Greetings warriors of Calradia!

3D modellers are like sculptors who create the world that you see and interact with in a video game. As we’ve seen before, it is not a trivial task, especially in an open, interactive sandbox world such as the one you will see in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. From small animals to huge keeps, going through weapons and armours, everything is modelled by an artist and has to find a delicate balance between creativity, historical references, and playability. Today we talk with Tuncay Horasan, one of our 3D modellers, who will take the opportunity to show us some screenshots of some of the stuff he’s working on right now!


Tuncay Horasan

Bolu, Turkey

2011

İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi, Art Instructor

3D Artist


“I am usually assigned to various tasks, such as armour modelling; interior and map design; shield modelling; and environmental design. I always start out by gathering historical references and study them thoroughly. Following that, I create concepts that are compatible with both the historical references and Bannerlord’s world. For example, if I am going to build a keep for a faction; I study the buildings and architecture of the corresponding nations and try to understand what kind of style and structures they were using. Then, depending on the demands (playability is an important factor that affects design!), I create a concept model that is to be approved. Following the approval, I complete the model using our texture library or create a texture myself if needed.”



“The richness of the content and the freedom to do as you please in the game. You can command your armies and become a strong leader or you can partake in mercantile activities and think about what you can do to escape your enemies while making a profit at the same time! Furthermore, the game is easy to learn, but hard to master, which is something that appeals to me.”

“Creating the design for the male character in the game. After creating the model, I had to make morphs of his face. Preparing this was quite challenging since each morph is a separate mesh and confusing the order of morphs is a major no-no! This was the most technically difficult part: the tiniest mistake would have meant that I would have had to start all over again from scratch!”

“Right now, I am working on farm animals and optimising parts of a keep that I modelled a while ago.”

“Khuzait was the faction that I had most fun modelling. Since this faction is based on Asian cultures and nations, it was a bit different than the other factions design wise. I think that, overall, Khuzait adds some additional spice to the Bannerlord world.”



“If you ever modded Warband, the only new thing you will face is going to be the PBR system. Other than that, modders will have a better material and tool system at their disposal.”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Mount & Blade gameplay is centered around battles and it is of critical importance for the player to understand how things are progressing. Whether you are engaging a few bandits in a skirmish or taking part in an epic battle, you want to know how various troops perform and which enemies present the most danger. To address this and to give the player a detailed account of the battle, we have added a battle report overlay. In this week’s blog, we take a look at this feature and try to explain how it works.

Veterans of the series will be aware that in our previous title, Mount & Blade: Warband, the only information that players receive during a battle is through the combat log, with additional information presented to the player after the battle in the form of a summary screen (the so-called butcher’s bill!). For the most part, this works just fine: players are presented with the information they need to make informed decisions. However, it is done in a way that isn’t really as engaging or streamlined as it could be, and frankly, at times it can be a little overbearing.


Warband’s Battle Summary Screen

The new battle report overlay is the main source for all of this information. It comes up at any time during the battle with the tab key so that you can review the progress and the casualties both sides have sustained. Once the battle has ended and one side has lost, the same overlay stays on screen and functions as an after-battle report and you can review the gory details at your leisure!

The screen shows a detailed breakdown of every party which is involved in the battle, including an overview of the troop composition of each party; available promotions; kills, deaths and injuries sustained in the battle; and a routed troop count. In addition to this, there is also a handy button to fast forward through the rest of the battle if you happen to be taken out by a stray arrow.


Bannerlord’s Battle Report Overlay

The battle report screen also comes up when the player decides to resolve a battle on the campaign map instead of playing it out. This could bring simulated battles a bit of excitement as the simulation is carried out incrementally and casualties start to pile up. The player can, of course, skip the simulation to end the battle instantly.


Bannerlord’s Auto-Resolve Battle Report

Players will need information to be able to make good decisions and enjoy the game to the fullest. Bannerlord’s battle report overlay will hopefully help players in this respect.


In next week’s blog, we will be talking to 3D Artist, Tuncay Horasan. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Before we dive into this week’s blog post, we would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our new Steam Creator page. The Steam Creator page acts as a hub for all things TaleWorlds on Steam. Make sure to follow the page to ensure that you don’t miss out on any news or announcements regarding our company and our games!

