide range of activities. For sake of illustrating the variety, I will use three examples. First, you might have to make a delivery. The quest giver will give you a number of items, perhaps, wool, horses, cows, or iron, and you have to physically travel to the target NPC and hand them over. Once there, you also have the choice of keeping them instead. Second, to train a noble. The noble who needs training will join your party. You may assign them to different roles just like other companions. They will remain in your party until the time is up or until they have leveled up 60 times. They will join in combat and any other activities you do. Last, to take care of a troublesome company. The company will join your party, and begin stealing things from your baggage train. You must travel to different nobles and find one who is willing to hire them. To do this, you will need to pass different speech checks based on your honor, tactics, etc.

Trading

Trading will get you a lot of money if you are observant and if you invest attribute points into it. You can buy resources from one village and sell to a city at a higher price, you buy a resource which is in excess at one city and sell at another where it is in high demand. This will net you a profit and increase your skill level in trade. You can also simply sell your loot from your battles. This will give you money, but no experience, since you did not pay for the goods.

Leveling up

As mentioned before, leveling up is triggered by getting the required number of skill level ups. You will then have to choose how to invest your focus point, and your attribute point if received.

Talking to an NPC

You will need to speak with an NPC in order to complete most quests, in order to receive quests, and also to barter. Depending on the subject of conversation topic, there may or may not be skill checks. For example, if you are trying to get married, there will be several skill checked conversations with your potential partner which you must pass before they will accept you. Or when you try to convince a noble to join your faction, the same will happen.

Lay siege to a city or castle

Sieging a castle or city is a quite involved process. You will first have to make a siege camp, which might take a few days depending on your engineering skill. Once you have a siege camp established, you could immediately launch an attack, or you might spend more time building siege engines such as ballistas, manganols, battering rams, and trebuchets. Once these are constructed, any siege engines that the city or castle has will attack your siege engines. To avoid this, you can put them in reserve and return them to the active state once more are completed. This way all of them can concetrate their attack. When you begin the attack, you will have the chance to place your troops in different positions before the chaos ensues. You can command your soldiers as normal, and you can interact with the different siege engines you have placed. Climbing the siege ladders, or storming the gates are tense and exciting parts of the game.

Clear a bandit hideout

When you clear a bandit hideout, you will spawn on a small combat map with some of your party members. You must kill all the bandits there, and once you do, a final boss group will spawn in. You can duel them or attack as a group.

Resources

  • Health: Your health always starts at 100 points, and you may invest in certain perks which increase it slightly. If it drops to 0, you will be knocked unconscious.
  • Age: Your character's age will increase in time with the passage of days and years in the game.
  • Character Level: Your character level increases as you get more skill ups.
  • Perks: Perks are unlocked for each skill once you reach the necessary skill level.
  • Attribute Points: Attribute points determine how quickly you level up.
  • Skill Levels: Determined by the amount of XP you have earned in the skill.
  • Focus Points: You receive one each level up. These are used to increase the learning rate and limit for a skill.
  • Skill XP: Determined by the number of times you use the skill.
  • Influence: You only receive this if you are a mercenary, vassal, or a leader of a faction. You can spend this on giving different fiefs to your nobles, instituting policy changes, or summoning armies.
  • Renown: You can this for completing quests, winning battles, and tournaments.
  • Money: This is in units of denars.
  • Inventory Space: This is determined by the number of troops and horses that you have.
  • Companions: As you increase your clan level, you will increase the number of companions you may recruit.
  • Food: You can buy this from various vendors, or pick it up as loot from defeated parties. Having a larger variety increases party morale.
  • Trade Items and Materials: Your parties will not consume these like food. These are items like wood, tools, leather, wool, iron, steel, etc. You can either trade them at cities, or in the case of material, you can get them by dismantling weapons.
  • Weapons: These can be bought at vendors, crafted, or picked up from battle.
  • Armor: These can be bought at vendors, or picked up from battle.
  • Mounts: These can be bought at vendors, or picked up from battle. They increase your travel speed, and allow you to move around the battle field more quickly.
  • Fiefs: Once you become a vassal or a factor leader, you can have fiefs and also assign fiefs to nobles in your faction. You will receive taxes based on the number of fiefs you have, their sizes, and their productivity.
  • Workshops: You may buy workshops in any city that you are friendly with, but if you declare war on that faction, you may lose that workshop. These generate money every day.
  • Parties: Similarly to companions, the number of parties you have will increase based on your clan level. You can assign a companion to lead a party, and in cities you can create a special trade caravan party, which will only travel and engage in trade.
  • Party Morale: The higher your party's morale the more likely they will continue to fight.
  • Clans: Besides your own clan, you can recruit any number of clans into your faction.
  • Clan Level: This is primarily a function of your renown. It will effect your marriage prospects, party size, number of party limit, and number of companion limit.
  • Movement Speed (Campaign): This is a complex calculation based on the number of mounts, troops, prisoners, wounded, and of course your inventory burden.
  • Movement Speed (FPS): This is determined by your athletics skill if on foot, and by your horse speed if mounted.

