Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Review - Page 2
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At some point during the game's early access phase, I decided to make a character who was a complete wuss. No more than 2 points in any physical attribute but plenty of social skills. And even so, after getting over the initial difficulty hump, I found myself dominating on the battlefield. And in a long campaign, eventually, you'll find yourself decent, at pretty much everything you do, seeing how the game uses a learn-by-doing system with very lax limitations.
Another major Bannerlord mechanic, the clan system, is now more robust compared to its original iteration. You can now have multiple parties of relatives roaming the map. Your younger siblings slowly grow up and develop into real characters. You can even die of old age and have your children take over, though by the time I completed my release version campaign, my character was 34 and his kids were still toddlers, so I guess it's more of a just-in-case feature.
Your clan members can now also get married to various NPC lords. Which presents a problem. After a few opening quests, you're reunited with your family and are tasked with discovering an ancient banner to then either restore or destroy the remnants of a fallen empire. That's if you're playing the game's campaign mode as opposed to the sandbox mode that has none of that banner stuff and just lets you roam the map without some big quest hanging over your head.
Either way, you have a clan. And immediately after unlocking it in my latest campaign, I got a notification that my brother got married and his new wife was now a part of our clan. Prior to that, she used to be a member of some noble NPC family. This means she enters your clan wearing high-end gear you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford until the late mid-game. You, of course, can take that gear, wear it yourself, and become unstoppable. And the game just throws that stuff at you when you're still mostly dealing with naked guys throwing rocks as the main enemy.
The list of Bannerlord's features that make you scratch your head and raise an eyebrow can go on and on. But in general, the developers may call this a full release, but the whole thing has an air of being unfinished about it.
Let's consider voice acting for example. The release version now has considerably more of it, usually around the story bits and encounter introductions. And what's there sounds great with all the cheesy exaggerated accents. But some characters and encounters are still not voiced at all. So you attack a bunch of looters and they talk at you. But then you attack some forest bandits and you only get silence.
All the social aspects of the game are pretty much exactly where they started. There's no intrigue, diplomacy, or dialogue-based roleplaying. The game doesn't even attempt to justify its wars in any way. Kingdoms just wage war because it's what you do in the game.
At some point in my campaign, the ruler of the kingdom I was supporting died of old age, and I was then elected as the new king. Which is a weird thing to do in a monarchy if you ask me, but at least it gave me a chance to experience what it's like to reign over the biggest kingdom on the map as opposed to some plucky upstart with two castles.
Basically, as a king, you can override any decision of your council if you have accumulated enough "influence," and you can choose between a balanced, defensive, or offensive approach to war. That's it. You can't tell your lords to go here or there, can't tell them to get an army going, can't even tell them to deal with the bandits plaguing their lands.
When a war starts, it just does, without even some pretext at diplomacy, like some other king saying that a town you own used to belong to him and he wants it back, or that running a war is mighty expensive, so why don't you skip the unpleasant part and just pay him.