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/taleworlds


Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is a bit different from other sandbox games. There are some in which the story isn’t linear, so you can more or less play it in any order while you explore the world. In others, there is no such thing as a broad story that encompasses the whole game, or if there is, it is less important than the world itself and its inhabitants: you are free to roam to discover them. What we intended to do with the original Mount & Blade, and what we are working hard to do even bigger and better in Bannerlord, is to create a game where you get to create your own story from scratch, where you make your own decisions and live through the consequences. In this week’s entry of our dev blog, we talk with one of the people responsible for creating this magic: Campaign AI Programmer, Ozan Gümüş. If we think of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord as a “box of tools” you can use to create and live your own story, he’s one of the people who help to create and shape those tools.


Ozan Gümüş

İzmir

2009

Computer Engineering, Bilkent Üniversitesi

Campaign AI Programmer


“I can answer this question in two ways: what I do now, and what I did in the past. In the past, I was generally trying to build our living sandbox world, which is almost a simulation of the real world. There are wars, enemy and ally kingdoms, lords with different characteristics and other aspects which mirror the real-world Middle Ages... From time to time, new armies will gather and try to attack the weak points of their rivals, capture rival fiefs or raid enemy villages. At the same time, caravans are carrying goods from where they are cheap to where they are expensive, making profits for the owner of the caravan (who can be a well-known merchant in a town, or even the player themselves). Each village produces new raw materials each day and villagers carry these resources to connected towns. Each day, the residents of towns are consuming these resources and paying taxes. The collected taxes are then given to the clan which owns the fief. While villagers are carrying their goods to town, they are vulnerable to attack from bandit groups and they can be killed and their items stolen. Each night, new bandit groups are spawned around hideouts. This means that even bandits can damage the economy of a clan if they populate a hideout which is close to a village.

All of these elements come together to create the sandbox world and present players with activities and objectives to pass the time. Each game element is connected to other somehow and we try to make the world as realistic as possible to make players feel like a real lord in Calradia.

More recently, with the majority of the coding for the simulation already complete, most of my time is spent fixing bugs that are reported by our QA team.”

“In Bannerlord, the power of a kingdom doesn’t come from just its total manpower count, but also from the economic power of each clan within the faction. Through taking different actions, players and kingdoms can win wars just by restricting the income of their rivals. In Warband, this side of the game was quite weak when compared to Bannerlord because NPC lords never suffered from a shortage of funds. However, achieving this was quite difficult because we needed to create an economically balanced game world (the total amount of money in circulation shouldn’t increase too much over time).

In addition to this, fiefs can be developed through projects. We have lots of different projects which affect different things positively, and managing these issues helps to make the player feel like the lord of this fief.”

“The first rule for creating a realistic world for our game was to make NPC lord and kingdom armies make rational decisions. We had to ask ourselves questions such as: after one army has gathered and laid siege to a town, what should the besieged town’s faction do in response? The answer may seem quite easy, especially if their army is patrolling in the area, however, what happens if the army is involved in an offensive siege of its own? Should they abandon their siege to head home and defend their own lands?

When making these kinds of decisions a lot of factors come into play. Distance, army power, garrison size, nearby parties, other armies, the strategical importance of fiefs... Ideally, the most logical decision should be found by the AI and their army should do this. If parties give irrational decisions in critical moments like this then players will notice this and start to interrogate our game world. Also, if players find situations in which the AI cannot react to or solve cleverly then they could misuse it. For example, if raiding a village alerted all AI lords and most of them travelled to the village, then other parts of their kingdom would be exposed to attacks. Players would notice this and the end result would be that they would be forced into using this strategy every time, which would negatively affect their gameplay experience. Solving these kinds of issues and not leaving things open to abuse by the player is a difficult problem for us, but it is something we work hard to achieve.”

“Currently, I am working on income and expense issues. In Bannerlord, clan wealth is mostly controlled by the clan leader, and all taxes are sent directly to them. However, the clan leader is also responsible for nearly all of the expense issues too (except for some minor personal expenses like recruiting troops and purchasing food). Each clan member is expected to deal with these minor expenses themselves, however, clan leaders can choose to gift money to their clan members. There are actually a lot of additional mechanics surrounding clans but it would be too much to explain right now!

My main area of responsibility is the simulation of the game world. The game is quite huge in scale and the simulation is open to many different kinds of bugs, many of which will only occur is certain combinations happen, so half of my time is dedicated to fixing these bugs. I actually prefer bug-fixing periods over implementing new things!”

