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 and blade village improvements