Taleworlds founder Armağan Yavuz is aware that Mount & Blade: Warband was—his words—rough around the edges. "One problem was that Warband was a very big and complicated game," Yavuz says. "That complexity was welcome for a lot of players, but it was also sometimes inaccessible. We had people with 200 hours in the game who didn't know an obvious feature."
I asked exactly how Taleworlds were dealing with that in Bannerlords.
"I think our basic solution will be the main storyline," Yavuz says. "We want to preserve the sandbox feeling of the game, at the same time making it more accessible. The best way to do that, I think, is to make a storyline so that the player, when they start, has various goals, has a quest and knows what to do and how to proceed. Once they have proceeded a little bit, and know how to play the game, then the storyline should take a backstep and just give the player general goals and options."
The main story is designed to guide the player through an opening set of goals, giving them a narrative and quest designed to offer an easier path into the game's sandbox systems.
"I think it's going to diverge a little bit," Yavuz says of the story's ultimate role. "We will give the player the option of playing in any style they want to play, and then, according to the style, the way the story proceeds is going to change."
Too see more Mount & Blade 2, check out the Gamescom feature trailer.
