Early Access Update

With some semblance of normality slowly beginning to return to the world, we wanted to take the time to reach out to you to talk about Bannerlord’s early access journey so far by discussing some of the changes and improvements to the game before moving on to touch on some of our plans for the future. Rather ironically, and even though it’s been a challenge, working from home seems to have brought our team closer together. Development of the game has continued unabated with around 78 patches and fixes in total being released since the game’s launch, eleven weeks ago.

The main focus of these patches has been aimed at stability and performance improvements and, with the help of the detailed bug reports from our community, we are pleased to say that we have fixed over 200 crash-related bugs to date. Performance has also improved a lot, with massively reduced loading times and increased frame rates across the board, especially in battles. The majority of the performance spikes are fixed and the resource usage of some tasks are reduced. Better balanced resource usage of parallel tasks has led to increased multi-core performance and much smoother gameplay. Additionally, we introduced multiple autosave slots and drastically reduced save file sizes to enable cloud saves, to further reduce the chances of players running into save-breaking bugs.

We will continue to work our hardest on resolving the remaining issues as fast as we possibly can so please continue to forward those bug reports as we really can’t stress just how useful they are to us!

We optimised resource usage of archer visibility computation and target selection, improving performance in archer heavy battles.

To help in the ongoing battle against bugs, we introduced a separate beta branch that players can opt-in to if they would like to test upcoming updates and changes to the game. This approach gives us the best of both worlds: players looking for a more stable experience can stay in the main branch; meanwhile, in the beta branch we can test new features and changes a bit sooner.

This patching process is something that we have used quite extensively as of late, with many new updates coming that have expanded on game mechanics and introduced new content. We have implemented a number of missing perks, added several new soundtracks to our existing comprehensive music library and introduced new weapons, armours, shields and crafting pieces. Additionally, new scenes have been added to both singleplayer and multiplayer. Also, while adding new quests to the game, all existing quests were overhauled and most problems and issues that could cause you to become stuck were fixed.

New armours and weapons are added along with different tiers and build qualities to existing ones.

One important update was Kingdom Creation, which allows players to forge their own path in Calradia in true sandbox fashion by giving them the ability to create their own kingdom outside of the main storyline.

Alongside this came updates to Kingdom Politics which incorporated diplomatic choices previously handled on the faction level into the kingdom decision system that sees clans vote based on their own interests. The decision for peace was further adjusted to include tributes and truce periods. This change has put a much greater emphasis on the internal politics and power struggles between the clans of each faction when major decisions are made and offered players a legitimate avenue to achieve war and peace when serving as vassals rather than ruling as kings.

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