Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Beta Branch Live, Multiplayer Impressions
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Since Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord launched into early access, we’ve been getting new patches on an almost daily basis. And in order to keep the updates flowing without breaking anything major, TaleWorlds Entertainment now plans to have additional alpha and beta branches to test some of the less reliable features before introducing them into the main game.
The beta branch is already live. Among many other things, it rebalances XP gain for both you and your troops, which should lead to a smoother leveling experience. Check out the link above for the complete patch notes, but here’s some general information about the new branches:
Greetings warriors of Calradia!
Since the release of Bannerlord, we have shared a number of hotfix patches with you to address some of the most prevalent challenges that players were experiencing. At this point, we want to begin establishing a more structured patch process to better support content changes that bear a greater risk for your gameplay experience.
For this purpose, we intend to introduce 2 additional branches to Steam. Aside from our public branch, which players will use by default, we will also offer opt-in alpha and beta branches.
The beta branch will include content that has gone through our internal testing and will be exposed to public testers for at least one week. During this period, we will address discovered issues with hotfixes. Our goal is a weekly cycle where we push our internal version to the beta and the prior beta version to the main Steam build. However, if serious challenges arise, we may delay an update until those issues have been addressed.
The alpha branch will include content that is untested. It is intended for players, modders and explorers that wish to be as close to development as possible - even at the cost of stability. Our goal is to update it daily with our latest development branch.
Please be aware that opting into the alpha or beta branch may negatively impact your experience.
You can find the patch notes for the beta branch below. We will publish the alpha branch at a later date.
On top of that, you might be interested in this Escapist Magazine article that talks about Bannerlord’s multiplayer modes and how some of them may have a future in e-sports. A couple of sample paragraphs:
No, the real treasure of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the Captain mode. If that mode takes off as well as it deserves to, it could become an esport in its own right, potentially bringing in viewers who have never even watched competitive gaming before.
The idea behind the mode is pretty simple: Two teams of six players fight it out on a battlefield, with each player commanding a company of AI-controlled soldiers. You get to choose what type of unit you control, from a small band of heavily armored cataphracts to a horde of what amounts to angry peasants with pointed sticks.
You wander around the battlefield yourself, pointed stick in hand, barking orders to your soldiers about where to stand, where to face, when to charge, and when to run away with your tail tucked between your legs. Each dead soldier stays dead until the end of the round, making each match a deadly game of high-stakes chess where you and your teammates must work together to either hold critical points or wipe your enemy off the map. Victory will almost always go to the team that manages to outthink the enemy, with tactics and battlefield awareness winning out over individual heroics.
