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Still waiting on some bright spark to make a good Game of Thrones game? It might not be out yet, but upcoming medieval RPG Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord looks set to provide that experience, save for all the dragons and zombies. Set 200 years before the first game, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord plonks you in the boots of an ordinary medieval man and asks you to unify the lands of Calradia by any means necessary. Of course, you can ignore that overarching goal entirely and live the life of a lone adventurer, eschewing the orders of your lord or king in favour of forming your own war party.

• Floris Evolved Coop
• Mount And Blade Viking Conquest Co Op Campaign

Update, August 29: Mount & Blade II’s developer has clarified a few details about the game’s upcoming multiplayer gameplay, including the new Captain’s Mode.Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s.

Astoundingly, after five years in development, TaleWorlds Entertainment have managed to keep a lot of information about Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord under wraps. However, there’s plenty of scope for rampant anticipation from the small glimpses we have had of the game, showing off everything from mounted combat to full-scale castle sieges, and even some of the game’s strategic elements like taking over caravan routes. It looks the part too, which you’d expect for a game that’s due out nine years after the original. In the interest of sorting out all the details for you, here’s our rundown of everything we know about Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord release date

Since the game’s announcement in 2012, TaleWorlds Entertainment have kept the release date for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord a closely guarded secret. There’s nothing remotely resembling an official release date for the game with both its Steam page and official website refusing to give even a rough idea of when we might be able to finally play it.

There was once a slight glimmer of hope that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord would come out in 2017, with a potential release window mentioned by the team during an E3 2016 Twitch stream. Managing director Ali Erkin later spoke about the most likely release window for the game in an interview with PC Gamer. “When all is done and we see a system working really well, we feel that it was worth the extra time and effort. While we missed our 2016 target, we are confident we’ll be able to get the game out in some form this year.”

Unfortunately we saw no such thing. Our hopes were dashed in 2017, and we are no closer to knowing the Bannerlord release date. The studio told us at Gamescom that they are working on Bannerlord for 80 hours every week, suggesting they’re not being casual about their approach.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord gameplay

The good news for fans of the original Mount & Blade is TaleWorlds Entertainment look to be keeping the open-ended sandbox gameplay intact. You’ll still lead a group of followers around a medieval sandbox, fighting bandits, fulfilling the wishes of nobles and trying to make a name for yourself by unifying warring factions and bring peace to Calradia. That will all play out without many surprises: the world map with its simplified strategic overview of Calradia is returning, the excellent directional swordplay of the original is back, and there also appears to be an equal emphasis on reputation and morale.

In essence, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is all about making your own way in a fluid and reactive medieval sandbox. You can even play as a travelling merchant if you like thanks to the working Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord economy system. That means the game takes the natural scarcity of resources into account which will affect the pricing of goods.

You can align yourself with different empires and attempt to expand their war effort by seizing land from enemy factions. To do so, you’ll have to accumulate followers, party members, and troop garrisons to aid in your quest for Calradian domination. Whereas combat and direct interactions take place in real-time from a third-person perspective, you’ll make all of your tactical and strategic decisions from the world map. Moving your party, managing garrisons, and plotting attacks all take place in the world map view and time is paused between actions here.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will also feature siege battles, which involve hundreds of troops storming into medieval castles – flanked by catapults and siege towers that assault the walls themselves. That comes from another developer blog from TaleWorlds, which says that the opening set piece will just be the initial stage of some bigger sieges. Grander and more fortified castles will have keeps, where defenders can rally to try and fight off invading armies. Further describing it, the developer asks you to imagine Game of Throne’s Red Wedding, “but with more red and less wedding”.

On a smaller scale, you can also enter any friendly villages, towns, or cities, all of which will have their own unique struggles to overcome and personalities to discover. New to Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is a crime system, which will see certain areas of large settlements held by crime lords, giving you the opportunity to either step in and quell the activity or assume control of the racket yourself. You’ll also be able to enter taverns and interact with locals by either talking to them or playing board games. You also have the option to settle in your own Bannerlord castles, all of which are based on real historical architecture, and fully upgradeable. Finally, settlements also give you a place to craft weapons from various weapon pieces you’ve found and seized on your travels, from blade types to pummels.

