I attended a presentation with Taleworlds Entertainment all about siege in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. Later I returned and Taleworlds graciously agreed to an interview, so I spoke with Frank Elliott and Steve Negus about more siege details, factions, relationships between lords, and more.

We first talked about much of what you can see in this video here, which is much of what I saw in the presentation I attended. There was discussion of what players new to the series should be excited to see, as well as the general philosophy behind Bannerlord. Basically, Taleworlds knows they have a good set of systems and mechanics in place, now they are just working to improve them. Siege is just one of the areas we can see that general improvement. The interview discusses siege a little, AI improvements, and more.

One of the more interesting discussions we had in the interview was in regards to the diplomacy and how relationships between lords take place in the game. Bannerlord is set before the first Mount & Blade game, so there are some new factions, some you will be familiar with, and you should see some town and village names that should be familiar. Each lord and kingdom will have their own desires and personalities you'll have to take into account when interacting with them. A bartering system will be in place to all you to do all kinds of trading from goods and money to prisoners and even land, if that makes sense within the context of the game. The interview of course goes into even more on how your relationship with various lords will work.

We also discussed mods and modding a bit. Taleworlds has talked in the past about modding for Bannerlord and how much they are embracing it in the new game. On release of Bannerlord, Taleworlds plans to the actual development tools they used for the game available to modders at the same time as release or soon after. We go into mods a little bit more in the interview.

Here's the video below, and I hope you enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txjEMt7utvE

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