Preface

I want nothing more than to love this game and I've really really tried. Despite that I got to admit I'm disappointed with Bannerlord's state 4 years after its release. I've got a two points about what makes the game not as enjoyable to me, which is why I still play modded warband over Bannerlord. I argue this from my subjective point of view and if you disagree and prefer to play Bannerlord I'd say more power to you.

No, Mount & Blade isn't a fucking Esport

For those who remember the battle of Bucharest will know that Taleworlds briefly flirted with the idea of having Mount & Blade be an Esport. I think this effected the development of Bannerlord with the potential for an Esport in mind. This is a terrible idea because despite Mount & Blade being a great game it'd be a terrible Esport. I think this is one of the reasons early on Taleworlds really pushed clans and skirmish mode in MP and didn't allow players access to battle mode in an attempt to push this. Battles is what made Mount and Blade a good game for community focused events and Taleworlds denied it to us forever because they wanted to push Skirmish mode upon us in an attempt to see where it'd would go at the detriment of the freedom of the community which brings me to my second point.

Modding tools and lack of complete overhaul mods

What made playing Mount & Blade Warband singleplayer great? Well it sure as hell wasn't native. Playing Mount & Blade Warband native is like having sex with a blowup doll rather than an actual woman. Yeah you'll nut and it'll be good for a moment, but afterwards you never wanna touch it again because it's kinda disgusting.

The best moments I've had playing mount and blade singleplayer was playing Floris, Gekokujo, Perisno, Pendor, AWOIAF, Viking Conquest and AD1257. These amazing mods build on the ground work that native gives them to work with but even almost all mods incorporate Diplomacy to have the campaign be functional. My point being that the sheer amount of diverse complete overhaul mods with interesting features really is what makes Warband singleplayer so fun. Playing Gekokujo compared to AD1257 gives so much replayability because of the different settings, troops and mod features which makes it worth playing the game all over again. With Bannerlord I haven't found any complete overhaul mods which are really worth playing because they're either too alpha/broken or aren't even released yet and the modders are still working on all the assets. I give Taleworlds shit for this because they released the game in state in which it wasn't stable enough for any complete overhaul mods to be worth while developing and restricting the modders to the tools they'd need to actually make a complete overhaul mod in the first place. Taleworlds just doesn't get that nobody really gave a shit about Native Warband and for some reason they think that what will make Bannerlord singleplayer awesome is their native version instead of the many possiblities modders provide to diversify the game beyond a metric they're even capable of.

This expands into multiplayer where the lack of overhaul mods and deprivation of battle mode restricted communities to form around events like they did in Bannerlord. In Warband you had many communities which would organize around battle events in specific mods. You'd have a Roman legion meeting up on Friday, Clone Wars regiment on Saturday and Napoleonic battalion on Sunday. This is what made Warband multiplayer thrive, not fucking skirmish mode.