When it comes to your individual abilities and talents, Bannerlord skills level up the more you perform an action, similar to how the Elder Scrolls progression system works. If you want to be better at one-handed combat, simply do lots of one-handed combat.

In another recent update, we also learn that Mount and Blade 2 features six more breeds of horses for you to mount so you can gallivant off and stuff your blade in some unassuming soul. These six breeds are Desert Horses, Highland Ponies, Saddle Horses, Steppe Horses, Sturgian Horses, and Vlandian Horses. All of these equestrian chaps can all be trained up to be a war horse, too. Be warned, however, training them up makes them stronger but all the more expensive.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord beta

We’re still waiting on a Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord beta, despite TaleWorlds Entertainment saying beta testing would begin by the end of 2016 during an E3 2016 Twitch stream. We got a slight boost when TaleWorlds Entertainment revealed on its blog that a closed beta would come soon for its new 6v6 multiplayer skirmish mode. True to form, however, any possible date on that hasn’t been forthcoming.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord multiplayer and co-op

Multiplayer only came to the first Mount & Blade as part of the Warband standalone expansion. When it did arrive, however, it did so with aplomb: battles with 64 online combatants, a variety of game modes including castle sieges, and a Counter-Strike-inspired in-match economy. Multiplayer is confirmed for Bannerlord, and the first revealed mode is a Bannerlord 5v5 Captain Mode. You’ll enter battle with your own army, although your role will depend on if you control cavalry, infantry, or archers. The scale of this is much smaller than previous Mount & Blade multiplayer, but there appears to be plenty of depth to the tactical combat.

Another aspect of the multiplayer experience that fans have been asking about since the game’s announcement is whether or not Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will have a co-op campaign. TaleWorlds Entertainment haven’t confirmed or denied the inclusion of such a mode, but they did state in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun that they had looked into creating a co-op campaign, and that doing so without dumbing the game down would be technically impossible.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord mods

In the absence of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, the original Mount & Blade as well as its massive Warband expansion still have a healthy modding scene, with conversion mods letting you transform the world map into Middle-earth and the factions into orcs and humans, or expand the battle size from a maximum of 150 soldiers to 1,000. Thankfully, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord mods will be fully supported, and the gameis being made with modders in mind. TaleWorlds Entertainment have already promised that players will be able to use multiple mods simultaneously.

In terms of modding tools, while prospective modders won’t be able to get their hands on the game’s source code, TaleWorlds Entertainment will supply players with the dev tools that they use to build the game world.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Combat

Combat in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord doesn’t differ hugely from that of the first game. There’s no magic, so your arsenal is limited to realistic weapons of the era: bows, swords, claymores, axes, and shields. However, your control in fights is much more complex than attacking and blocking, as you can attack directionally by aiming your weapon in the direction you want to strike your enemy. See your foe swinging their arm out to their left? You can block it by swinging your sword to your right, then strike them from the same direction as they recoil. This Bannerlord gameplay decision greatly enhances the use of Mount & Blade II mounts (which makes sense, considering the name), as you gain far more control over how you attack targets. Attacks can also be chained together, so each complete swing you make can be quickly followed up to catch enemies off guard. You’ll need to place equal consideration into your shield, which will be damaged if you block incorrectly, and can be used to bash enemies. You can also use bows in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, which work much like bows do in other games – you’ll have to aim and hold down the fire button to pull the drawstring back as far as possible.

Combat takes on a more strategic element in battles and sieges where you take control of hundreds of men. Formations will need to be considered, and groups of soldiers can be merged and split as you please. There’s a hierarchy as part of the new Sergeant System, where commanders will designate units to other lords in order to better manage an assault. Of course, you’re still able to enter the fray yourself, but dying will leave your forces without a leader, massively disadvantaging them. In battles, troop positioning and managing your forces is incredibly important – you’ll have to try to draw your foes away from solid defensive positions and have contingency plans for whatever your opposite throws at you. Tactics are also vital, and enemy AI is built on the principles of battle used by real historical commanders.