“I think Battania is so characteristic when compared to the other factions. Their architecture and equipment draw me closer to them. Also, their culture is more closely connected to wildlife, which I also like.”

“Party morale is a critical variable. It decreases massively if the leader does not pay wages regularly or if the soldiers cannot find food to eat. Leaders have two main responsibilities: wages and food. Other than this, travelling long distances without entering a town makes soldiers tired and decreases their morale. Some strategies, like leaving soldiers behind to run away from strong parties also make men unhappy. When you enter a battle with troops who have low morale, after taking some casualties your men can lose their courage and start to flee. This means that a battle can be lost even if most of your troops are still alive. These deserting troops go on to form a new deserted party on the campaign map which the party leader can no longer control. Thankfully, there are lots of different ways to keep party morale high!”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

One of the main activities you carry out in Mount & Blade games is visiting towns. Towns serve as trade hubs and strongholds where you can socialise with the nobility, recruit companions or get quests. For Bannerlord, we spent a lot of effort on the town menus to make the experience as fun and immersive as possible.

As a starting point, the town menu is no longer full screen. It now comes as an overlay on top of the campaign map. This, (hopefully!) makes visiting settlements a more fluid experience. Also, the basic campaign map user interface is still available, so if you would like to tinker with your party or inventory while visiting a town, you can easily do that.

The menu background art was something that was really dear to us and we didn’t want to let it go completely, so we decided to use illustrations as the background for the smaller menu for town options. This required some retrofitting of the illustrations but our illustrator, Serdar, did a fantastic job there.

There are many things that you typically do in towns, so we tried to make as many actions as possible directly accessible from the menu, thus removing the need to load into a scene to perform actions. For example, prisoners can be sold to the ransom broker directly through the menu and players can access the crafting screen without needing to navigate their way to the local blacksmith.

One result of this was that the number of menu actions increased considerably and it was no longer practical to access everything from a single menu layer. Fortunately, the solution came quite naturally. Town scenes have various areas and sub-locations such as the tavern, castle, marketplace, etc. We decided to simply mirror that in the town menu structure. So the main menu now has options to go to various districts, which are themselves sub-menus. Each sub-menu has actions that are applicable there. For example, the arena sub-menu has an option to join a tournament.

Locating and speaking to NPCs is also one of the most important things you do in towns. This can be done through the portraits on the top right panel, eliminating the need for the players to enter the town scene and search for any NPCs they wish to talk to. This may seem like a minor improvement, but in reality, it has a huge positive impact throughout the game as it helps to streamline certain actions to make them faster and less tedious, improving the overall user experience.

Players who wish to immerse themselves in the world will still be able to explore the scenes to locate notables, however, those who prefer to maximise what they can achieve during their play session will be able to use the town menu to perform any action and save some valuable time.



In next week’s blog, we will be speaking with AI and Campaign Programmer, Ozan Gümüş. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

For regular followers of this series of blogs, it will come as no surprise to hear that, for Bannerlord, we draw our inspiration for each faction from a number of historical cultures and peoples. Using real-world cultures in this way gives us a great starting point when it comes to creating visual assets for the game. It allows us to create weapons, clothing, armours, buildings and practically everything else in the game in a way which looks and feels authentic to players. However, the low fantasy setting of the game gives us room to inject our own flair and flavour into each item we create, which is something our artists certainly make the most of. In this week’s blog, we talk to one of these artists, Ömer Zeren, who will tell us a little bit about his workflow and what it takes to get a design from the drawing board and into the game.


Ömer Zeren

Ankara, Turkey

2013

Fine Arts - Visual Communication and Design

3D Artist

“Since I joined the team in 2013, most of my work has revolved around designing and modelling armours and costumes for the game. A design can start with something as simple as a description, such as ‘Vlandian medium leather armour’, or it could be something a little more complex, such as a reference image or a concept design created within the studio. Those are usually the starting points for any of my designs. My next step is to launch ZBrush and to start sculpting! If the final design is approved, I move on to create a low-poly version of the model. I try to be economical with the poly count of course: a full set of armour, head to toe, usually comes to around 7000-10000 polygons. For texturing, I use a number of different programs, including ZBrush Polypaint, Photoshop and at times I use Substance Painter (fabric texture creation is faster with it!). I finish by doing the skinning and import the item into the game to check for errors, etc. If everything looks good and is approved by the boss, I move on to the next one.”



