Taleworlds are pre-emptively dampening some Gamescom hype by announcing that Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord will not get a release date at the event. In a fairly lengthy post on the game’s Steam page, the studio also explain why this is the case.
Basically, they don’t have a release date yet because the company are under no pressure to set one. “Some companies have publishers, shareholders, investors and owners who press for a release date, even if it means cutting content from a game” they write, “we are not in that situation.”
Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord was announced in 2012 and has appeared at major trade shows for the past couple of years, so you can imagine why people are getting quite eager to play it. “We understand that some of you might fear that we are abandoning the game or that we are stuck in development hell, the post says. “We can assure you that that is not the case: we have of course made our share of mistakes and false starts which have added to development time, but not more than what could be expected from a project of this scale.”
Taleworlds have built the Bannerlord engine “from scratch” which means there are “fundamental tech and architecture changes compared to Warband.” The scope of the project is also pretty large, encompassing a sandbox campaign, kingdom management, trading, diplomacy, and, of course, real-time battles involving hundreds of participants. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord will also get a multiplayer matchmaking system for the first time.
That scope hasn’t radically expanded over the years, and is broadly in-keeping with what Taleworlds achieved with the original Mount & Blade (albeit that was on a simpler level). The general lack of feature creep should be encouraging for those who hope to ever see the game finished.
“We are working as hard as we can to develop the great game you are all waiting for, and our primary focus is the quality of the final product. We want Bannerlord to be the best game that TaleWorlds can create, and we won’t take any shortcuts to get there,” Taleworlds conclude.
As for what you can expect from Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord at Gamescom, the studio suggest it’ll be video demonstrations like the ones shown at E3.
