Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Blog Update

Since the last time we have checked, the developers at TaleWorld have published another development update on Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, which deals with the game’s bartering system. Some interesting stuff in there:

The satisfaction-meter in the middle demonstrates the other party’s willingness to accept the deal and so is the key indicator for the player, when putting together a barter offer. Satisfaction changes as we add and remove items into the offer. It is also affected by other factors such as player skills and relation to the character -and especially- the needs of the other party. Certain goods and arrangements have different values for different NPCs. For example, setting free a character who is held prisoner may be worth quite a lot to the prisoner’s family and to a lesser extent, other NPCs in the same faction, while this may be of essentially no value to characters who are completely unrelated.

The things that can be exchanged in barter depend on context as well. When bartering with enemies, you are able to negotiate peace deals, while barters between a king and his vassals could consist of granting ranks within the kingdom or awarding of fiefs.

Under the hood, the game takes what might be called a rather materialistic approach: In the world of Bannerlord’s barters, everything has a price; the game internally assigns a numerical value in the game world’s currency –denars to every possible item in a barter, then uses this monetary value to evaluate whether a deal is good or not. Something to be careful of, with this kind of system, is the potential of counter-intuitive results arising: For example bribing your arch-enemy to join your faction, if you pay the right amount. In practice though, this is a non-issue. The system will typically assign such exorbitant values to decisions of this sort, that these will be extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, for the player to attain.