“It has to be the handcrafted, huge world of Bannerlord. There are so many possibilities for adventure. You can be a furious warlord or a greedy mercenary, or you could just be minding your own business and have a bandit group or noble lord hunt you down for whatever reason and make your life hell. It's medieval to the core!”

“Tweaking the cloth parts of the armours/costumes for cloth simulation. Basically, there is a lot of trial and error! Our cloth physics system is custom written code that was created in-house and was implemented later on in production. This meant that older models had to be revisited and tweaked for better simulation results (like changing poly loops or simplifying layered meshes). Ironing out the bugs and tweaking the models takes time.”



“I am currently working on some civilian costumes for Aserai. This involves sculpting and texturing lots of fabric and jewellery! For these particular sets, I use concept art created by one of our artists. It’s refreshing after years of leather and metal sculpting! Of course, Aserai has some cool looking heavy armours too, so no worries there!"

“Sturgia. I have worked on a lot of different armours for the game, but with Sturgia there tends to be a bit more variety within the designs for this faction. This is because they are a bit of a mixture of Slavs, Vikings, Russians and Scythians.”

“It takes about 2 weeks from scratch to create a fully functional game model. This includes designing, redefining, low-poly, texturing, skinning etc.”



“My favourite part is adding details in the sculpting process. It’s fun seeing your blocky model come alive.”

“Good quality reference art is really important, and it is something we search for as much as possible. Historical accuracy is fairly important to us so we search through historical medieval books and festival photos for as many pictures as we can find. Movies can help too, but we try to avoid the Hollywood bling.”

“It depends on the task. If it is something vague like, "European leather armour wearing foot soldier", I can choose the design more freely. But if it is a book illustration of a specific troop or a concept design, I strictly follow the references.”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, whether you are trading goods or taking part in a military campaign, a large portion of your time will be spent traversing the campaign map. The campaign map acts as your portal to virtually every other aspect of the game: the diverse array of settlements, the huge and epic sieges, battles, trade, diplomacy, etc. In this week’s blog, we would like to show you some of the work we have been doing to improve this core feature of the game.



For Bannerlord, we are using a fantastic scene editor that our engine team created for our artists. We were, however, using a different method for the campaign map that was a relic of Warband’s system. This was practical in some aspects and had its advantages, but as time went on we realised that the limitations were too many and we decided to redo the campaign map system built on the new scene editor.

There are a lot of advantages to the new design. Apart from being able to create a map that is of a much higher quality, it is actually a huge change that opens up a ton of possibilities. By creating the map directly in our editor we are able to quickly and efficiently edit the map, with one of the key benefits being that we can now place settlements directly in the editor (rather than with coordinates in a text file!).

This leads us on to possibly the coolest change we have made with the campaign map: the city icons on the world map now visually represent the actual city scenes. This means that, given some time, seasoned players will be able to recognise a city just from its map icon alone. Likewise, players will be able to see what kind of resources a village produces and the level of a castle’s walls visually represented on the campaign map.



The new system requires a bit more work in certain areas. Making city icons that match the scenes is an additional task, and we also need a separate navigation mesh so that path-finding is fast and efficient for the many parties roaming the map. However, we think that the benefits justify the extra effort.

Finally, we would like to expand a little on what Gökçen told us in last week’s blog regarding terrain types. Designating areas of the campaign map with different terrain types allows us to do more than just match battle scenes to parts of the map, it also allows us to control AI behaviour (for example, limiting the areas where certain bandit parties can roam) and affect party modifiers (such as movement speed). We think that modders will find these terrain types to be quite useful as they can be used in a number of inventive ways.



In next week’s blog, we will be talking to 3D artist, Ömer Zeren. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comment section and we will pick one out for him to answer.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Should you enter, let’s say, a castle for the first time, you would get lost in minutes. The debris of that ruined tower would not have fallen so handily as to be climbable to the top. The path to the Lord of the castle would not be perfectly illuminated with torches which leave empty, useless halls in darkness. And, should you enter a real battle, there wouldn’t be overturned carts conveniently distributed so you can move from one cover to the next. This is because there is a big (and obvious) difference between real life and video games: life doesn’t have to be fun. A level designer’s work is to create these set pieces where you live your great adventures: places and landscapes that present just the right amount of challenge, which, at times, guides you like an invisible, subtle hand, and evens the scales so that every fighter on the battlefield has a fair chance. In this week’s blog, we talk with Gökçen “Cuce” Karaağaç, one of our level designers, who will explain more about his job and what he is doing for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.


