Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Character Screen and Campaign Gameplay

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was presented at this year’s Gamescom trade fair and as a result, thanks to IGN, we can now check out a few minutes of Bannerlord’s campaign gameplay and get a good look at a bit of arena action, world map travel, a bandit skirmish or two, and even a preview of the game’s character screen:

And if you’d like to learn more about the character screen, this week’s developer blog tells us all about it. Check it out:

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

As most of you will already know, we have been at Gamescom this week showcasing the singleplayer sandbox campaign of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. We have been reading comments and feedback and we noticed that quite a few people are interested in seeing some of the different screens and deeper parts of the game that are visible in the videos that are coming out from our guests at the booth. So with that in mind, for this week’s blog we thought we could show the character screen and explain the different elements of that and how character development works in Bannerlord.

On the left side of the screen you can see the character skills. To improve these skills you need to perform the associated task or action. If we take One Handed as an example, successfully landing attacks with one handed weapons will increase the One Handed skill. Once you increase these skills enough, you gain access to different perks which you can select to give your character an extra edge in the game.

Perks, as the name suggests, give your character certain bonuses. These bonuses could be anything from an increase in party size to extra ammunition in battles, or they even unlock certain actions, such as the ability to reload any crossbow while on horseback. Players are unable to unlock all of the perks, and in many cases, a choice will have to be made about which perks that you would like to choose. In the end, perks act as a great way for players to customise their character to match their playstyle.

Just above the perk tree is the character leveling bar. As you increase your skills, your character will fill up the bar. Once the bar is completely filled, your character will level up and you will be rewarded with two extra focus points. These focus points can then be invested in different skills.

Skill focus allows your character to gain experience at a faster rate for that particular skill. However, once you invest a skill point into a focus then it is permanently locked in. To gain skill points in any of the skills, you need to have made an initial investment of focus points, meaning that skills that are shown as level 0 and have no focus points invested in them cannot progress, no matter how much you practice them.

All of this applies to companions in your party too, which players have total control over. Your companions can perform specific roles within your part such as Quartermaster, Scout or Surgeon. Once you assign a companion to a role, you will start gaining bonuses from skills and perks that are attached to that role.

We hope that this was an informative overview of the character screen for you, and we will see you next week with another blog.

You may also be interested in this brief PCGamesN interview with Armagan Yavuz that stresses just how dedicated the TaleWorlds Entertainment team is to actually finishing this project of theirs. An excerpt:

“It’s not that we have a release date but we are not announcing it,” Yavuz says. “Our philosophy is more like ‘we will release the game when it is ready.’ We don’t want to set a release date now and then miss it or delay it or postpone it.

“We are actually working very hard. Unfortunately, the last few months, almost, our team has been working like crazy. Working like 80 hours a week. Almost like seven days. So we are working very hard. But we still don’t know. We don’t have an exact release date.”