One Year Anniversary Recap

It seems hard to believe, but a whole year has passed since Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was released in Early Access. And such a challenging year it has been, for everyone. We hope you are staying safe and healthy, and that the game was able to serve as an enjoyable distraction for you during these difficult times. We also want to express our gratitude to everyone that has supported us since the early access launch and provided us with many great suggestions and ideas that have helped us tremendously with the development of the game!

With that in mind, this first anniversary seems like the perfect occasion to take another look at the path we’re walking together. Initially, we had estimated that the early access period would last for about a year. And while we are happy with the progress that has been made so far, we feel that the game isn’t quite ready for its full release just yet. As such, our tentative estimate for the release is Q4 2021, however, development will continue for as long as necessary as we take the time to ensure that the game is fun and enjoyable.

On a connected note, many of you have been inquiring about the game coming to consoles. As we’ve always said, our focus right now is on finishing the PC version. Consoles will come later on – but they will come! When we have more information to share about that, you’ll be the first to know, so stay tuned to our website, forums, and social media channels.

With that cleared up, let’s move on to discuss what has happened with the game over the past year!

Steam post image

Stability & Performance

When Bannerlord first released, we were humbled by the sheer amount of players that chose to support us in early access. And while many of you were able to play the game without any major issues, there were those of you that experienced bugs, crashes and performance challenges.

This is something that we have worked hard to address, especially in the early weeks and months. To help in those efforts, we introduced a separate beta branch for the game which, thanks to some supportive (and patient!) players, has since helped to highlight and resolve many issues before they could make their way to the live version of the game.

Naturally, there still remains work to be done, but to date, the performance and stability of the game have improved by leaps and bounds. For instance, a recent internal profiling of a 1000 unit field battle played on a GTX 1660ti and i7 8700k averages around 27-30 fps (36 ms) on the EA release build and sits at 47-50 fps (21 ms) on the latest patch. Similarly, when it comes to the campaign map, a setup that we use for continuous testing (GTX 1080 and i7 8700k) experienced an increase from 80 to 90 fps in fast forward.

Steam post image Average performance in field battles in e1.0.10 compared to e.1.5.8

Other technical areas have also seen much progress over this past year. Many spikes that caused stutters in gameplay were resolved, scene loading times were greatly reduced, DLSS was added, savegame compression was improved by around 80%, and the optimisation of texture streaming reduced pop-in and sliced roughly 10GB off the game size!

Gameplay

In the same spirit, we’ve made many improvements since launch to ensure that the basic gameplay is smooth and enjoyable. By utilising your feedback, we've been able to