Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog Q&A

Gökçen Karaağaç, a level designer at TaleWorlds Entertainment, is the subject of this week’s Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord in-house developer Q&A, where he talks about his level designer duties and the challenges he has to overcome on a daily basis, but also at one point mentions that Bannerlord, unlike Warband, will not use randomly generated battle scenes and instead will have you settle your differences on handcrafted arenas.

Here’s an excerpt:

WHAT FACTION DO YOU LIKE THE MOST IN BANNERLORD?

“Khuzait: they offer the most of what is unique about Mount & Blade.

Aesthetically they have a great contrast to the other factions, with wide open maps, sparse landscapes, stunted horses, and eastern clothing. They play their part of invaders from a faraway land really well.

As you grow your army, you can see your horde riding towards the enemy, kicking up dust and filling the air with arrows. Soon after, the organised battle lines of your more sedentary rivals fall into chaos.

Also, a nomadic collective of tribes ploughing through a disorganised empire is just the nature of the early medieval times.”

WILL BANNERLORD FEATURE A USER-FRIENDLY SCENARIO EDITOR?

“Yes! Modders will have access to pretty much what I’m using right now. Only, it will be more robust and have a prettier and streamlined interface.”

WHAT IMPROVEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE TO RANDOMLY GENERATED BATTLE SCENES COMPARED TO WARBAND?

“We don’t have randomly generated battle scenes in Bannerlord. With our new engine and new map editing tools, we are much more efficient at making terrains with no settlements on them. We realised that we can have enough handmade maps for battle scenes. We designated areas on the world map with biomes and tagged our battle scenes according to their features.

This helps us to have consistent quality and fun gameplay with all of our battle scenes, with hand placed spawn positions, managed distances according to party size and many other small details to spice up your gameplay.”

WHAT IS THE LEVEL DESIGN PROCESS FROM START TO FINISH AND HOW DO YOU CREATE LEVEL DESIGN VARIETY FOR BOTH MULTIPLAYER AND SINGLE PLAYER?

“The process varies quite a bit depending on the type of the scene I’m making.

In our previous blog about castle design, you can see me going from ground up with a simple sketch while building a castle, deciding on various details as I make the map while trying to keep true to the vision I had in mind. It is mostly adding new buildings and walking around the map, checking the sense of scale and travel times. When the overall colour palette of the castle and terrain come together, I start to add details and scripts that turn the empty husk into a siege scene.

In comparison, multiplayer follows a completely form follows function approach. It’s theorycrafting, multiple versions of white boxes, as many tests as we can muster, people climbing places they shouldn’t, calculating travel times with various troop types, checking for possible spawn camping issues, the list goes on… At some point, you grow more confident about the layout and start to flesh it out with actual assets. We emphasise control points, differentiate one side of the map from the other, visually hide symmetry of the map, add landmarks for callouts, and many other small but significant details. We also try to make the visuals match the purpose (if a corridor lets you flank a choke point, it should be tight and dark, with small corners to create surprises). As always, the map making process ends with testing and polishing.”