Oooohh, it's Tab not Esc.
Never mind.
Time to find a good way to skill up before venturing out. This should mean arena fights, where injuries are hand-waved with the excuse of using blunted practice weapons which don't cause lasting harm.
However, since 1) even after a day's rest I'm starting out at 20% health and 2) there's a tournament in Danustica, I'll just have to see how I fare outside the gates. I did try one round in the tournament and did better than I'd hoped, which is to say I landed one hit before hitting land.
My starting cash buys a sack of grain, light crossbow and quarrels and three fresh-faced young lads in search of adventure. Interestingly troop recruitment seems based on relation with each town's wealthy citizens now, which might reward networking in a particular area in the long run. Accepted Surena the Gutting-Knife's quest (she's nicer than she sounds) to rescue her goons from goon-hunters though if camps are anything like I remember I won't be able to do it for quite a while.
M&B1 had a problem with towns. As its world grew (especially in Warband) and locations proliferated, the focus shifted to the overland map, and customers rightly demanded menu shortcuts to important NPCs like the tavern / castle in each town. Unfortunately, as M&B's environments are almost entirely decorative (unlike say, The Elder Scrolls' "everything's lootable" mentality) those NPCs were the only things which might reward a visit in the first place, and after a while the only objective warranting a physical trot around town was the quest-giving guildmaster. After you grew rich enough not to care, not even that. I assume it's to prevent this that Bannerlord ties trade price rumors to chatting up townsfolk, and I must admit towns do look slightly livelier than they used to with their musicians and dancers an varied decor like gardens and animal paddocks... but they're a bit of a let-down for a sequel a decade in the making. Open-air workshops might be nice if workers did more than mill about. Talking to every townie you meet might be good if you didn't have to cycle through hi/bye dialogue options (floating overhead text would serve just as well for mere trade price rumors) and zooming into their faces reveals Bannerlord's otherwise fairly comprehensive face customization isn't being put to much use.
Most Calradians sport the same droopy-eyed, purse-lipped, buck-toothed, moon-faced character model, simply with a couple different hairstyles, aging and small variations in clothing. On the other hand: those ain't hobbits above. They're children. Most games don't bother with 3D models for children, since it would be development time wasted on characters superfluous by definition, but Bannerlord's effort to implement aging gives it an easy leg-up in portraying realistic communities. Still, sometimes, the deliberate slight exagerrations built into the models (combined with algorithmically selected animations) can appear... let's say striking:
Gives me flashbacks to TES4:Oblivion.
Anyhoo, I'm a bit disappointed to see food no longer decays, which added a bit of urgency to old Warband trips, but this may be due to a world map which at first glance looks both larger and more fragmented than M&B1 Calradia. Most notably an ersatz Mediterranean Sea makes its appearance, splitting off mameluke lands from the rest of the subcontinent. Danustica, my starter town, appears positioned vaguely Constantinople-ish, though TaleWorlds made the right choice in maintaining only thematic and not historical or geographic references. They certainly could not have competed with Europa Universalis or Kingdom Come: Deliverance in verisimilitude and are better off playing to the weird triple hybrid genre niche to which M&B is already a main reference point.
But I shouldn't get ahead of myself. I was lucky the Southern Empire massed its armies near Danustica at the start of the game, making it easy for me to lure three looter bands in a row into traps against local lords' much larger armies. I leveled up in the first battle after only two crossbow shots (seems a bit rushed) and my share of the loot is... a decaying ho. Wait, I thought there were no zombies in this game? After trading that in for a couple more recruits at the nearest village, I was finally ready to fly solo. So to speak.
 |
| Forked 'em up! |
A 5v5 engagement against the nefarious looters of Tegresos yields something rusty, nothing new, something tattered, butter too! After cashing in and upgrading a few archers, fights against unarmored, unshielded looters get very easy very fast. I take another couple of quests only to discover smuggling goods for one merchant now pisses off the others in town... this has potential. Had to turn two of them down though for trying to send me eastward. Anyone who played the first M&B knows not to venture anywhere near the steppes with a starter party.
I was surprised at how well looters' trash sells, and Calradian economy in general seems to have suffered some retroactive inflation in this prequel, but it's offset at least in part by a greater need for mounts. Where in the original you only needed a handful for yourself and your companions, they're now required both to increase cargo space and for mounted unit upgrades (got my first Imperial Equite, may enemies shudder at the sound of his hoofbeats) and I find myself needing more and more of them. Their cargo capacity seems minimal and all the trash loot from these trash looters is slowing me down - probably another reason why food no longer decays.
Having made a couple thousand in profit schleppin' silver from a village mine to the big cities (and cheated by crashing the game when I was ambushed while slowed to a crawl by its weight) now it's time to start trawling taverns for companions. First up: Ira the Wronged, a classy gal impoverished by riots. But, while I'd planned to finish off this chapter by selecting my trusty sidekicks, I only now noticed their recruitment is limited by this newfangled "clan" mechanic, so next time will be all about grinding street cred.
For now, with an eye toward building up my trade skill in the near future, my search for the stalwart heroes of the land was pre-empted by a search for... mules! Wonderful, sensible, high-capacity mules!
 |
| Why yes, I do have a snazzy new chapeau. Thank you for noticing. |
Ah, humble beginnings, how I do love them.
No comments:
Post a Comment