Dev Blog 23/08/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! As most of you will already know, we have been at Gamescom this week showcasing the singleplayer sandbox campaign of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. We have been reading comments and feedback and we noticed that quite a few people are interested in seeing some of the different screens and deeper parts of the game that are visible in the videos that are coming out from our guests at the booth. So with that in mind, for this week’s blog we thought we could show the character screen and explain the different elements of that and how character development works in Bannerlord. On the left side of the screen you can see the character skills. To improve these skills you need to perform the associated task or action. If we take One Handed as an example, successfully landing attacks with one handed weapons will increase the One Handed skill. Once you increase these skills enough, you gain access to different perks which you can select to give your character an extra edge in the game. Perks, as the name suggests, give your character certain bonuses. These bonuses could be anything from an increase in party size to extra ammunition in battles, or they even unlock certain actions, such as the ability to reload any crossbow while on horseback. Players are unable to unlock all of the perks, and in many cases, a choice will have to be made about which perks that you would like to choose. In the end, perks act as a great way for players to customise their character to match their playstyle. Just above the perk tree is the character leveling bar. As you increase your skills, your character will fill up the bar. Once the bar is completely filled, your character will level up and you will be rewarded with two extra focus points. These focus points can then be invested in different skills. Skill focus allows your character to gain experience at a faster rate for that particular skill. However, once you invest a skill point into a focus then it is permanently locked in. To gain skill points in any of the skills, you need to have made an initial investment of focus points, meaning that skills that are shown as level 0 and have no focus points invested in them cannot progress, no matter how much you practice them. All of this applies to companions in your party too, which players have total control over. Your companions can perform specific roles within your part such as Quartermaster, Scout or Surgeon. Once you assign a companion to a role, you will start gaining bonuses from skills and perks that are attached to that role.
Dev Blog 06/09/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! With Gamescom behind us and everyone back in work after taking some much needed time off to recover, we have had the chance to sit down and work our way through the major talking points to come out of this year’s expo. For some of the topics, we plan to expand upon them and explain them in greater detail at a later date in their own dedicated blogs, but for now, we want to clarify some of the things that were said in the interviews that took place during the event. Will the game release in Early Access? We feel that some form of Early Access would be beneficial for getting community feedback and balancing game elements. It would also allow dedicated fans to access the game sooner. Therefore our intention is to take this path at some point, however, we do not have a specific time frame for this. Will there be dynasties/families in the game? Players will be able to have family members and children. Time flows faster in Bannerlord (when compared to Warband) with a year currently set to 84 days (we will probably fine-tune this further before release). Also, you can start the game with siblings, nephews and nieces and they serve as potential heirs as well. Can the player and/or AI lords permanently die? Our current plan is to have this for both players and NPCs, but we will add an easy mode option to disable it for the player character. Players will be able to continue with a family member if their main character dies. Will the game have co-op? Adding co-op functionality to Bannerlord would increase the complexity and development time of the project considerably and therefore it will not be included in the release. We can hopefully add it as a DLC after release. We think the only viable way to support this is to make a single party co-op where additional players can join the main player’s battles but cannot venture into the campaign map on their own. Could you tell us the specs of the computers you used for the demo? We haven’t done a final optimisation pass of the game just yet and this is something that will come towards the end of development. We are aiming to make the game playable on a wide range of systems, but for the purpose of this demo, we used some high-end gaming laptops: CPU: Intel 7700K 4.2Ghz GPU: NVIDIA 1080 RAM: 32GB 1TB SSD Can we still build castles in villages we own? We had to drop that feature. At some point in development, fief management became too complex, with towns, castles and villages each having their own specific management screens. The ability to build castles in villages also gave rise to complex rules. For example, demolishing the castle in a village could potentially revert the village to another kingdom and we had to add complex logic to handle that. Overall, we felt that the design had become too bloated and unappealing. The solution was changing the status of villages so that they would no longer be considered independent fiefs but were always attached to a castle or town. This removed the necessity to have a management screen for villages and simplified and streamlined the system. The aesthetics of our new villages is also much more pleasing. Are we able to join minor factions? You can hire some minor factions as mercenaries or enlist them to your kingdom in other ways, but there is currently no way to join minor factions as a member. What is the release date? We made a decision some time ago not to announce or speculate on a release date, and as such, we currently don’t have a release date to share with you. As soon as we are confident that the game is ready for people to play, we will make an announcement.
