A few days ago, I found out on PCGamer that a mod was turning Bannerlord into a 1000 player MMO game.. I was intrigued beyond belief, as a person who had thousands of hours in Warband (and of course played two mods, namely, Persistent World and Persistent Kingdoms, where players could create their own kingdoms in a map, severely limited, though.) this was my dream game mode to play.
The start of the game is pretty straightforward, you download a launcher, you sign up to their website and then you run it. After you join a server (There are currently 2 working servers, one with 1100 player capacity (constantly increasing) and the other one has about 500 player capacity last time I checked) you start in a different manner when compared to the regular Bannerlord. There is a custom tutorial that helps you get started, first, you talk with an NPC that instructs you to visit a village to get hands-on and earn some hard-earned denars. In the picture above, you can see me and a few other players doing this action. I was quite far away from the spawn city (Zeonica) so there are fewer people here.
PCGamer article I linked above has a nice depiction of this
I had witnessed over 80 players in the same village, frantically farming to earn their denars to go on their merry ways. After earning some quick buck, you go and recruit some recruits to join you in your crusade and then you are good to go. For this though, you need to visit the Tutorial NPC first and then basically tell him "I got the money." and then you go around in the town recruiting NPCs who are standing still in various alleyways.
Currently, the mod is in it's really, really, really pre-alpha stage. After the recruitment, the tutorial is pretty much over and you are left to do whatever you want. However, it is quite limited. There are only looters spawning in around the map where you just Recruit > Kill Looters (or die) > Repeat -- if you die because you encountered a 50-men looter army while having just merely 8 recruits on your own, there is a huge chance that because recruits don't have armour, they'll instantly get killed. (By the way, the market is pretty limited. You can't even buy proper swords, just pitchforks, scythes and Low-Tier 3 armors at the moment, which is quite weak) If that does happen (it 90% will happen) you just start over.
The developers said that they are planning to optimize and fix bugs, for the time being, unfortunately, bugs are quite prevalent at the moment and just straight-up crash your game, even worse, if your game crashes mid-battle or whenever you are close to some looters, they just attack you instantly, and obviously, you can't respond. So the moment you're back in-game, your soldiers are dead and you are wounded.
Demonspawn a.k.a. Scuffed Horse
Overall, the mod is definitely in its early stages and requires some work. However seeing that only one developer (as far as I know, there is only one developer and a few QA testers making up the development team) was able to get this done, it is definitely a magnificent feat. Over 1000 people were playing the last time I was on and there was basically no lag, everyone was interacting quite well and the server was stable. (other than crashes, but that's client issues) I believe that I am not the only person who have these thoughts since the developers created a Patreon page 24 hours after the mod was publicly launched (oh did I mention that it's only been 4 days since the mod got released?) and they have over $2000 in monthly earnings from over 120 patrons at the moment. Hopefully, with this cashflow and community support, they can improve the mod even further soon!
That's all for today!