Mount and Blade 2 on a mission to be the best RPG of 2017

Because of its sandbox nature, Mount & Blade’s quests are procedurally generated around a number of set templates. They can have a great effect on the overall story of your campaign, but no individual quest ever felt like a compelling story by itself. Not only is Bannerlord attempting to increase the complexity of these scenarios, but their generation is now based on what’s happening out in the world. That means you’ll only get a quest to hunt down bandits if a settlement has a bandit problem. Everything is tied more fully into the sandbox. That’s important, because the simulation is the story. The narrative emerges based around your actions. While there will be a more traditional story, it’s mostly optional, and designed purely to get new players familiar with Bannerlord’s world and systems.

Full article at PCGAMER

In Bannerlord, armies can be asked to attack or defend a location. This has a major effect on the behaviour of the enemy AI. A defending army won’t necessarily charge at your position, and may instead move to higher ground. That won’t always be the case, though. Even a defending army will hunt you down if they think they’ve a chance to quickly take you out. TaleWorlds hasn’t yet decided on a unit cap for battles. It’s possible to have hundreds of soldiers per side, but too many causes performance issues. This battle is composed of just 18 soldiers, and so there’s little need for advanced tactics. The bandits are taken out with ease.

The battlefield is looted, and prisoners are captured. Both loot and prisoners can be traded for money to buy new equipment and food to sustain the army. In addition, some of Yasmin’s soldiers have levelled up. It’s one thing to have a large army, but basic recruits are quickly dispatched. Here, too, there are advantages to having friends among the right locals. Certain NPCs can recruit more experienced volunteers of different specialities. Carrying out missions for the right people can lead to a more varied and effective army.

Got excited then, thought it might be a release date :(

I almost forgot that the previous M&B games had a singleplayer mode.

this is definitely one to watch

Yea I wonder how close they are to releasing one since its been in development for a long time

gotta be Q4 of this year.

A very excite game.

I have over nearly 3,000 hours in M&B Warband (2k of them logged in Steam).

Maybe 300 of those hours were spent in SP in the campaign and across various mods. I actually remember when M&B was only a single-player game and the community mocked you if you requested multiplayer (because of its unfeasibility and popularity of the request). Eventually the game exploded into a large success and eventually got that MP mode. And that's where I sunk most of my time. The game has the best melee combat in a game, period. It's very DEEP and rewarding. Some competitors arose later on (like Chivalry), but they were much less successful than M&B and they more or less completely died and faded away into obscurity.

So, being a M&B dork, I'm going to tell you that the SP in this game probably isn't going to be the centerpoint of the game. They will probably put a lot of effort into it, and it will probably be a lot of fun, but IMO the game is probably a bit too much on the sandboxy copy-paste side of things for most people. The production values are low to the point of it being comical, and it looks like that isn't going to change here. They've been putting a lot of work into the game so I'm sure in the end I'm going to have fun with it no matter what.

Can't come soon enough

The game sounds very engrossing.

I just wish they could give us a release date.