Don’t expect Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord any time soon

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord developers took it to the forums to talk about the recent progress of development. Sadly, there is still a lot of work to do before a release date will be discussed.

It’s still too early to talk about the release date of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, said the game’s community manager Frank Elliot (a.k.a. Captain Lust) on the forums after well over four years since its original announcement in September 2012. While the development progress is rather steady, there is still lot of things the team at TaleWorlds have to do.

One of the things they are currently working on is combat. The focus is to make it “look and feel great in every sense”. Elliot also confirmed that the game is still goining to have permadeath and aging features, but no more details have been given on that.

It is unlikely that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will offer a co-op campaign, although the developers have been seriously thinking about that. As they have previously said in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, it is very difficult to put two players in the game’s big open world and let them have fun together. But here is a possible solution to that problem proposed by Elliot:

There may be another way to manage all of those things, by limiting the co-op to one kind of campaign. Let people play together as a party and have them always be together. That might be possible and that may be the the only kind of co-op that we can deliver. It’s something we’re experimenting with and that we have worked on. We’ll only officially announce something if we can make it 100% efficient and fun to play though.

Either way, nothing is sure at this point and all features are prone to change. We only hope that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will be playable this year – if not as full version, then perhaps a beta at least.