Alternate title: Please fill the Bannerlord sized hole in my heart.

Having been waiting for another Medieval RPG title with a deep combat system, and with the added bonus of the historical importance alongside it, I could not be more excited for it.

I am just a teensy bit apprehensive though having heard about very high system requirements, so I hope the day 1 patch that's coming out will optimize the game for lower end computers.

Also wondering what sort of modding support the game will have, as there's already a Game Of Thrones mod in progress for it on Moddb. What are your opinions on it? Hyped or not hyped?

Edit: So I'm fairly surprised that my poor crappy old first gen i7 860 can sort of run this game with my newly acquired 1060. I'm gonna buy it. My first impressions have been met so far and I think I will have some lasting enjoyment out of this.

I've been hyped on it for a long while now and, wouldn't you know it, my GTX 970 seems to have died. So i'll be missing out on this and will likely miss out on Bannerlord until video card prices come down.

Shit man that sucks so much, I don't know much about how badly cryptocurrency mining affects GPU's but maybe you can find a cheap one from miners selling them off.

@hero_swe: They'd have to be extremely cheap before i'd trust buying a decent used card. Feel like anything used in a mining rig would be half way burnt out by the time they sell it used.

Cool, let's talk about some racism. (Please, let's not...?)

In all seriousness; this game looks kind of terrific. The level of detail they've gone into exploring the physics between how different weapons and armour interacts is kind of absurd. And the idea of a game that takes advantage of that with a deep combat system, not to mention over 30 (!) different hurt boxes on the enemy, is kind of blowing my mind. We'll see how it ends up working out in the long run, but getting that perfect stab in between the joints of the opponents armour, tearing their throat out, could be immensely satisfying.

They also go on to mention that you have 14 different armour slots to equip, as it is structured in layers. See, you didn't just put on some chain-mail over your junk in the olden days; you wore thick clothes beneath, and perhaps greaves above for that extra testicular protection. That's right, both armour and ogres have layers.

I believe it was some 2 years ago they released a neat video on the subject; lemme' see if I can find it.

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Alternatively, here's a trailer that was released 8 minutes ago as of me writing this.

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This is a single player game right?

This seems cool I always wanted to get into mount and blade but it never clicked with me.

If this is like mount and blade mixed with the Witcher 3 I'll probably buy it now.

Personally I'm excited about Kingdom Come.

@sin4profit: Bannerlord won't most likely be coming out this year. Given that they didn't even fully showcaseed how the open world part of the game operates and considering how they handled publishing the first Mount and Blade (Early Access via their site). Furthermore, they usually showcase and cover the stuff in videos, unless they want to be more secretive about it which is unlikely since they've never done that before.

If anything they might release the game in a sort of Alpha/Early Access state, like they did with the first Mount and Blade back around 2005-2008.

There will be a couple of price spikes in GPUs during the time where they're releasing Bannerlord so sit back and enjoy the ride.

Please don't turn this thread into all the others. I would love to discuss the game.

It's likely gonna have that big eurojank feel, but hopefully I can ignore that. Been wanting a realistic game like this forever.

I am quite interested in this game, but right now it's the definition of a "wait for reviews" game for me. I'm really curious to see what the critical reception looks like. If it seems to be trending positive, I'll probably pick it up, but this is certainly one of those games where I have no idea where it will end up. It could end up with average score of 85 or 55 and I wouldn't be surprised either way.

@rk92: Judging the first message its better to make a thread once the game is actually out. You know, keeping it on topic according to the original poster and all that.

I've been vaguely interested in this and totally thought it became vaporware. I'd love for it to be good because the idea of a realistic historical rpg sounds fantastic.

Excited but cautious, waiting on reviews/quicklooks

I'm more than willing to give this game a shot. I like Euro-Jank RPGs and such. Devs behavior aside, it looks pretty good (at least visually). Combat looks like it has depth that is probably not explained well, but that's a hallmark of the Euro-Jank RPG. Looking forward to hearing about it.

Well, a 23 gig day one patch is certainly an interesting proverbial starter's pistol.

@sethmode: As skeptical as I am about this game (I'm firmly in the "it'll have a small, yet extremely dedicated, fanbase" camp, and I suspect that its systems will be too arcane to review well), I don't think a large day one patch is necessarily indicative of the overall quality of a game.

@bladeofcreation: Oh I'm not saying it is or it isn't, necessarily. I just don't think it is the best look, and it sure sucks for people in areas with crummy internet (especially if the patch is because large portions turn out to be busted).

The release of this game and peoples response has made me realize how much of a free pass Bethesda has been getting for all of their games.

I hope Vinny gets his hands on this. I hope Drew gets to look over his shoulders too.

You're right, this is the perfect Drew quick look game. Real sad that won't happen.

@rk92: There aren't any reviews out yet that I've seen, so what are you referencing here? I agree with you that it's irritating how the narrative for a lot of people changes when they talk about Bethesda open-world RPGs, but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything said in this thread or what I've seen about this game so far (to my knowledge, even regarding the patch, Bethesda RPGs aren't even big downloads).

@sethmode: Not specifically in here, but on reddit especially I've seen tons of people complaining about the animations as a huge negative point, when they generally look fine if somewhat stiff in places. Bethesda couldn't even get a diagonal run animation until Fallout 4 and all of their animations for their entire games are basically generic looping animations but it's rarely this big thing to point it out. Just like a passing "Bethesda animations suck. But SUPER HYPE FOR THIS GAAAMEE!" bugs too in the same way, I've seen streams of this game where a small AI bug happened and it's posted all over Reddit with people saying "Knew it, game is shit."

Now this isn't a judgement on either game. Just an observation on how we seemingly judge one game on a quality, and not others for that same quality for some reason.