Conflicts

Leveling

As mentioned before, because of the slow pace of leveling later on in the game, it makes sense to stack your character's social and intelligence attributes as high as you can from the character creation menu. Your combat skills will still increase much more rapidly early on simply because you use them more often in the early game. As you level up, however, you will need to decide how to spend your attribute and focus points. As focus points are more plentiful, and skills only have five focus point slots, it is quite easy to get all five slots filled on the key social and intelligence skills, like steward, leadership, tactics, trade, and charm. Even though they occur more often, you still need to pick carefully. A much more important and impactful choice is that of attribute points. You only get one every 3 levels, and these have a big influence on your playstyle.

Boundaries

Inventory

There are no hard limits to inventory, but inventory weight is limited by the factors mentioned above.

Map

You cannot go outside the map boundaries.

Attributes, skills and focus points

Each attribute can have a maximum of 10 points, while skills can go up to 330. Each skill can have a maximum of 5 focus points.

Companions and Spouses

You can only have 8 companions, and you can only have one spouse at a time.

Outcomes

There is literally no ending for Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. Like Mount & Blade: Warband, the game can always be continued. In one of my playthroughs for Mount & Blade: Warband, I created my own faction and decided to conquer the world. It took about 70 hours, but I was able to bring every castle and city under my control. In Bannerlord, you can remain as a mercenary forever if that is your wish. You could never join any faction, and instead play as a merchant, buying shops, creating trade caravans, etc. You could become a vassal of a faction and help them paint the map one color, or you could start your own faction and try to do so yourself.

Dynamic Elements

There are many dynamic elements in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. For starters, the dynamic friction pattern can be found in many design elements of the game. In increasing your skills, you need increasingly more XP for each level up. For each character level up, you require increasing more skill level ups. For each increase in clan level, you need more and more renown.

The slow cycle also appears in many different places. After a tough battle, you may have suffered from losses. You can recruit refresh troops from nearby villages or cities, and begin the long process of engaging in battles to give them experience and leveling them back up to the troops you lost.

Dynamic engines also make their appearance. Cities and castles can be customized with different buildings. These effect the economy, the population, and the stability of the area. If you create buildings which increase the economy, it gives you more money to spend from taxes, allowing you to build more buildings, etc, while if you focus on increasing the population, it gives you more militia and more soldiers to recruit. It also has a negative effect on the amount of food available. The point is, you can see that cities are engines that can be customized in different ways, producing different wide-reaching effects.

Playing style reinforcement is another strong pattern. Because skills improve as you use them, you are encouraged to specialize and focus on skills that you enjoy using.

If you have fiefs, you can optionally assign different companions to them as governors. This allows you to consider whether they would be better placed in a city, leading a caravan, a party, or staying in your own party. This is an example of the worker placement pattern.

Of course, trade is another strong pattern in this game. You can buy and sell many goods, and the economy is roughly simulated, so that as you buy more of a good in one area, the price will increase, whereas selling that same good causes the price to decrease.

The converter engine appears in several forms. Safety or stability leads to increased economic activity, for example, and over time influence will be converted into money.

The stopping mechanism appears in a few places. For example, you cannot enter negotiations with the same NPC too soon after you have already negotiated with them.

 

Dramatic Elements

Characters and Story

As in the previous Mount & Blade game, you start as a nobody. The main difference is that there is a main quest involving either destroying or rebuilding the Empire of Calradia.

There are hundreds of characters in the game, and they start out in the same relationships and factions each time, but they make different decisions each time, which leads to slightly different events.


Conclusion

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is finally out, and it is well worth the wait. You will still encounter many bugs and strange behaviors, but it is such a vast improvement compared to Mount & Blade: Warband. You have a lot more agency, which is saying a lot. You could play in almost any way in the original, and the scope of the game has just increased. The combat still feels awesome, and growing your faction is still really engaging. The options the player is given almost always enhance the experience, and the dev team is hard at work to improve the experience, even now during the height of the covid crisis.