Gökçen Karaağaç

İstanbul (Turkey)

2016

İstanbul Bilgi University, Visual Communication Design

Level Designer

“Most of my time is spent on working with our scene editor. I bounce around between our engine and campaign teams depending on if we are working on new features or redesigning or polishing existing features.

In addition to this, there is always constant progress with multiplayer. I make new maps or improve existing ones, join combat-related tests, gather feedback, watch people play and make improvements for the next test.”



“Sieges! They bring together so many things that are unique to Mount and Blade, and with Bannerlord they become quite the spectacle. Sieges are the climax of your efforts in the campaign. When you are attacking you see the army you painstakingly built up slowly melt away as you approach the walls to claim your prize. As a defender, you fight to hold on to the gains you made after months of fighting and diplomacy. Sieges are where you see the result of your campaign efforts most clearly.”

“Cavalry and foot interactions on multiplayer maps are what trouble me the most. When cavalry units can move at 4x the speed of foot units but are less manoeuvrable, while foot units have a perfect turn rate and can traverse tight corridors and sharp corners with ease, things tend to get a little complicated. On top of that, when you have horse archers, throwing weapons and 6 factions with different mounts, you have quite a few things to think about.

An area could be just large enough so that a heavy Vlandian knight can manoeuvre around enemy spearmen but still get punished for his mistakes, while the same area might be wide enough for the nimble Khuzait horse archer to stay completely out of reach. Likewise, swift Aserai light cavalry could just zip through one opening to another, barely exposing themselves while charging down enemy infantry. And while all of these things are all great for depth of gameplay, they could also be extremely frustrating if players can abuse them.

So, in pretty much every map, we try to add multiple elements to create fun interactions between cavalry and infantry: ditches to disrupt cavalry charges, serpentine corridors to slow them down, small fences that only cavalry can jump over, paths that are too time-consuming for infantry to use, etc.

I can’t say this issue is solved yet, but it is satisfying to work on! I often find myself tweaking a corner so that cavalry can approach from one angle but not the other, or by adding a place for a crafty spearman to hide and ambush unsuspecting horse archers.”

“Nowadays I’m working on the world map; creating settlements and adding details. It’s a process I do together with our 3D Artist, Umit. That being said, most of my time is still dedicated to my work on multiplayer maps, and with creating new castle and city scenes.

This week I worked on this Sturgian coastal city:”



“Khuzait: they offer the most of what is unique about Mount & Blade.

Aesthetically they have a great contrast to the other factions, with wide open maps, sparse landscapes, stunted horses, and eastern clothing. They play their part of invaders from a faraway land really well.

As you grow your army, you can see your horde riding towards the enemy, kicking up dust and filling the air with arrows. Soon after, the organised battle lines of your more sedentary rivals fall into chaos.

Also, a nomadic collective of tribes ploughing through a disorganised empire is just the nature of the early medieval times.”

“Yes! Modders will have access to pretty much what I’m using right now. Only, it will be more robust and have a prettier and streamlined interface.”

“We don’t have randomly generated battle scenes in Bannerlord. With our new engine and new map editing tools, we are much more efficient at making terrains with no settlements on them. We realised that we can have enough handmade maps for battle scenes. We designated areas on the world map with biomes and tagged our battle scenes according to their features.

This helps us to have consistent quality and fun gameplay with all of our battle scenes, with hand placed spawn positions, managed distances according to party size and many other small details to spice up your gameplay.”

“The process varies quite a bit depending on the type of the scene I’m making.

In our previous blog about castle design, you can see me going from ground up with a simple sketch while building a castle, deciding on various details as I make the map while trying to keep true to the vision I had in mind. It is mostly adding new buildings and walking around the map, checking the sense of scale and travel times. When the overall colour palette of the castle and terrain come together, I start to add details and scripts that turn the empty husk into a siege scene.

