You have to find and then pay attention to the characters who actually have something for you to do (you can shortcut to them, fortunately) and while I understand that being able to drive your horse around in every settlement on the map is a critical part of the Mount & Blade template, it does feel somewhat redundant.

This later part does, perhaps because of the ludicrousness of that ambition, feel a little empty. ItвЂ™s almost like Taleworlds were trying to populate an actual world. To talk to a noble, or a merchant, or a eligible friend, you do so in person, in an often absurd or buggy 3D chat-o-scene. When you visit a settlement you can engage with it via menus, allowing you to buy or sell goods, as well as recruit soldiers into your retinue, or you can actually walk about in the settlement and chat with the locals. As a player, you can drive your gang of soldiers about this real-time strategy map (think the main map from the Total War games, only this is all happening in real-time) and visit locations, track enemy units, engage them and so on. The heart of the game is a real-time map, in which the various factions hold settlements and fortifications, and about which units of soldiers, bandits, and merchants make their way. Bannerlord is about freeform adventure, and faction-driven AI collisions on a massive scale. There are missions to follow, sure, but they are open-ended to an extreme. It is not for the Bannerlord the tradition of CGI-linked storylines, and instead you are abroad in an open world, doing whatever you please. You create a character and then find yourself dumped into a world where AI factions are plentiful and their machinations enormous. Mount & Blade is more mechanistic, more strategic. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is a bold and beautiful slab of purest video game, and it is difficult not to love it.Д«ut what exactly is it, you cry? Ah, well, itвЂ™s an RPG, but not an RPG of the templates we are now generally familiar with. But let no man say I do not love ambition. That jankiness is a factor of the ridiculous ambition and scope of the game, which tries to do so much that some of what it does can feel a little undercooked. I have to admit itвЂ™s been a couple of years since I checked in with Bannerlord, and for some reason I was expecting something more polished, and therefore diminished, compared to the original games. And, oh my, the apple does not fall far from the tree. This later condition is true of the Mount & Blade games: as true for Bannerlord as it was for its predecessors. Some games are, in a cruel twist of developmental fate, born janky, while others, well, they choose jankiness.

Mount & blade