Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog Q&A

If you’re someone who enjoys Mount & Blade’s multiplayer battles, you may be interested in this week’s developer blog post for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord that features an in-house Q&A with TaleWorlds Entertainment’s Level Designer and Assistant Game Designer Paul Kaloff responsible for Bannerlord’s scene design and multiplayer balancing. Here are a couple of sample questions:

ARE THE DIFFERENT FACTIONS BUILT TO BE VIABLE ACROSS DIFFERENT GAME MODES, OR ALL FACTIONS EVENLY MATCHED IN MOST CONTEXTS? FOR EXAMPLE, WOULD ONE FACTION PERFORM VERY WELL IN SIEGE, BUT BE NEXT-TO-USELESS IN AN OPEN FIELD MAP BECAUSE THEY HAVE POOR QUALITY CAVALRY?

“We are working on making factions as viable as possible in any scenario. The way we designed multiplayer gives us a lot of opportunities to make that happen. For each Troop Class, we have individual item loadouts, items perks, skill perks, and armour + speed values (more about that in the next question). This gives us a lot more screws to adjust if units under or over perform. A more specific example would be that for siege we have specific maps for factions to defend. So while Vlandia might have a very tight castle layout, a Khuzait castle would have a wide courtyard, perfect for horse archers, and ways to sally out easily and harass/skirmish the siege camp.

With all that said, we still want factions to play differently from each other. Factions will require players to change up their playstyle and strategic approaches in team-based modes.”

HOW SEVERE COMPARED TO WARBAND; WILL MOVEMENT PENALTIES FOR USING HEAVY ARMOUR/WEAPONS BE?

“As mentioned above, in multiplayer, we tie movement speeds to the class rather than weapon weights or armour. This enables us to, for example, make a berserker very agile, even though his weapon may be very heavy. Also, an important factor is that, unlike in Warband, we have a combat speed and a normal speed. This means that once you raise your weapon or block, you will slow down to a combat pace, which greatly reduced the amount of face-hugging going on and prevents players from constantly holding up their shield and turtling in combat. These speeds, as well as, the acceleration can also be set for each individual multiplayer class, giving designers (and eventually modders) an easy way to create unique classes without having the hassle to cross balance the weights of the armours for every small change.”