"It's so gorgeous to be back in Paris once again
Now I wonder what they put in the rain?"
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It's a rainy day outside, but luckily modern man may at at time escape into alternate realities bathed in the undimmed radiance of...
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| Has anyone invented umbrellas yet? |
...ummm, never mind.
A dreary, drizzly, drab and muddy day greets my landing in Hvalvik, as I begin testing the literal waters of Bannerlord's expansion.
Haven't managed to get myself into any naval battles yet (chickening out of the first and only one so far) but though as I said in my last M&B post I don't think this expansion addresses the game's real needs for more roleplaying and small-group adventuring, what's there makes enough sense in itself. The ability to call ships to large ports makes for interesting half-and-half round trips, for instance sailing across from Car Banseth to Sturgian lands, then looping around eastward by land. The stealth gameplay hinted at years ago is also finally making its way in. You can now infiltrate a bandit lair solo, stealth-killing your way through patrols to a signal fire to call your droogs in for the last big scrap.
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| Be vewwy vewwy quiet. |
Quite satisfying. But limited in scope. As detailed in my post on RPG timers, Bannerlord is pretty good at balancing costs and benefits for large things like sieges, but for smaller affairs like quests the benefit of running it yourself is dwarfed by the potential profits of continuing your trade circuit while delegating to your companions.
Well, sorry there, Rhyley me boyo, but cows are not a common commodity, and even if I look at the map and see a village selling them nearby there's no guarantee they'll have enough or at a profitable price or more importantly that I'll be able to loop back this way while still pathing to a trade hub or military objective. By comparison the bandit camp stealth run above is more of a known quantity. You need to wait for dark if you want to stealth it yourself, but sunset can be predicted. Other quests, like capturing prisoners or hunting mobile bandit armies that almost certainly will waste days of your time in the chase, are so unlikely and unprofitable that I've never accepted them personally after the first attempt years ago. So are they really part of the game? Hm. Dreary thought. Let's move on to sunnier pastures, like the scorching deserts of the U.S. Southwest where...
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| Knew I should've waterproofed my implants. |
Well, crap. My first jaunt through Santo Domingo only cemented my appreciation for Night City, in itself, as a monumental achievement in virtual landscape design. There's no strict point of demarcation. As in a real city, the skyscraper canyons begin opening up gradually as you leave the downtown area, shopping centers and apartment blocks growing dingier by degrees, diffusing into an increasingly dilapidated shadow of what must have once been suburban cookie-cutter neighbourhoods, until finally, where the city dead-ends into the dam, the architecture itself loses semblance of habitability, consuming itself in unfinished, patchwork, geometric industrial utilitarianism. I nearly expected to find primitive adobe huts trailing off the end of this downward spiral. But note, I called it a "virtual landscape" and not a game. The downpour which accompanied my climb up the dam finally thinned and passed as I reached the top and turned to look back. At first obscured by sheets of falling rain, my journey gradually reappeared, the fringes and suburbs and shops and high-rises and then the gleaming skyscrapers.
I flashed back to twenty years ago while playing Oblivion, climbing the mountains east of Bruma to look back on the entire province. There: that's the spot where I'll hunt deer. Downhill there are Ayleid ruins I can dungeoneer my way through. Follow the river for some good herb spawns. Maybe head the other way to fight some ogres.
But Night City, for the incredible amount of effort and undeniable talent going into its construction, lacks even that limited gameplay relevance. The gangbangers you kill are interchangeable. The rest of street life is unchangeable. Too much of Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by
theme park MMOs' fixation on XP/loot grinding. Other than sightseeing, what may motivate you to revisit any particular spot? Is there anything in Northside you can't find in Santo Domingo? Individual sidequests could've been placed anywhere. Is the Northside of today any different from the Northside of tomorrow? At least We Happy Few distinguished polite from unpolite society by mandating a wardrobe change and some mannerly comportment.
I don't know where I was going with this. Something about the recurring theme of rain, motion, change got my mind stuck once again on
environment interaction and
the relevance of time. Maybe I just need to ditch these grimdark game worlds where the sky's always the color of television tuned to a dead channel and try something more cheerful, something colorful and cartoonish with a storybook flair, like
Wildermyth.