Saw a video on this earlier today that involved an interview with a couple of the developers and they said over the course of development they have completely redesigned the UI 3 times, each time taking months to get right and the map has been completely redone in a new rendering engine just last month so it still has to be gone over for refining and fine tuning. They also said they are perfectionists and want to get it 100% right before release, which I like, but also dislike in that it takes 4 times as long because they sit there and tweak items for months until they decide the original way was best or the final one is only marginally different from the original. Some bloggers with supposed inside knowledge are saying mid 2019 for beta/early access and full release late 2019 or early 2020 I just want the game already...even if its early access/beta and still not perfect.
Dev Blog 04/10/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! When you set out on your adventures in Mount & Blade games, you are just a humble traveller with only a sword and a horse to your name. As you progress through the game and establish a foothold in Calradia, you can pledge your sword to a faction and be welcomed into the fold of the nobility. Eventually, you will have the option of branching out and establishing your own kingdom, or, as is the case with Bannerlord, if you have taken a liking to your current one, you can subvert it and seize power for yourself! In this week’s blog, we discuss how players can interact with their fellow nobles after joining or establishing their own kingdom, looking specifically at the kingdom screen, which is an entirely new addition to the Mount & Blade series. The main focus of Mount & Blade games revolves around the aforementioned journey from rags to riches. Almost every action you take in the game is done in the effort of increasing your wealth, prestige and ultimately, your power. However, in our previous games, there are parts of this journey which were somewhat overlooked during development. In our previous games, managing and interacting with the lords of your realm is an arduous task that requires some level of patience. The information presented to the player can be hard to locate and the kinds of interactions available are rather limited in scope. This is something we wanted to address for Bannerlord, making the mid-late game a more fluid and enjoyable experience for players. Our solution was to implement a screen dedicated entirely to this aspect of the game (along with some additional mechanics to expand upon the existing interactions available of course!). The Kingdom screen is split into four separate tabs: Clans, Fiefs, Policies and Armies. These tabs cover practically every piece of information that the player needs to make informed decisions and manage their kingdom effectively. The screen is still a work in progress and new elements are still being added, however, what we are showing you in this week’s blog is something close to what you can expect from the final game. Clans The Clans tab shows detailed information about every clan that is a member of the faction. This information includes the clan name, banner, influence, members and fiefs. In this screen, you can lend your support for one of the clans to become the leader of the faction or initiate a vote to have a clan expelled from the kingdom. Fiefs The Fiefs tab shows the towns, castles and villages which are under the control of the faction. There is also an option in this tab which lets you spend a large sum of influence to try and retract a fief from another lord. However, this is still subject to a vote from the other lords and the person on the receiving end of this action may not be too pleased with your meddling. If the vote is successful, then a second vote will begin to decide who will take control of the fief. Policies The Policies tab allows players to propose new policies or initiate a vote to repeal existing ones. Policies affect the entire kingdom and range from laws which give greater protections to vassals or transfer more power to the ruler. Armies Finally, we have the Armies tab. This tab lets you create and manage different armies within your faction. The screen gives you a detailed breakdown of each army, including the lords that comprise the army, the strength and cohesion of the army, and the army’s current objective. Faction leaders are able to assign objectives to the armies through this tab, giving players greater control over the strategic aspects of warfare in the game. Overall, we think the Kingdom screen is a welcome new addition and helps to enhance the mid-late game experience for players. Information is presented in a much more streamlined and aesthetically pleasing way and the new additions of clans, policies and armies all come together to give a more accurate representation of an actual medieval kingdom, especially when it comes to internal power struggles.
