Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord: release date, gameplay, beta, mods - everything we know

Astoundingly, after five years in development, TaleWorlds Entertainment have managed to keep a lot of information about Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord under wraps. However, there’s plenty of scope for rampant anticipation from the small glimpses we have had of the game, showing off everything from mounted combat to full-scale castle sieges, and even some of the game’s strategic elements like taking over caravan routes. It looks the part too, which you’d expect for a game that’s due out nine years after the original. In the interest of sorting out all the details for you, here’s our rundown of everything we know about Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Release date

Since its announcement in 2012, TaleWorlds Entertainment have kept the release date for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord a closely guarded secret. There’s nothing remotely resembling an official release date for the game with both the game’s Steam page and official website refusing to give even a rough idea of when we might be able to finally play the game. There is a slight glimmer of hope though, that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will come out in 2017, which was mentioned as a potential release window by the team during an E3 2016 Twitch stream. The studio has gone dark since then though, so perhaps 2018 is a more realistic window.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Gameplay

The good news for fans of the original Mount & Blade is TaleWorlds Entertainment look to be keeping the open-ended sandbox gameplay intact. You’ll still lead a group of followers around a medieval sandbox, fighting bandits, fulfilling the wishes of nobles and trying to make a name for yourself by unifying warring factions and bring peace to Calradia. That will all play out without many surprises: the world map with its simplified strategic overview of Calradia is returning, the excellent directional swordplay of the original is back, and there also appears to be an equal emphasis on reputation and morale.

In essence, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is all about making your own way in a fluid and reactive medieval sandbox. You can align yourself with different empires and attempt to expand their war effort by seizing land from enemy factions. To do so, you’ll have to accumulate followers, party members and troop garrisons to aid you in your quest for Calradian domination. Whereas combat and direct interactions take place in real-time from a third-person perspective, you’ll make all of your tactical and strategic decisions from the world map. Moving your party, managing garrisons and plotting attacks all take place in the world map view and time is paused between actions here.

On a smaller scale you can also enter any friendly villages, towns or cities, all of which will have their own unique struggles and quirks to overcome. New to Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is a crime system, which will see certain areas of large settlements held by crime lords, giving you the opportunity to either step in and quell the activity or assume control of the racket yourself. You’ll also be able to enter taverns and interact with locals by either talking or playing board games. Finally, settlements also give you a place to craft weapons from various weapon pieces you’ve found and seized on your travels, from blade types to pummels.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Beta

Will still waiting on a Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord beta, despite TaleWorlds Entertainment saying beta testing would begin by the end of 2016 during an E3 2016 Twitch stream. Since then there’s been no word from the studio on when tests with players might begin. Considering Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will feature multiplayer, it’s safe to say that a public beta, whether open or closed, will be an essential phase of development.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Multiplayer and co-op

Multiplayer only came to the first Mount & Blade as part of the Warband standalone expansion. When it did arrive however, it did so with aplomb: battles with 64 online combatants, a variety of game modes including castle sieges and a Counter-Strike-inspired in-match economy. With multiplayer confirmed for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, it’s hard to imagine the developer scaling back the immensely popular feature, although until they release more details on this side of the game it’s impossible to say for certain.

Another aspect of the multiplayer experience that fans have been asking about since the game’s announcement is whether or not Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will have a co-op campaign. TaleWorlds Entertainment haven’t confirmed or denied the inclusion of such a mode, but they did state in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun that they had looked into creating a co-op campaign and that doing so without dumbing the game down would be technically impossible.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Mods

In the absence of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, the original Mount & Blade as well as its massive Warband expansion still have a healthy modding scene, with conversion mods letting you transform the world map into Middle-earth and the factions into orcs and humans, or expand the battle size from a maximum of 150 soldiers to 1,000. Thankfully, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is being made with modders in mind, and TaleWorlds Entertainment have already promised that players will be able to use multiple mods simultaneously.

In terms of modding tools, while prospective modders won’t be able to get their hands on the game’s source code, TaleWorlds Entertainment will supply players with the dev tools that they use to build the game world.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Combat

Combat in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord doesn’t differ hugely from that of the first game. There’s no magic, so your arsenal is limited to realistic weapons of the era: bows, swords, claymores, axes and shields. However, your control in fights is much more complex than attacking and blocking, as you can attack directionally by aiming your weapon in the direction you want to strike your enemy from. See your foe swinging their arm out to their left? You can block it by swinging your sword to your right, then strike them from the same direction as they recoil. This greatly enhances the use of mounts in the game, as you gain far more control over how you attack targets. You can also use bows in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, which work much like bows do in other games - you’ll have to aim and hold down the fire button to pull the drawstring back as far as possible.

Combat takes on a more strategic element in battles and sieges where you take control of hundreds of men. Of course you’re still able to enter the fray yourself, dying will leave your forces without a leader, massively disadvantaging them. In battles troop positioning and managing your forces is incredibly important - you’ll have to try and draw your foes away from solid defensive positions and have contingency plans for whatever your opposite throws at you.

Sieges are different again. You’ll have fight alongside your troops to maintain morale, but you’ll also have to direct your troops as well as a number of strategic tools depending on whether you’re attacking or defending. Attackers, for example, will have catapults, battering rams, siege ladders and siege towers at their disposal and will be able to control them to maximise their effect, or leave them to the AI to manage. Conversely, defenders would be wise to hurl rocks and boiling oil at their enemies from the safety of a murder hole, or charge back and forth along their castle walls ensuring the enemy can’t establish a safe position to storm the walls from.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Setting

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is 200 years prior to the original game in a fictional land called Calradia. Effectively, that still places the action in a medieval setting with pretty much the same weapons, tactics and armours available to the player. While the setting is fictional, it’s based very rigidly on medieval Europe, and as such adheres to the same social structures and technologies of the era. The benefit of it being a fictional setting, however, is that TaleWorlds Entertainment can compress the map so as to include desert, mountainous and tundra regions.

The map will be divided up between six factions: Calradians, Sturgians, Aserai, Khuzaits, Battanians, and Vlandians. There will also be mercenaries, bandits and barbarians to deal with around the map. Each faction will behave differently, there weapons and tactics will differ, and their settlements will feature distinct architecture, music, clothing and board games. Some factions will be adept horsemen, while others might be hardier, or better at launching ambushes.

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