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| Oh, come on! |
I was a bit disappointed when discovering the map zones lack any real personality, aside from your initial decision on resource production. I'm more about the world-building usually. (Which is why I just can't hate C2077.) But more than even Old World's dynastic character growth or RimWorld's Sims-like mood management, this one's all about nudging your randomized crew through randomized events, not only to maintain the status quo but open up new gameplay elements.
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| She truly is a wit of jam. |
In her previous adventure, Jamwit acquired a firearm. By which I mean a fire arm, replacing the ability to wield two-handedly with a flame AoE. You run into several of these transformation quests, turning your plucky farm-boys into forces of nature, which can carry forward into various encounters. She'll never again wield a bow, but flamer-dame here brought her own
conflict resolution to an encounter with an ice monster.
Well, since the rain's not letting up I may as well return to Calradia. Ironically, though I've moved from my last campaign's home base in the far east of the map to almost the western shores, both areas house herding culture, and both times I've found it impossible to actually sell the insane surplus of work-horses produced. But this time I discovered nearby towns have far more favorable trade prices on meat, and though I couldn't put a dent in the horse market, I gleefully bought hundreds-strong herds of Sumpter horses and flooded butcher shops with their carcasses until they could take no more. And that, the Sumpter Horselocaust, interestingly enough has felt like more of a win than the sheer amount of money my character's making. The real problem with questing in Bannerlord is that running the quests yourself feels unimpactful compared to alternate time investments for your character like war and trade. It's not the quests themselves but what they prevent you from doing. Though Vagrus for instance runs on the same caravan management premise, it more carefully threads quest actions (mostly involving your NPC companions) into your comitatus' business ventures. You can run them in parallel to trading, can still turn a profit on marble in newbietown even if you've polished off its local quests, and those quests in turn have opened you new avenues for local profit.
So I suppose I can draw a conclusion here, beyond my usual push for greater consequences for player actions. Making a move should change the board, yes. But your own actions should also be limited by the changing board. It's not as if this is a new idea. The old
Dune game for instance had you spreading vegetation across the planet, altering the availability of the spice you needed to mine. And, just as with
alternate routes, such costly trade-offs have always been a core element of strategy games, where RPGs' fixation on infantile power fantasy mandated a constant increase in fantastic power.
I decided to stay out of kingdom politics in my new Bannerlord campaign, until seven years of trading and questing later I noticed my Battanian homeland's been taking a real battanianing.
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| (note the lack of green flags) |
From five cities down to two, and about to lose #2 and their last castle. So technically the map won't change. The same towns/castles/villages will always be there. The same units can be recruited. But certain goods have become unprofitable due to wartime scarcity (how's that for topical Spring 2026 references?) my ability to be a Battanian will vanish if I don't step in now to rescue them, gaining myself a fiefdom in the reconquered homeland if I'm lucky. Well, that's campaign divergence. If only prices, troops, conquests and reconquests didn't have a habit of rubberbanding back and forth a bit too quickly.
Persistent game worlds like Night City have been stuck in the MMO precept of unending grind, ensuring players can always revisit every and all their favorite haunts and victims ("where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came") but looking at the collapse of MMOs, that cozy familiarity may be far less marketable than it once was. Long-form RPG campaigns now stretch to hundreds of hours but by necessity cannot incorporate repercussions which might lock the player out of completing the main quest. You can see a parallel to Bannerlord's village quests being impractically unprofitable toward your "main quest" of wealth and lordship and world domination.
So I can't help thinking Wildermyth was onto something, if not necessarily in its heavy randomization, then in splitting the action into short campaigns whose heroes can hop to the next module and the next, much like you would in tabletop gaming, or as in fact many did with the old Neverwinter Nights modules. Some heroes die, others lose limbs. Some decisions end up opening more campaigns or future quest options. But you're still free to give the current adventure a thunderous climax. There's no reason this pattern couldn't coexist alongside permanent or epic-length varieties.
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P.S.: Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting case, as it actually did offer a tremendous, unprecendented variety of quest resolution options which really did carry through to later acts, but lackluster worldbuilding and narrative design kept these from really registering as important.