Dev Blog 11/10/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! Game development can be a tricky business. Sometimes an existing technology or tool just doesn’t do quite what you want it to do or it isn’t as efficient as you would hope. This leaves you with a difficult choice to make: change your design or create your own bespoke solution. This is something we came to realise while working on the User Interface (UI) for Bannerlord. Previously, we were using a combination of Flash and Scaleform to create our UI, which is actually a pretty common method in the game industry. We would start out by creating the UI in Flash, before using Scaleform to make the UI work in the game. Technically, both Scaleform and Flash functioned perfectly and provided us with the capability to implement the UI in the way that we liked. However, it wasn’t too long before we noticed some issues with the overall process of creating and implementing the UI that we thought needed addressing. To start with, the process was actually quite slow. Any changes to the UI had to be made in Flash, before being implemented in the game to be tested. As the screens grew in complexity, the .swf file generation would take longer. And with each change we made, the game would need to be reloaded to see the result. Even a small change, such as moving an element 5 pixels to the left, would require going through this entire process. Additionally, Scaleform and Flash are both third-party frameworks that we had limited control over. The difficulty of changing and modifying these systems, depending on our needs, made us question the effort that we were putting in just to make it work. Eventually, we realised that the time and energy we were spending on UI was really holding us back, and the only way to have a UI that would fit our vision for the game would be creating our own UI library. After all, some problems are just opportunities in disguise! Now, that was a really scary prospect because we had already invested thousands of man-hours into the existing UI. Fortunately, early in the development process, we had decided to use a paradigm called MVVM to create the UI. This meant that part of our code was in neat C# classes that did not depend on any specific UI library, and we would be able to re-use this part of our work even if we had to re-do the rest. Yay! Next, we had to decide what our new UI library would be like. We came up with a list of requirements: The new library had to be fast and snappy. Our engine team worked really hard to shave off a single millisecond from our render cycle and they wouldn’t appreciate the UI wasting away their savings with poor performance. The new library also had to be very easy to work with and make changes on the fly. It would preferably use a text-based specification file format, such as XML, since text-based files make collaboration by multiple developers so much easier. The system had to make it easy to create highly interactive UIs. The UI layout had to be independent of how it would look visually. This would allow the UI designer to work independently from the artist. We decided to name our new UI framework Gauntlet (for no other reason than we thought it sounded cool!). With Gauntlet, we can make changes on the fly. This means we can edit a screen without closing the game once, with no file generation or any additional steps needed. When we make changes to the .xml file of a screen, we see the results as soon as we save that file. And because we have full control over the system, we can make changes to the system as our needs demand it. So how does it work? Well, the system is actually pretty simple. We couple a .xml file to a screen in the game, which the game loads when the screen is opened. All of the layout information for the screen is specified in this file. We can also reference other .xml files in each .xml, which means that if we create a UI element that we know we are going to use more than once (i.e. in other screens) we can just refer to that element. This allows us to make changes to the file and have these changes occur anywhere that we reference this .xml. We also have a set of separate XML files that specify how various elements will look, much like CSS files are used for HTML pages. This skinning system is very powerful and the artist can easily specify every detail about how a UI element will look and behave. For example, a button can change colour when the user moves the mouse over it and it can go through an animation when the user clicks on it. Inventory screen .xml Inventory screen in-game We hope that Gauntlet will come as a welcome addition for our modding community. In Warband, editing the UI was always a bit of a headache and there were some limitations that couldn’t be overcome. With Gauntlet, modders will have total control over each screen, with the only limitation being their imagination.
