Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - Developer Post

[Couchpotato]

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord has a new developer update talking about the art department, and how the game handles hair.

One of the current focuses of the artists is on character hair. Hair is a great challenge for all games; simulating realistic movement and texture when you have so many individual strands moving separately is incredibly resource intensive, when done in real time. Some games use certain techniques to improve the simulation, while saving resources but in a game like Mount&Blade, where you may have 100s of characters on screen, the balancing act becomes significantly more difficult. Our current working method is: a textured base (something like a hair coloured swimming cap) with groups of hair strands (rendered onto polygons with alpha channels) moving in various directions to give a natural look. This adds more depth than the method used in warband, which relied on the texture to give depth to the hair. You can see the difference below (Left: Warband, Right: Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord):

It goes without saying but what you're seeing is the game in its current state and the hair will likely see further changes and improvements. That means, if there's something you don't like about it, feel free to let us know via an ALL CAPS tweet with several exclamation marks but there's a good chance we're not completely happy with it either... just yet. The most important thing is that it's something which can be used en masse without heavily impacting on performance, a possiblilty achieved by the strength of our new game engine.

More information.

 

[wiretripped]

About time that some news about this game starts to be released... How long has this been in development now? 2 years? 3? I was starting to think it was vaporware.

 

[wolfing]

I just fired Mount&Blade from my backlog yesterday. Never gave it a chance since it's twitch based, so other games kept coming above my options. It's actually quite good and could easily be considered an RPG. I like it even with my slow reactions (guess the fact it starts in 'very easy' difficulty helps (when I go to 'options' it says PC is getting 1/4th damage and allies 1/2).

For the life of me I can't seem to hit anything from horseback, but I can still enjoy watching my 30+ followers kill the enemy and I just charge foot soldiers with my horse, I don't miss that way

 

[SpoonFULL]

I seriously can't wait for this to come out.

I am replaying Warband now and it would be an insult to play anything else until bannerlords come out - there is nothing like Mount and Blade when one considers all the features: deep and strategic combat, social, political, economical, historical and rpg aspects and how they all work together.

 

[SpoonFULL]

For the life of me I can't seem to hit anything from horseback, but I can still enjoy watching my 30+ followers kill the enemy and I just charge foot soldiers with my horse, I don't miss that way

You need to use weapons with longer reach (100+) for best results, and lean more on your horse. Polearms are best. It is much better in Warband and combat is more responsive so would recommend that over the 1st Mount and Blade.

I assume that you know that you can give commands to your archers, infantry and cavilary during combat - yes? That can make a large difference: put archers on high hills so that they kill and be difficult to reach in combat while infantry on the lower ground, and cavilary a bit further way from the battle ground to sweep the enemy later or when tables turn.

 

[Saxon1974]

Love mount &blade, especially with historical mods.

This being said I don't expect a playable sequel before 2015I if even that. All this waiting and a year since its announced and they give us an update on....HAIR....ha well at least they got their priorities right

 

[SpoonFULL]

Love mount &blade, especially with historical mods.

This being said I don't expect a playable sequel before 2015I if even that. All this waiting and a year since its announced and they give us an update on….HAIR….ha well at least they got their priorities right

I am sure that their development is already progressing, and that they are showing tiny things and will gradually show more to build up momentom for the release. I hope its not going to be 2015 .

 

[Roq]

Hair is important; do hate it when my pony tail clips through my shield.

 

[wolfing]

You need to use weapons with longer reach (100+) for best results, and lean more on your horse. Polearms are best. It is much better in Warband and combat is more responsive so would recommend that over the 1st Mount and Blade.

Still, when I am in tournaments and they give me a big jousting lance, I don't hit anything, just had a bout where I was left on my horse and big lance against 4 foot soldiers, I kept going back and forth against them and never touched anybody.

I assume that you know that you can give commands to your archers, infantry and cavilary during combat - yes? That can make a large difference: put archers on high hills so that they kill and be difficult to reach in combat while infantry on the lower ground, and cavilary a bit further way from the battle ground to sweep the enemy later or when tables turn.

hmm... that's like too complicated for me, same reason why I don't like games like Total War But I can still win by just running around fighting my own battles and my buddies doing their own thing

 

[Pladio]

The lance on horse combat is slightly boring, you do not actually move the lance.

What you do is ride around trying to get as much speed as possible and just ram into units. It does tremendous damage. Don't click the mouse to attack with the lance. It's called couched lance damage or something.

So, ride straight into enemy units with the lance pointed towards them. It takes a few tries to get it right.

Just do not attack in any case ! Worst thing you can do is initiate an attack with a long lance.

So it's only a decision to defend or not if someone as a lance coming straight at you or if you're blocked and aren't moving fast enough to do couched lance damage.

If this doesn't make sense, I believe there would be tutorials on youtube to explain how this works.

 

[azarhal]

I pulverized hordes of enemies with the couched lance technique. I also made lots of money in tournaments. Took lots of time to get right though, you can't hit enemies at random, you have to hit in the right spot (i.e. do a head shot at full speed on a horse).

It makes the game a bit boring overtime, because every fight end up the same way: charge + hit on every single enemies.

 

[wolfing]

for some reason I can never complete the looters quests, they spawn like 4 of them, I kill 2, maaaaybe find the 3rd, but by then the 4th one is long gone never to be seen again (maybe they go chasing after some villagers or caravans or something and end way far from their original area, impossible to find. I also found the game is very alt-tab unfriendly in full screen mode. Luckily found if you alt-enter to make it a window you can do whatever you want, then alt-enter again to make it full screen again.

 

[wolfing]

they weren't kidding when they said playing as a woman was going to be tougher than as a man. My first test game as a man, I had a fief of my own in the first week (got lucky after tutorial, there was already a tournament in the nearest city, won it, next city I visited, tournament there, won it, king was there, he gave me a fief). As female I've been winning countless tournaments, battles, doing quests all over the place and still the king won't give me a fief.

I'm playing with TweakMB which makes the game so much more enjoyable. I didn't go overboard, just changed a setting so cattle followed you, another setting so you could visit the guild master from the town menu (instead of wasting 5 minutes in each town/city looking for him), and another to make innkeepers slave brokers I'm considering eliminating the 'looters' quest as it's such a chore, it spawns like 4 looters, you kill 2 easily, the 3rd with some luck will be somewhere in a 2000 mile radius, and the 4th I've never been able to find in like 4 times I've got this quest (I even raised my spotting to 2 and nothing)