Why I Still Love Bannerlord Despite Its Flaws Hello everyone I've been thinking about this for a while, and I wanted to share it with anyone who enjoys Bannerlord, or wants to enjoy it more. If you're already having fun throughout the entire game, that's great. This post probably isn't aimed at you. But if you've ever felt that Bannerlord has incredible potential yet somehow loses its magic after the early game, maybe this perspective will help. I completely understand the criticism the game receives. Bannerlord could have been so much more. The quests become repetitive, diplomacy lacks depth, and many of its mechanics never evolve as much as they could. The early game is exciting, the mid game starts to slow down and the late game often turns into a grind. I agree with all of that. And yet... I still enjoy every stage of the game. The reason is simple; I don't rely on the game to tell my story. I create one myself. To me, Bannerlord feels less like a tra...
This is not a rant, love this game, despite the extreme amount of flaws, but during my last playthrough I started to count how many features in this game are pointless, and was really surprised. To clarify, "pointless" is not "useless", useless features cannot be used or have no effect, pointless features are just there, you could use them, but why bother?
So, let's see:
Campaign quest line
The elephant in the room. First tried it in beta, it was hilariously frustrating, then tried again after full release, got the dragon banner, laughed hard, when found out it's some mediocre buff, worse than top-tier banners, and start a new sandbox game. The only reason you want to play campaign, is to gain "free" family members.
Workshops
Probably this should be about money and economic in general. When you snowball your way out to 100k gold, money is no longer an issue, you even can just forget it exist, as selling loot, gained from the latest battle would usually cover your payments for weeks.
But workshops probably are the worst part of it. Even if we ignore all the necessary convoluted steps to get this thing profitable, even if the stars aligned and all goes well, you will start to see your profit only after around 150 days, after investing ~30k denars in it. But you could also invest 30k into your own party/gear to grind your way to t5 troops and high clan tier to start snowballing the map and have enough gold for the rest of your campaign after the same amount of days.
Fancy towns
This one is painful. A lot of development was put into building cool multicultural towns and villages. You can walk through the streets, talk with people, walk in a tavern or arena, even trade with merchants. And it's just pointless, as every interaction could be made by the menu and there is literally nothing else for you to do there, on the streets. You only really see them in your first couple of hours, when you're still exploring this game or during sieges.
Hiring mercenaries
Okay, we can agree that everything that is not strictly part of the "war" is kinda half cooked in this game, so let's skip the rest and focus on its best parts.
So why hiring mercenaries to your kingdom is so awfully implemented? Like, hilariously so. You can't send them a letter, they would never present their services to you themselves, you really have to hunt their parties across the map. But you can't just speak with a random dude, it must be their leader specifically, and they have to be free at the moment. And after all this effort, they still, as far as I remember, can just decide to leave you at any time. Amazing.
Joining army as a mercenary
Made that mistake a lot during early days of playing. When you're joining a kingdom as a mercenary, the worst thing you can do is actually participating in war, especially joining armies. You do not get paid by siding with them, and you get extremely small amount of influence and loot after large battles or sieges, where you would probably lose half of your troops. So, literally the opposite experience of what you would've expected from being a mercenary.
And that's just a most frustrating stuff. There is a lot to cover, like marriage of your sister, existence of vlandian pikemen, and so on. I am more interesting with you, sharing your experience, what is the most pointless feature for you, what I've missed?
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