Dev Blog 25/10/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important features of any single player game. Getting it right is key to the experience: it has to be almost invisible, so players (sort of) forget that they are playing against a machine. It has to be clever and fast enough to be a worthy opponent, but not too much – humans are fallible, after all; and ultimately the player, as the hero of the story, is supposed to win. It has to make use of the game mechanics at hand, not just to be fun and varied but to show the player what can be done. This rings especially true in a game such as Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, where skill-based combat and epic large-scale battles are at the core of the experience. In our previous games, the AI performed adequately in combat, but it was by no means advanced. Battle tactics were quite basic in that AI armies would either launch themselves into full-out assaults or sit back and wait for the player to attack. No consideration was given to the terrain, and at no point would the AI try to exploit weaknesses in their opponent’s army or capitalise on any mistakes made by the player. This lack of depth made the AI more an obstacle, a nuisance, than a truly worthy opponent. With Bannerlord, this is something that has received a complete overhaul. We want players to be challenged, to be clever and make use of all the combat mechanics available to them if they want to emerge victorious -- and at times, to be punished for any unwise decisions or mistakes that they make. To do this, and taking into account that combat in Mount & Blade can be both one-to-one and in large battles, we had to devise a more advanced and reactive combat AI, broken into three separate categories: individual, formation, and tactical AI. Individual Each individual agent in a battle is controlled by its own AI. Moving to a position (pathfinding), selecting a target, attacking and defending are all managed on this level. Individual AI needs to be extremely fast and responsive and its results should be correct within a very small margin of error (swinging a weapon, engaging an enemy that just charged them out of nowhere on horseback, etc.). In addition to this, orders need to be carried out across the entire formation at the same time. Ultimately, timing and execution need to be as close to perfect as possible. To put it simply, individual AI needs to be as precise as possible to ensure that each agent can perform effectively in combat. It needs to carry out any orders that are issued to it, as well as, assess the current situation to make its own decisions on what actions to take. And when you have hundreds of agents performing all of these calculations at the same time, performance becomes a huge potential issue that needs addressing (which in our case is solved by using parallel processing). Formation Formation AI sits at a level just above individual AI. Formation AI is used to issue commands to each agent within a formation and decide what behaviour that the formation should perform (i.e. attack, defend, flank, retreat, etc.). However, it is important to note that the orders issued by the formation AI only determine what is expected of each individual agent, but it doesn’t directly make them do anything: this is left to the individual AI to interpret and carry out. The formation AI has access to the same interface and set of commands as the player. In other words, our combat AI doesn’t cheat! It uses every piece of information that a player would have access to (although, perhaps slightly more detailed and accurate than a player’s guesstimates) to make its decisions. Tactic Tactic AI is what gives an AI army its overall battle plan. It looks at the terrain of the battlefield, as well as the compositions of each army to determine the best tactic. To keep each battle varied and to further the emergent narrative for the player, this layer of the combat AI is influenced by the AI lord commanding the army. Some lords might be more cautious and prefer to seize the high ground before setting up in a defensive formation, whereas other lords might be a little more rash, putting pressure onto their opponents by committing to an early assault. The tactic chosen sets the overall battle plan in that each formation knows what is expected of them but they aren't strictly tied to it. What this means is that each formation's AI will make immediate battlefield decisions independent of the tactic when necessary, such as exploiting advantages or pulling back when necessary, but when there isn’t an urgent action that needs to be carried out they will try to stick to the plan. One way to look at it would be to think of the AI as having its own chain of command, with tactic AI being the general at the head of the army, issuing commands to its subordinates and expecting them to carry the order out to the best of their ability. One of our main considerations while developing this new combat AI system was to ensure that any decisions that the AI makes are believable to players. The AI needs to make logical decisions that make sense to the player, otherwise, the system could be easily gamed and player immersion would be adversely affected. So far, we are pretty happy with the results. We think that Bannerlord’s AI will be a fresh challenge to returning players to the series, and provide players new and old players alike with dynamic combat experiences that test their individual combat skills and tactical prowess. Finally, we would like to mention that Bannerlord’s AI is also moddable, too -- and its separation into three different levels is important for modders, making their life easier and allowing for more complex modifications. Tactical, formation behaviour and agent levels being separate is essential: just as commanders changing their orders during battle does not change their soldiers themselves, adding a new tactic doesn't require you to model every single formation behaviour or agent AI. Adding new formation behaviours doesn't require you to delve into agent AI either because the interface the AI uses and you will use is the medium between the hierarchies. This lets modders create a custom AI that suits their needs without breaking anything, using a complex or simple set of orders and logic to create new formation behaviours and new tactics using various formation behaviours.