Sieges are different again. You’ll fight alongside your troops to maintain morale, but you’ll also have to direct your troops as well as a number of strategic tools depending on whether you’re attacking or defending. Attackers, for example, will have catapults, battering rams, siege ladders, and siege towers at their disposal, and will be able to control them to maximise their effect, or leave them to the AI to manage. Conversely, defenders would be wise to hurl rocks and boiling oil at their enemies from the safety of a murder hole, or charge back and forth along their castle walls ensuring the enemy can’t establish a safe position to storm the walls.

Castles will, naturally, be a huge part of sieges. You’ll be able to upgrade your own Bannerlord castles with fortifications that are all drawn from historical designs used in the real world many years ago.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord reputation

One key difference between Bannerlord and the standalone Warband expansion is an increased emphasis on building reputations with different NPCs across Calradia. A whole new Bannerlord recruitment system governs this. Whereas before the player could act like a mercenary in most situations, recruiting their soldiers from villages and making their own fortune, in Bannerlord you’re somewhat more reliant on gaining the favour of NPCs. For example, you can only recruit soldiers from certain NPCs rather than throughout the world, which means the NPC determines the cost of recruitment. This can be expensive if you’re drawing your forces from all over the place and paying the highest rates. However, if you build up a good reputation with a single recruiter, you’ll be able to recruit many more soldiers for the same amount of money.

Reputation confers more than good rates on rent-a-swords, later on a good reputation will open the doors for other, more nefarious opportunities. Need to kidnap a character and reckon it’d be easier with some help from inside the town or city? A friendly NPC might be able to help you out with that if you’re on particularly good terms with them and they specialise in that area of expertise. Of course, it’s not all soldiers and hostages. Befriending a merchant will simply net you better prices at the town’s market stalls.

Then there’s Bannerlord’s influence system, which allows you to buy an army’s loyalty. By serving the kingdom through noble gestures such as eliminating bandits and capturing the realm’s enemies, you gradually build a currency that can then be spent on influencing an allied lord to join your cause. Potential allies include the Aserai clans and the Calradic Empire.

Bannerlord also promises to put you on your backside as often as Warband did – you’ll run into vastly superior forces and find yourself a penniless prisoner with no forces to command – but having a solid network of NPCs to fall back on will make your journey back to prominence easier.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord setting

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is set 200 years prior to the original game in a fictional land called Calradia. Effectively, that still places the action in a medieval setting with pretty much the same weapons, tactics, and armours available to the player. While the setting is fictional, it’s based very rigidly on medieval Europe, and as such adheres to the same social structures and technologies of the era. The benefit of it being a fictional setting, however, is that TaleWorlds Entertainment can compress the map so as to include desert, mountainous, and tundra regions.

The map will be divided up between six factions: Calradians, Sturgians, Aserai, Khuzaits, Battanians, and Vlandians. There will also be mercenaries, bandits, and barbarians to deal with around the map. Each faction will behave differently, their weapons and tactics will differ, and their settlements will feature distinct architecture, music, clothing, and board games. Some factions will be adept horsemen, while others might be hardier, or better at launching ambushes.

Waiting for Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlords? Stop twiddling your thumbs and give some of these Warband mods a whirl.

Mount & Blade: Warband is the standalone expansion for Mount & Blade that released on Steam back in 2010 and made its console debut at the end of last year, and a huge modding community has built up around it.

The sequel, Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlords, still doesn’t have a confirmed release date but we do know that developer TaleWorlds will share its tools to keep the modding community alive.

There’s a tonne of mods for Mount & Blade: Warband, from total conversion to simpler fare that makes the game prettier, and that’s what we’re here for today.

