Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord E3 2017 Recap

11 TaleWorlds Entertainment employees have attended the recent E3 and now that they’re back, the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord developer blog boasts a comprehensive new post that goes over their experiences at the expo. A few snippets:

The demo itself revolved around the two battle scenarios we published as videos at the start of E3: “Horse Archer Sergeant Gameplay” and “Cavalry Sergeant Gameplay”. “Sergeant” here is referring to the fact that in these scenarios, we are controlling a single formation while receiving orders from our commander – essentially acting as a sub-commander. The idea is that when multiple parties enter a battle on the same side, the senior ranking leader will take overall command and designate individual formations as they wish. The player can fit in at any level of this system, just like the AI, and so depending on their company and individual progress can expect to be commanding part or all of the army in Bannerlord.

This allows players to be part of larger battles at an earlier stage in the game, giving them a taste of command without being too overwhelming. It also serves as a reward for progress, connects the player more closely to their AI peers and adds variety to the battle gameplay. In our system, we also allow the player to designate control to the AI at any time, so while you have the option to design and execute a specific strategy, you can also just get stuck in and focus on your own personal combat.

In addition to the battles, we allowed attendees to warm up in Bannerlord’s version of the “arena-brawls” (essentially what the tournament master offers you to do if there isn’t currently a tournament in town). We also used this as a way of highlighting some of our new combat features, all of which you can spot in the videos. We think the Directional Shield Blocking, Shield Bash and Attack Chaining are all natural additions which fit into Mount & Blade’s combat system very comfortably, maintaining the intuitive nature of the combat while adding some depth and variety. It was great to see how quickly players of the previous games got to grips with the bashing and chaining, working it into their fighting style. They aren’t the only new combat features in Bannerlord but we are still finalising the system and are looking forward to talking more about it in future!

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Of course, we understand a lot of you are looking to hear a release date and more details on the politics and campaign side of single player. In our opinion, the most important thing is to deliver a great game, worthy of our efforts and your expectations. We have so far avoided giving a release date thinking it would distract us from our attention to quality. The campaign is something we can definitely show off more and we’re looking at the best way to do it justice, and present it with the clarity and depth that it deserves.

During our announcement we found that there was a lot of confusion and many people weren’t able to find our extended gameplay videos and written information easily. We took this as a lesson and will try to plan accordingly in future to make sure our announcements come off as clearly as possible. In other news, we would like to introduce our new Community Manager, Callum, who will work alongside Frank and help improve our direct communication with you, the community! He has already made a huge impact organising the Steam forums and we expect he will continue to keep up the great work in the future.

The post also rounds up the Bannerlord E3 coverage, so check out this link if you’re interested in reading/watching some previews.