Dev Blog 08/11/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! In the medieval ages, castles and strongholds were not meant to be dwellings, but military tools that were strong and easy to defend, positioned in choke points to protect an important region or trade route. Villages, on the other hand, were the population centres - places where people would dwell and sleep after a long day of work in the fields or herding their cattle. Towns were somewhat a combination of the two, but they were also very different (and complex) places. They had walls for defence and a high population count, but they were much more than just dwellings and defensive structures: they were the most important places around. Towns are where kingdoms forged their real power. Artisans worked raw materials into quality goods and merchants turned them into wealth. Courts were established in towns, so they were also the heart and brains of any realm -- where politics, conspiracies, and plots took place. In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, towns are very much like their real-world counterparts. They are where industrial goods are produced, higher quality troops are trained, commerce flourishes, notable NPCs do their dealings and crime is prevalent. And this is exactly what our level designers try to reflect as they create each town scene. In a previous blog, we looked at how we approach map design for castles, which share some similarities with towns (both have upgradable walls and both can be besieged). However, when it comes to design, towns are a completely different beast. As we design the layout of each town, we tend to divide them into recognisable districts, so that players can develop an instinct for where they can find what they are looking for. This isn’t so much a rule that is set in stone, as we want to stay fluid in our approach to level design, but all of our work on these scenes share similar design principles. Marketplace - This is where most goods are traded. If you are looking for a shiny new helmet, supplies for a campaign, or perhaps some barding for your horse, then the marketplace will be your first port of call. The marketplace is also where you will find the local blacksmith, where you can design and craft your own melee weapons. Slums and backstreet - Dangerous places where smugglers and bandits gather to make money by illegitimate means, diminishing the resources and taxes of the town. Keep - Where you can find the nobles and governor of the town (as well as the prisoners!). One day, this is somewhere that you will hopefully get to call home. Military district - This is where the town guards and garrison gather, and where troops can be trained. Also, this is where the town’s stockpile is located to be used in times of need (such as a defensive siege). Tavern - This is where adventurers and drunks alike gather to share stories over a mug of mead. Some revellers are just a nuisance, others are sellswords that will fight for the right amount of money, and a rare few are companions that will follow you in your ambitions and help you to achieve your goals. Gameplay We understand that no matter how nice and immersive we make our towns look, walking around them creates downtime from your conquering and pillaging. For those of you who would like to rest between your various exploits, we have many small details to explore and discover in our towns. However, for those who are in a hurry, we group interactable NPCs together according to their roles for ease of access for players. And for those of you that don’t want to set a single foot in a town, we have the settlement menu, where you can access practically every function available in towns directly from the campaign map (barring a select few that we save for immersion). Sieges also play a big part in the design of a town scene. This comes both with technical and gameplay limitations, but also with opportunities! Small roads and buildings around town gates add variety to gameplay when the town is under siege, however, a shop that is filled to the brim with many intricate pieces of pottery would add performance complications. Our solution is to have a "siege state" for our scenes (which is easily achievable with our map editor). When a player deploys into a town that is under siege, they are greeted by deserted streets. The marketplace closes down, taking all of the colourful and fine goods with it, shops bar their doors and barricades are raised in the streets to help with defences. This method not only helps us create immersion and ease the load on performance by removing elements that are unnecessary for a combat scene, but it also gives us more flexibility with our design. We can barricade off roads that are not related to siege gameplay to reduce overcomplexity or close shortcuts that might give an unnecessary advantage to either side while creating new choke points that would look out of place when there is no conflict. Overall, we try to design our town scenes to be believable and immersive, but also to compliment gameplay. We want players to be easily able to navigate the world, either through their player character or through UI elements (such as menus), and experience the sandbox in the way that they want to.
No, you are required to sell your soul in order to do so but since no one here have a soul we are out of luck.
