Bannerlord is a title that’s ultimately too flawed to give a 7/10 score, but what’s most interesting about the game is that its qualities are so unique that it becomes very difficult to see the forest for the trees as it pertains to the game’s value for the player. I’ve only just managed to shake off my annual addiction from it after a two-month play period.
Fighting through war-torn kingdoms with your band of arrow-fodder soldiers and randomly generated companions has two main strengths to its gameplay loop: the warband management and the combat. Naturally, you’d imagine the entire game would revolve around warband management, and it does, but for now, that term will refer to income, relation, and morale management.
The Warband Management
These aspects of the gameplay prey on the human mind’s need to turn infinite growth into passive behavior. Effectively, a player wants to buy out production in cities, earning them passive income. A player wants to earn all of the associated perks related to relationships to increase their standing with lords without ever talking to them. A player also wants to keep their warband’s morale at 100 without ever needing to purposefully replenish their mixes of foods by consistently winning battles with their unstoppable army of tier six Fian Champions.
As it happens, the end-game of Bannerlord sees money become all but infinite, relationships become irrelevant, and morale nothing more than a theoretical soft cap on how many prisoners you can recruit. But during the mid-game, these facets of the game provide enticing goals to work towards while you interact with the second main draw of the game:
The Combat
Astonishing though it may seem, Bannerlord offers combat gameplay that is both underdeveloped and entirely unique (which is the theme for the game as a whole, if you’ve not caught on.) When trying Bannelord out, Civilization players will be found wanting for more city management and Chivalry players will be wanting for better combat mechanics, and yet both of them will find that there aren’t any games that can provide both of these styles of gameplay in quite the same way that Bannerlord can. These aspects of Bannerlord aren’t strong on their own, but together they are, at least, unique.
Combat in Bannerlord suffers from a wild problem of wonky hitboxes, strange, unintuitive armor calculations, and a rather unfortunate limitation introduced by AI that does not show any signs of self-preservation when fighting enemies in the open field nor in sieges. In the early to mid-game, this matters less to the average player, as they will find themselves fighting lightly armored opponents with a smaller band of troops who are easier to manage in skirmishes.
But as the game crawls towards the end-game, these combat problems will begin to matter more and more. Enemies will be heavily armored, meaning some weapons will one-tap them while others will do 10% of their HP. Battles will take place between men numbered in the thousands, so troops will find themselves using their complicated algorithms to strategically smack their faces against the opponents in an attempt to speedrun dying.
As a small aside, it is these same AI issues that make sieges a cheese-fest instead of the strategic logistical puzzles they should be.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s played Mount and Blade: Bannerlord for any significant amount of time to read that the end-game, which has already been cited as a problem area for the game numerous times, is the ultimate issue where these problems culminate.
When money isn’t infinite, you’re not in the end game, and finding ways to achieve cash flow is fun. When you don’t farm free relationship standing through warfare and perks, you’re not in the end game, and charming someone up feels worth the effort. When combat is less a battle of AI face-tanking and more a skirmish of tactics, you’re not in the end game and your contributions on the field actually matter.
It’s unfair to expect Bannerlord to get everything right all of the time, but it definitely seems fair to be disappointed that it gets most things wrong by the time the end-game rolls around. I’m happy to be free of this addiction.
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