Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is finally about to enter a form where you can both buy and play it. But even though it enters Steam Early Access next year “pretty much finished” in terms of features, there’s still plenty of polish, bug fixes, and other changes that’ll need to happen before the game goes 1.0. Don’t worry, though – developer Taleworlds doesn’t plan for the game to spend another eight years unfinished.
“It’s difficult to really pronounce any specific thing,” Taleworlds founder Armagan Yavuz tells us in regards to how long the game will be in early access, “but it’s not going to be years, hopefully. We just want to make sure that the game is reasonably polished and balanced, and we’re happy, and we’ll be able to say that ‘ok, now we’re ready.’”
Mount and Blade 2 will already be a rich experience when it hits early access, but the trouble is in how all those details fit together – and that’s why the studio needs player feedback, Yavuz says “we have pretty much all of the features figured out and everything working, but we can’t really control all the millions of different combinations of how things play out with each other and what happens when different features combine or different paths play out in the game.
“In order to really balance the game and make everything click with each other, we thought that it would be so much better if we just did an early access.”
With all the combinations of features in Mount and Blade, Yavuz says “I’m pretty sure that in some of them, something may go wrong, or we may discover that we’ve forgotten to address something. Those kinds of things will happen, and of course there’ll be a huge amount of balancing.” That process starts when the game hits early access in spring 2020.