Dev Blog 22/11/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! Great news! The first baby in Calradia has been born! Yay! The mother, is us, the player, a woman named Boudicca: a caravan raider hailing from the misty foothills of Battania. On our travels (read: raids), we managed to steal the heart of Usair, an Aserai warlord who sports a proud moustache. The proud parents, Usair and Boudicca On the 20th of November, 1084 (the year of the Camel), the heavens blessed our union with the honour of parenting the very first child on the shores of Calradia! Please, allow us to introduce our daughter, Ruwa, who as of now is still a babe, but we spared no expense and commissioned the best portraitist in the court of Unqid, the Sultan of Aserai, who believes she will look something a little like this by the age of 10. Ruwa (the Children of Men) Her beautiful face was derived from the features (facekeys) of her father and mother, with a small amount of randomness thrown into the mix. And thus, she has a unique face(key) which will retain traits of her parents into adulthood. And, it is not just the facial traits that she will inherit from her parents, but also our wealth and lands too, which we worked tirelessly to accumulate through entirely legitimate means. As she grows, we will be able to spend more time with her, interact with her, share our experiences and skills with her, and develop her into a fine young woman. Clan Boudicca is much more complete now! On a more serious note, we are extremely excited to be able to share this with you. Children are something we have been working on for some time now and to finally see them implemented and working in-game has been a really rewarding experience. We have plenty to talk about in terms of dynasties and how children will work as a feature in the game, but we will save that for a later date. Campaign team celebrating the birth of Ruwa. Oh, and that’s a cake, not a pile of pancakes!
Dev Blog 20/12/18 Greetings warriors of Calradia! In this week’s blog, we want to introduce you to a brand new feature to the Mount & Blade series: the persuasion system. No medieval drama, from Shakespeare to the Game of Thrones, is complete without a few scenes of high-stakes negotiation. Although most of our development effort goes into battles and combat, we also want to offer players alternative gameplay. Be it a plot to betray a king, a dynastic marriage, or just a way to handle a thorny conflict between your bickering subjects, skilled persuaders can find solutions to solve problems and save a bit of wear-and-tear on their sword-edges. The persuasion system is based on the premise that, even in a dark and desperate land like Calradia, there are some things that money can’t buy. An honorable emir may feel compelled by his oath of fealty to stick by even the vilest of sultans. A conniving one might turn down the choicest bribe because frankly, he doesn’t think you have what it takes to win a civil war, and silver is no use to him if he’s dead. Persuasion is a means to help players overcome these reservations. The persuasion system is also one of the main ways that Bannerlord’s personality and reputation system comes into play. If you have a reputation for generosity, people will believe you tell them that, if they do a favor for you, you’ll make it up to them further down the road. Likewise, if people know you take honor seriously, they’ll be reassured if you tell them that, in your opinion, no one will ever blame them for breaking their oath to the Khan, who never kept his oath to anyone else. The NPC’s personality also plays a major role. A valorous warrior might respond better than a timid one to your courtship pitch, that he should marry you, a shield maiden who’ll fight by his side, rather than some dainty maiden with nothing to recommend her but vast tracts of land. Personality is only part of the equation. You can also draw on a variety of skills. Charm helps you guess an NPC’s motivations and appeal to them. Charisma helps you inspire them. And, even if you don’t have much of an army at your back. Roguery is a good way to convince them that you’re not someone they ever want to mess with. Finally, the game tracks most major events, and if you can remind the Countess that the king you want her to betray murdered her cousin, or passed her over when last handing out fiefs, that will make your task much easier. We want players to feel the dynamic sandbox history of Calradia, and persuasion is often the time when a lord’s past mistakes, the dirty deeds, the slights to fragile egos, the unpopular policies, all come home to roost. So how does the system work? All persuasion attempts are initiated through dialogs. You first need to steer the conversation to the relevant subject. You need to hint to the lord that his liege isn’t really worthy of his service, or maybe suggest to a lady that, it being a truth universally acknowledged that any ambitious young lady of title and substance must be in want of an upwardly mobile warlord to marry, you should perhaps discuss whether you are mutually compatible. At this point, the system calculates a “persuasion difficulty”. If this value is too high for any reason, the NPC will turn you down right away. But if not, you can start discussing specifics. The NPC will then present you a number of issues where you will need to persuade him or her. During persuasion, you will see a progress bar, which shows how far you’ve gone toward convincing the other party. Every time you succeed in convincing the lord over a point, the persuasion bar will fill up a certain amount. If at the end you can fill up the entire bar, the NPC’s objections will be overcome. His moral and long-term objections, anyway. Money can’t buy everything, but it’s usually at least part of the deal. The persuasion system is often a gateway that leads you into the barter system. Some lords will do anything for honor, or for revenge, but most want some sort of token of your appreciation up front. Each successful persuasion attempt will help to reduce the monetary cost of the action you would like to perform when it comes to the bartering stage, whereas repeated failures might make a deal impossible to reach. And if you push your luck too much, then you run the risk of severely impacting your relations with NPCs in a negative way. Overall, we feel that the persuasion system adds a massive amount of depth to diplomacy in Bannerlord, giving players different options and ways to approach challenging situations that they are presented with. We think that it will give players greater control in playing the game in the way that they want to, opening up avenues and possibilities that were unavailable in previous games in the series. And that’s it for 2018 folks! We will be back in the New Year with more blogs (with the next one due on the 10th of January), so make sure you follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook to keep up to date with all the latest Bannerlord news as we march ever closer to that elusive release date. We hope that you all have a wonderful time over the festive season!
