So it’s been a while since I talked about my first impressions on Bannerlord and now that I have played a bit more of the game and experienced late game mechanics, I have a lot more to say about the game than I did previously. I have yet to experience sieges though so do bear that in mind but I have finally joined a faction as a vassal and have been overwhelmed with all the new features the game has to offer upon joining a faction.

For starters, let’s talk about influence. What is influence you ask? It’s a currency you can use to buy friendship, no I’m not making that up, you can spend influence to get people to like you more. I find this to be a bit silly but it does build up my charm level so I’m not complaining. Once you join a faction, you join as a clan (the one you create at the start after defeating the bandits in the story). There are many clans in the faction and they all have their own influence, yours included. Influence can be gained through fighting enemies and owning fiefs so if you do not have a fief, gaining influence can be a real pain since there are laws that can drain your influence, on top of all this, getting a town also means getting the associated village so there aren’t many fiefs to go round. I got lucky and won a fief in a vote so I didn’t have to worry but initially some of the laws in place really screwed me over and made me feel like being in the faction was pointless as I got nothing out of it.

Speaking of fiefs, one of the things I do like a lot about this game is the interior design of the castles. No longer is your castle a single room, your castle has several rooms including a place for you to play board games with visitors to pass the time. The board game you have depends on the location of your fief so be mindful of that. I know this isn’t a big deal in the great scheme of things but it’s a nice touch to make the castle feel more livable than they do in Warband.

On top of this, you can upgrade your town fiefs to improve various things including garrison space, prosperity and higher taxes. On top of all this you also have to choose how your town operates in terms of maintenance and growth by choosing between building housing, bolstering your town’s militia, improving your town’s morale and irrigation to increase food production. I really like this new and improved upgrade feature as it feels more involving and the UI is presented better than it was in Warband where it was just a list, the only thing missing is the option to construct a prison tower which can be annoying since lords you imprison tend to escape way too quickly so you’re better off just ransoming them for money.

One thing to be mindful of however is that fiefs consume food, if you have troops garrisoned in your fief, they may abandon you if you don’t have enough food. Your prosperity will also go down if your food stocks are low. So this means you will have to spend time travelling to and from towns to deliver food to the fief which can be tedious but it does work, even if you have to pay more for the food, it’s a necessity. The issue is though that caravans will buy the food from you if you store too much because it becomes cheap. Also, the bigger your garrison, the more food is consumed so you don’t want to stuff your fief up with troops.

Next I want to go into more detail with the game’s clan feature. All companions you recruit become a part of your clan, you can create a party and have it be led by one of your companions, they will then roam around the world and do whatever the hell they want. This annoys me because as cool as this is in concept, if you can’t give commands to your parties and tell them to patrol an area or something, what’s the point? They just do whatever the hell they want which is kinda lame. Thankfully though I did notice that in later versions of the game, my companion party tends to patrol around my fief more often and the results are noticeable. Still I think being able to have more control over your clan members is important and I’m hoping that the devs will implement this in the full game.

As I mentioned before, factions in Bannerlord have laws. These laws are voted for by each clan and the ruler decides which laws pass and which don’t. Laws can greatly impact the experience of the game and it is very important to make sure that the laws are mostly in your favor since they can affect numerous things ranging from influence gains for certain lords, to keeping the common folk happy. All clans are eligible to vote so long as they have enough influence, the more influence spent, the greater the impact on a vote. Players can also petition for a new law to be passed or disvowed, those in opposition of the player’s vote will lose relation with the player whereas those whom the player supports will gain relation with the player. It feels like a constant balancing act of trying to pass/disvow laws to benefit yourself personally and trying not to fall out with other lords.

There is also the option to spend influence points to vote for a fief to change ownership, this costs 400 influence points and could cause someone to lose their fief should it be voted to someone else. On top of all this, you have the option of voting people out of the faction completely and while I personally haven’t experienced being voted out myself, I would advise you to maintain a strong relation with multiple lords to protect your position in the faction. Ultimately while I am not keen on the influence system as a whole, I do think that the law system is a great idea that requires players to think more carefully about their decision making as well as making the player feel like they have a bigger impact on the goings on in the world.