In comparison, multiplayer follows a completely form follows function approach. It’s theorycrafting, multiple versions of white boxes, as many tests as we can muster, people climbing places they shouldn’t, calculating travel times with various troop types, checking for possible spawn camping issues, the list goes on... At some point, you grow more confident about the layout and start to flesh it out with actual assets. We emphasise control points, differentiate one side of the map from the other, visually hide symmetry of the map, add landmarks for callouts, and many other small but significant details. We also try to make the visuals match the purpose (if a corridor lets you flank a choke point, it should be tight and dark, with small corners to create surprises). As always, the map making process ends with testing and polishing.”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Animation is a complex and well-developed art with a long story, even longer than cinematography. Creating animations for a video game might look similar than doing it for a film or TV show, but it’s actually quite different – and much more complex. An animated character in a video game is not linear: it has to answer to the players’ feedback, be it because you should be able to direct its movement (if it’s the protagonist) or because it responds to your decisions (if it’s an NPC). Thus, on top of the artistic work, there is a technical side of things to make them look and feel natural, transitioning seamlessly from one animation to the next. And in a game such as Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, where combat is so important, animation plays a key role in its gameplay: it gives you the visual feedback that you need in order to fight effectively, letting you know (in a subtle way) what your opponent is about to do. This is why Olcay’s work is so important, and today he will share with us some details about what he is doing for Bannerlord.


Olcay Mancılıkçılar

Bursa (Turkey)

2013

Uludağ University - Computer Technologies and Software Development

Animator / Technical Animator

“These days, I spend my time cleaning up the motion capture data which we recorded for our town and village NPC's. I make sure that all the animations look realistic, clear and blend well together with the other animations.”



“The most important thing that differentiates Bannerlord from other similar games is that it contains a large number of features. While you can be limited by what you can do in most medieval games, Bannerlord is like a combination of other games which contains lots of sandbox content. I also like the unique combat system of Bannerlord. It's really fun to play and hard to master.”

“It's definitely the two-handed animations. Actually making the animations was not the challenging part. What made it difficult was to adjust the animations for our combat system, which has lots of complicated features working together to give the players best Mount & Blade combat experience.

Another challenge was creating a dynamic rig and animations for our new mount, the camel. Our camel skeleton supports a dynamic neck and tail which helps us to create more realistic animations.”



“Currently, I'm working on our new NPC animations. We are focused on animating different types of NPCs to create a living atmosphere in the game. This could be something as simple as seeing NPCs drinking and eating in a tavern or tending to crops in a village, but it goes a long way in making the world feel more alive.”

“Khuzait, because of their horse archers (which I like to play most!).”

“Since the animations are the visual result of the gameplay system, they are very important and have a large impact on balancing.

As you know, Mount & Blade has unique and responsive combat mechanics. Everything in our combat system depends on timing, speed and readability.

This is where the animations come into play. We make sure that every attack can be read by the player and their opponent. We do a lot of playtests and adjust each of the animations to increase the visibility of each attack.”

“Yes, they will definitely be able to use different types of skeletons! For example, our new camel mount has a brand new skeleton and animations which we easily added to our engine.

We try to make sure that modders will be able to add any type of skeletons and creatures to our engine without having any issues.”

“Yes, you will be able to add custom actions and animations!”



In next week’s blog we will be talking to Level Designer, Gökçen “Cuce” Karaağaç. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

When you set on your adventures in Calradia, it would be wise to remember the old proverb: there’s safety in numbers. The world of Bannerlord is an unforgiving place and whether peacefully trading or engaging in warfare, players will rely on troops to stand and fight by their side in order to achieve their goals. In this week’s blog, we take a look at how players will go about raising their own army in Bannerlord by discussing the game’s recruitment system.

The ability to raise your own army is one of the core mechanics of the Mount & Blade series. Riding from village to village to recruit troops becomes a part of the emergent narrative for players as they build up relations with different settlements to provide access to a steady stream of recruits. In Bannerlord, this mechanic works in a somewhat similar fashion as it did in previous Mount & Blade games, however, we have worked on improving the system to make it feel more natural and engaging for players.

Players now recruit units from specific NPCs that we call notables. By making this simple change we were able to expand on this mechanic and give players more control over the recruitment process. Instead of building relations with a settlement, players will now need to build up their relations with notables in the game, which are located in both towns and villages. Increasing your relations with notables will give you access to higher tier units straight off the bat and different notables have their own favoured troop types, meaning that a particular notable might offer a greater amount of infantry, while another may offer archers. This allows players to directly target and build relations with specific notables that can provide troops which match the player’s preferred army composition. This also means that losing soldiers may not be quite as devastating as it was in previous games, as higher tier troops can be more easily replaced, provided you have access to a few friendly notables!