@rk92: Ah, yeah...I mean, I feel like that's unfortunately part of the irritating internet thing, where way more people collect to bag on something than get excited for it. We'll see. But I would say this game will definitely get more of an unfair criticism for just about anything than something like Skyrim does (I recently tried to replay that and woof).

Reminds me of the opposite of what Penn and Teller have had to say about pre-recorded magic on televsion. It only has to work once, and then they just don't show you when things went wrong. Not exactly a fair representation of the truth.

@ll_exile_ll: Yeah, same here. I WANT to believe it's going to have the same "Wow!" Factor that Oblivion did way back when, but I can't really put money down on belief.

Here's hoping there's more to the game than "wow, it really is like the 15th century" for 50 hours.

hmmm....is this game actually gonna be good? whoa

Just from looking at videos I'm not a fan of first person sword fighting, but the game intrigues me anyway.

Waiting for general reviews and a Digital Foundry platform comparison.

EDIT: Thought better of potentially derailing thread with a Bethesda technical issues conversation. Carry on.

Been watching some streems. I've been seeing load times for starting and ending conversations. Looks like something that would drive me insane. No loads going in and out of buildings, at least. Maybe that big-ass day 1 patch addresses that.

I want this to be good, and I have a pretty decent tolerance for jank (I'm a fan of all of those Spiders games). Holding out a couple days to see what kind of issues pop up.

I hope it's good, but after what sounds like a rough development cycle (over 6 years!) I'd be lying if I said I was optimistic. Then again, I've always been a "glass half full" kinda guy.

@thatonedudenick: Yeah the loading going into conversations is weird. I can't think of any other RPG that does that. It seems like it'll get annoying.

Cautiously optimistic, will wait for reviews though

This would be my game right now if my backlog wasn't so dumb. I am also kind of sure my wife is getting me the Shadow of the Colossus remake for Valentines day, so...yay! I can't wait for Giant Bomb's next criminally overlooked game. /s?

I really hope we get a viking game like this too.

Currently watching a stream of this game and this guy is literally floating 50 feet in the air. May wanna hold off for a bit on this one.... Attached is the video where it stated, actually quite hilarious

@sackmanjones: The upper right corner..."ON AIR." Well, it's not wrong!

@sackmanjones: They were right, it IS like a Bethesda game!

From what I've seen of the game it seems like it'll be one of those games that finds a small audience that absolutely adores it, but won't really appeal to most people. Either the setting and style carries the experience for you, or the clunky systems and B class production is gonna grow old fast. You can talk about the technical stuff all day long, but let's not forget writing and presentation. And so far it seems quite spotty to me.

Game is reportedly buggy as hell and boring to boot. Can't say I'm surprised.

I got the game a few day early, have played for maybe 10 or 12 hours now, and haven't experencied a single bug yet. I'm on PS4.

As for the game itself: it's clunky and a bit directionless, but story and atmosphere wise it's really well done. I'm not sure about the combat system yet, since it's quite confusing and not well explained at all.

Right now I'd say it's a good game but not a great one.

Just look at metacritic. You can tell this is either only the first handful of reviews that happened to have really low scores, or someone just selected the lowest of review scores and tweeted it as if that were a consensus. More than half the scores on metacritic are above 80, with a decent amount of praise found in the reviews in progress sections as well.

@spaceinsomniac: yeah it has a 74 on metacritic right now, with the popular sites reviews in progress generally saying positive things which will probably put it in that range. Which is around the score I was expecting

Here's another positive review, although one that admits it's going to be best to wait for a sale or some bug fixes. It's a shame, but I hope they keep working on fixing the issues. I'll almost certainly never play this game due to some pretty hardcore gaming mechanics--limited save system, food that rots in your inventory if you carry it too long, etc--but it's pretty great that this game exists for people who want an RPG experience that unforgiving.

Per RPS' review, there is no quicksave option; to save the game you need to either find a bed to sleep in, reach a major quest milestone, or have a drink that there are a finite number of in the game.

So this a no buy for me.

After spending a while trying to get the game to fucking launch without crashing I finally put a few hours in and I really like it so far despite the jank. The story and voice acting have been surprisingly good and it manages to look really good and really bad at the same time. Its also incredibly linear at the start and there have been a bunch of cutscenes. I haven't minded them though since they're pretty great so far. It definitely seems like one of those games thats going to force you to make some tough choices along the way. Combat is weird though, don't have a handle of it at all. Its definitely a mess but there seems like there could be something special under all the bullshit.

Sounds like the kind of game I'll have to keep an eye on nexusmods for. If I'm allowed to circumvent some of it's mechanics I'll buy it, otherwise it's a no-go for me.

This is already a pretty big minus for me but when you add to the fact that it looks super eurojank then not having a bank of saves to fall back to in case of bugs is pretty much a deal breaker.

Started my download now, gonna be done in about 12 hours. Can't wait!

Hopefully the reviews settle down in a few days as the patch is now out.

@fezrock: Yeah, a 74ish range is fine with me but if this is the case no thanks. This is the kind of bullshit that sounds really cool when you're bullshitting among friends when you're 15 or something (or Hidea Kojima). I don't have the patience for something that I'm going to have to replay large segments of because of either a) jank; or even b) I fuck up unforgiving combat. I get it, it's realistic and unforgiving. But, and I know this will be an interesting ironic twist considering the circumstances around this game, sometimes I play games to have fun, not be mired in frustration.

Also, to be be clear, I played Elex to completion the week it came out, so Eurojank is no stranger to me! I am fine with that shit, I just don't want it to be anymore frustrating than it needs to be.

@sethmode: if you play on PC there are apparently console commands to save whenever.

@rk92: Not an option for me, unfortunately. My laptop can barely run The Witcher 2 haha.