Dev Blog 28/02/19 Greetings warriors of Calradia! Bannerlord has many dynamic systems for maintaining most gameplay mechanisms. Horses are a case in point. They are produced in certain villages so there is a steady supply being created each day. These are then purchased (or sometimes looted) by passing armies or carried to town markets to change hands. Horses are also regularly removed from the game when cavalry troops eventually die or desperate parties slaughter them for food. However, this dynamism brings its own unique challenges. How do we make sure that all these systems stay more or less balanced and working as intended, even after the elapse of many in-game years? In order to help designers with this, our engine team added a nice little utility for creating heat maps. So, what are heat maps? Heat maps are a visual representation of the paths and active areas that parties traverse, as well as, the flow of goods around the campaign map. It may seem limited at first glance, however, this is actually quite a powerful tool that allows us to identify issues with AI behaviour, in addition to, map design and balance. Every journey that armies, parties and caravans take can give us a valuable insight into what is happening in the game, highlighting any potential issues or confirming that our design is working as intended. With this data, we are able to make the necessary adjustments and changes to rectify issues, saving time, effort and resources in the process! But, rather than trying to explain how we process and evaluate the information, it would probably be best if we gave you a couple of examples directly from the game: Trade Flax is a raw resource that is produced in the villages of northern Calradia. As the map below shows, there is a large concentration of flax in those areas, with little spread to other regions. This is because flax is a low-profit item and there is little sense for traders to invest in it. However, linen, a good that is produced using flax, is widely dispersed throughout Calradia. This is because linen has a much higher value than its unrefined flax form and, additionally, because it is in high demand throughout the continent. Parties We have a number of different types of bandit parties that roam the various regions of the map, but the Steppe Bandits were one that particularly stood out for us. When we mapped their movements, we saw that they were unable to penetrate into the interior of the Khuzait territory. As we checked their paths and the areas that they concentrated in, we started to get some clues as to what was happening. One of the reasons was the placement of Khuzait castles. Bandits tend to prey on the weak, as is their nature. The placement of settlements in the region was giving the bandits few options when it came to plotting a route to undefended villagers. The bandit parties were actively trying to avoid the hostile Khuzait lords, which is exactly what we want to happen, however, this often resulted in long journeys around mountain ranges to reach their destination. This issue was compounded by the fact that Khuzait lords tend to have smaller, more mobile parties, which are quite adept at chasing down bandits. In the end, this resulted in a strange loop, quite literally, with the bandits running around in circles without actually achieving anything. In this instance, slightly changing the placement of settlements and hideouts resolved the issue. As you can see from the given examples, the tool is really quite valuable to us in ensuring that our systems are working as intended. This is exactly why we will be expanding this tool to work with scenes too. And not only for singleplayer, but also to help us refine the design and balance of our multiplayer maps!
Bannerlord will be at gamescom. They will show off both single and multi-player in both public and business areas. Gameplay of the skirmish mode taken from last weekends beta test.
I'm glad they took their time on making this good, but glad to finally hear a date for the beta! Looking forward to this. Assuming there's no major hickups with the final product.