Another major change we have made is that AI lords now recruit troops in exactly the same way as players. And while, on the surface, this may appear to be a massive benefit to the player (as there are no more magically regenerating doom stacks!), it also means that you will be competing with fellow lords for fresh recruits.

Finally, for those of you that prefer to recruit a ragtag band of warriors from captured or rescued prisoners, then those options are still available! Likewise, mercenaries still feature in the game and can offer some extra muscle in times of need.

To bring this all together and to help you visualise the changes to the system, we would like to show you an early version of our new recruitment screen. And please note that this is very much a work in progress!



In next week’s blog, we will be talking to Animator, Olcay Mancılıkçılar. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Concept artists are the backbone of an art department. A 3D artist or an animator might be constrained by technical limitations or by the particular engine that a game is using, but a concept artist can let their imagination run wild. Combining their research, their artistic sources, and their own skill, they explore new aesthetic possibilities and lead the art of a game to new territories, effectively pushing the boundaries of what a game can offer (in visual terms) to its players. In this week's entry in our blog about Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and the team behind it, we talk with our concept artist Ali Eser, who created (among other things) the faction banners, many castles, interiors, clothes, and armours. When you look at some impressive-looking armours from Bannerlord: it's very likely that it started with Ali thinking, "hey, this would look cool in the game!".


Ali Eser

Ankara, Turkey

2017

Anadolu University, Illustration/Animation

Concept Artist

“During the day, I'm busy drawing and designing architecture, clothing, armours and weapons for the different cultures of Calradia. Usually, I have something new to work on every week so it never gets boring!

The way I go about designing this stuff is; after I get my briefing, I spend some time researching about that specific topic, gathering as much information and historical illustrations as possible. I prefer using historical reference books that focus on a specific culture/time period. After this, I start sketching. During the sketching phase, I try to come up with lots of variations for the same design because usually, a design that's worth keeping comes after several iterations. Something of importance is to form a convincing and coherent visual language for every culture, based on their way of living, values, history and traditions. This is reflected on the immersion of the world as a whole and contributes to the suspension of disbelief that the player needs. After I feel like I've created some satisfying designs, I send them for approval and at this stage we usually go through more and more changes to improve the designs even further. After we have the final versions, they get passed on to our amazing 3D artists and made into assets for the game.”



“Definitely playing as a freelancer in singleplayer campaign. I especially love starting out in one kingdom and at one point leaving it to roleplay as a traveller.”

“I think it was designing the architecture for Khuzait. The cultures they were based on (Central Asian/Mongolian tribes) didn't leave as much architectural artefacts as the other cultures because of their nomadic way of living. So what we had to do was reference their existing aesthetic styles from their nomad homes and small buildings and come up with our own designs. Which was honestly, one of the most challenging but fun designing experiences.”



“Right now, I'm designing civilian clothes for every culture. I try to always keep in mind what are the most recognizable and iconic dressing styles that are unique to each culture and implement those. Sometimes I even push those parts in my designs to have clearly separable sets of equipment for each culture.”



“I'm in-between Empire and Aserai, both for their architecture and cities. The former feels glorious and gorgeous while the latter, mystical and enchanting. The way I plan to solve my indecision is to play as a traveller from the heartlands of the empire, who roams the Nahasa desert!”



“I can say that designing for castle keeps can get quite challenging. The buildings must always make sense in real-life terms, meaning you cannot have something in Calradia that couldn't be built in the real world. Since these keeps are huge buildings that need excessive planning to actually construct, I need to be careful about which walls can stand or not, which ceilings needs support, etc. Also, I need to keep in mind the technologies and materials available for that particular culture in the early medieval period. I also have to solve gameplay problems visually, like keeping navigation fluid and easy, and making first-impressions interesting and readable. With all of this in mind, trying to design a nice and beautiful castle can get overwhelming! The design approach we have for Bannerlord's keeps is practical, less focused on the decoration and aesthetics part of things and more focused on the functional part (meanwhile, as I mentioned, keeping things beautiful). That's why the concept designs for the castles actually look more like plans than paintings!”





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