It’s also worth noting that unlike Warband, feasts have not yet been implemented into Bannerlord which may be why tournaments occur more often. I find the absence of feasting to be odd as it was such a big part of keeping your kingdom in order by gathering vassals and gaining relation with them. It also helped prevent snowballing as feasts would stop factions from acting for a time which in turn gave all the other factions and the player more breathing room. Now I would like to believe that the devs will add feasting later on in the development but the kingdom tab suggests that they planned on removing feasts entirely and instead of inviting them to a banquet to gain favor with them, you spend influence instead which I find to be a step backwards.

I was hoping that feasts would be more involving in Bannerlord than they were in Warband. I would have liked to have seen feasts get improved and maybe having some war stories being told at the table by lords, gossip and of course compete in the new minigames. It’s such a shame that they axed them entirely, it kills a part of the game’s charm if you ask me and makes the castle interiors feel kinda pointless. Speaking of feasting, the ability to get married is still available in Bannerlord, however the criteria for marriage is much stricter than it was in Warband since you have to be under the age of 40 to marry. This means that if you spend the early portions of the game doing other things instead of dating noblewomen, you have screwed yourself out of having children and that’s a big problem because in Bannerlord, you can die of old age!

That’s right, after so many years pass, your character’s health will deteriorate and when it reaches zero a text box appears saying “you are not a part of this world anymore” and the game just stops, your entire clan falls apart out of nowhere and you lose everything you worked so hard to get. So basically, if you do not get married and have an offspring it is literally game over! Now upon hearing of this, I naturally rushed to get married but when I realized that I was 43 years old and was unable to marry for some reason, I found out that I was screwed. In Warband you could technically live forever and continue to develop your character further, not in Bannerlord and this is what upsets me about the game the most. Combine this with the game’s grindy leveling system and you not only have a game that feels like a chore to play at times but all that work grinding levels was all for nothing.

Now there are a few things I forgot to mention in my first impressions of the game, first of all, the inventory system in Bannerlord has changed for the better. Now you can buy horses to increase your inventory capacity. Food is now stackable which is great as you don’t have to worry about each piece of food taking up an inventory space. Rather than having a grid based inventory system, you now have a list for your items and you can have as many as you want so long as you don’t reach the inventory limit. Thanks to the horses though, I didn’t have much of an issue managing my inventory which is definitely something I can appreciate about Bannerlord as managing food in Warband was a pain in the ass, though to be fair, in Warband you didn’t have to worry about your fiefs consuming food so in a way, the tedious task of hunting for food is still present in the game sadly.

“So basically, if you do not get married and have an offspring it is literally game over!”

Also I forgot to mention that the game’s soundtrack is pretty good overall. I mean it does kinda get a bit repetitious at times but so did Warband’s to be fair. I do like the music that plays in the empire territory and the remix of the town theme from Warband is great too. Of course the best song in the game has to be the main menu music, I cannot begin to express just how hyped I was when I heard that menu screen music, it’s so unbelievably epic.

So all in all, what can I say about Bannerlord now that I have spent more time playing through it? Bannerlord is a game with lots of great ideas and it has so much potential to improve from those ideas but at the same it is plagued with absurd design choices that ruin almost all of these ideas and make the game feel like a slog, the worst of them being the aging feature. I don’t think the developers thought things through with this feature. On top of this, the game does a terrible job of telling players how to play the game, even with the encyclopedia, I had a hard time understanding basic gameplay concepts and paid the price heavily. It’s one thing to fall in a fair fight, another thing to feel cheated by the game’s design and this is something that I cannot ignore until the game becomes more intuitive in its design. As it stands now, the game requires a lot of trial and error to figure out how to play and this can be very frustrating.

To this day I am still trying to get my smithing level high enough to craft a weapon that surpasses my own, I am currently at level 150 smithing and hopefully I will reach 200 Smithing before I die of old age. Smithing is such an ordeal to level up due to the stamina system it’s ridiculous. I just want to get to the good parts game… just let me craft that awesome sword already I’ve spent over 1000 in game days playing and still can’t craft a decent sword, what a pain.