Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog Q&A

Cem Çimenbiçer, the Team Leader among Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s programmers is the latest TaleWorlds Entertainment’s developer to participate in their in-house Q&A. He starts by talking a bit about his duties and then proceeds to describe many of the game’s new and otherwise exciting features. And then there are the customary holiday greetings, followed by a promise of new things coming our way in 2018. An excerpt:

HOW HAVE RANGED ANIMATIONS CHANGED FROM WARBAND? WILL PLAYERS BE ABLE TO MOVE DURING THE ANIMATION AND HOW HAVE YOU BALANCED THIS?

“The major change in bow reloading and shooting animations is that, we used to leave the arrow in the quiver until the player starts readying to shoot. Now the arrow is taken from the quiver as soon as the player is available to do so. This reduces the time required to ready and shoot an arrow, and gives a decent timing advantage to the bowmen. If the player gets disturbed while taking an arrow from the quiver, this action gets restarted on the next availability. This stage difference is also done for the crossbowmen, so the reloading in crossbows is split into two: cocking the crossbow, and placing the bolt. First stage gets cancelled if the player moves during the action, but second stage allows movement. Bowmen are free to move at any stage.

Balancing of all weapons was made after this change, so this new system didn’t cause us too much trouble. By the way I should remind you that the balancing in both weapons and their usage animations are continuously made, so nothing that has been seen in the footages shown should be assumed to be final.”

HOW GOOD IS THE COMBAT AI ON THE HIGHEST DIFFICULTY? WILL THERE BE DIFFERENT COMBAT AI FOR DIFFERENT UNITS IN BANNERLORD?

“Until now, we mainly worked on the tactics of formations and armies, but not the tactics on 1v1 fights. I believe that we will add some variety on that only after we feel like the AI is good enough and missing only unique tactics. So far the AI has been buffed with improved ranged and melee accuracy, decision to use kicking, keeping distance according to combat states and so on. In the end, our aim is to expand the range of intelligence of AI in order to help new players more in combat, and create more challenge for the experienced players. With the addition of more complex army AI, you should also expect a hard time on even reaching the army commanders in the battlefield. And a challenging duel would be your reward (or punishment) when you penetrate the defences.”

IN TERMS OF COMBAT ANIMATIONS, WHAT SORT OF VARIATIONS CAN WE EXPECT? ARE THERE MORE UNIQUE ANIMATIONS DEPENDING ON WEAPON THAN WARBAND?

“In Bannerlord we have quite a few more variations than in Warband. Combatants can be in a left or right stance, which means there are two versions of each and every animation. On top of that, there are two variations of each animation, one for very light and fast, and one for heavy and slow weapons. Any particular weapon uses a blend of those two animations according to its weight. The dirty way of fighting also got additional variety in Bannerlord. Kick works the same as Warband, but it would also be possible to bash with either a shield or weapon in hand.”

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST FEATURE YOU WANTED IN OLDER MOUNT & BLADE GAMES (BUT WERE UNABLE TO INCLUDE) THAT YOU HAVE IMPLEMENTED IN BANNERLORD?

“A custom skeleton system that would support different creatures would expand the creativity of our modders a lot in Warband. Luckily, just like many other moddable things in Bannerlord, this will also be possible to modify.”

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE CREATION OF WARBAND 8 YEARS AGO AND BANNERLORD TODAY?

“Actually, this is a quite wide question, so I will limit my answer to only the programming part of it. I started working here in TaleWorlds in 2006, but I officially joined the team in 2008. So I’ve been involved in development of Mount & Blade projects for more than 10 years. The number of programmers working on Mount & Blade games during this timeline increased from 2 (Armagan and me) to more than 20. When there were just two of us, the overhead of designing and discussions was extremely minimal, the codebase was smaller (Bannerlord codebase is 3x that of Warband, including the module system) and our quality expectations were lower. All of these factors helped us in implementing new features within a short period of time. In Warband we doubled our programmer count (to 4!) but everything else stayed similar. When we started working on Bannerlord, the increased number of employees forced us to act more professional in almost every area of the project. Renewed and automated integration tools, team based development, proper QA and testing, design meetings, regular meetings etc. were all introduced during the development of Bannerlord. I could say that, our team turned from “a group of ambitious guys” to “a game development studio” while developing Bannerlord.

Oh, and one strange fact is that the office has felt chillier each year. Most of the others don’t feel the difference, but I do, I really do!”

[…]

We would like to take this opportunity to say that 2017 has been a very, very exciting year for us. We went to E3 and Gamescom and had a great time there showing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. We have been talking to you week after week for some time now, and sharing an open conversation with you and getting your feedback has been extremely useful, invigorating and empowering (thank you guys!). And of course, Bannerlord is getting better and better, shaping up to be the great game that you deserve. 2018 is almost here, and we expect it to be even more exciting — we can’t tell you more as of now, but stay tuned: you wouldn’t like to miss it! We wish all of you and your families a wonderful holiday and the best for the New Year. See you in a couple of weeks!