Mount & Blade: Warband’s best mods and where to get them

In anticipation of the sequel hopefully hitting its potential 2017 release date, we’ve rounded up some of the best mods for you to try in Warband as the game is super cheap right now, and it’s a good a time as any to dip your toes into the water.

Let us know if your favourites made the list, and if you have any suggestions of your own.

A Song of Ice and Fire is music to our ears

If you’re yearning for some Game of Thrones action while waiting for the next book or the new series, A World of Ice and Fire is going to be right up your street.

We reviewed AWoIaF a few years ago, comparing it to another popular Game of Thrones mod, A Clash of Kings.

It was officially released in April this year and is still being updated – you can check out June’s patch notes here – and it lets you pick character names based on either the books or the TV series, which is a nice touch.

If you’re ready to slaughter and pillage your way to the Iron Throne, this is the mod for you.

Mount & Blade: 40K

Warsword Conquest has been around for a while, and while it’s still in beta, this Warhammer fantasy total conversion mod features factions like the Scaven, dwarves, orcs, elves, Lizardmen and more.

The latest update was in June, and while there’s still no release date in sight, it’s a solid fantasy mod for fans of Warhammer.

Any mod that enables drunken heroes to stagger across the world and ride into battle completely sozzled is okay in my book.

A galaxy far, far away

Star Wars – Bear Force 2 is a world away from Mount & Blade: Warband.

Set during the Clone Wars, this multiplayer mod has overhauled everything to recreate the Star Wars universe for Mount & Blade players who fancy changing things up and trading in their swords for lightsabers.

In June’s blog update the team behind the mod said that they were working towards “a grand release in July”. Hopefully they’ll get it out there before Bannerlord comes out.

Watch your enemies lose their heads

There’s nothing more satisfying in this world than lopping off someone’s arm or leg, so let’s throw a little love towards the Decapitate and Dismember mod.

It’s an oldie but a goodie, and all of the enemies can be beheaded in the majority of scenarios. Just like in real life, it might take you a few tries to hack off a limb or a head, but a little perseverance and elbow grease goes a long way.

It’s not Elder Scrolls 6, but it’ll do

It would be remiss not to include an Elder Scrolls mod on the list.

Tamriel: Bloodlines End is an ambitious mod that is currently in development for Warband. It’s set in the fourth era, just after the assassination of Emperor Titus Mede II and Vittoria Vicci.

Factions include Khajiit, Argonians, Aldmeri, and lots more. It’s certainly one to keep an eye on if it can deliver on its promise to let you “Travel to any corner of Tamriel.”

There’s no release date for a beta version, so let’s hope the project doesn’t become too overwhelming. We really want to see Tamriel come to Mount & Blade: Warband.

A Smorgasbord of mods

If you can’t be bothered to trawl through all of the Mount & Blade: Warband mods, the Floris Mod Pack is for you.

This is definitely an experience for players who have seen and done all there is to do in the vanilla version of the game, and it brings together a range of existing mods in the community.

You can choose between Basic, Gameplay, and Expanded versions depending on both the power of your PC and how much of a change you want.

Need a helping hand?

Wandering the land trying to amass an army can get lonely at times. If you want some company, the Full Invasion 2 mod is a popular choice for co-op.

Players are tasked with surviving waves of invaders and bosses for as long as possible, so it’s no walk in the park.

There is a newer version being worked on that will introduce new maps, systems, and features. If you’re having fun with Full Invasion 2, it’s worth keeping up with Wave 53 Studios’ progress on Full Invasion 3.

For honour and glory

Another mod that’s still in development, War of the Samurai overhauls Mount & Blade: Warband’s setting entirely.

YouNean is putting in a lot of effort to get its mod as historically accurate as possible, reading up on the era to get the names and artwork spot on.

The mod starts in 1560 after the Battle of Okehazama and one of the features will be the option of promoting members of your army to companions. There will be at least 50 clans and over 300 lords when the mod is finished.

It’s one to add to your watch list.

Swords and sorcery

Perisno is a fantasy mod for Warband and within it you’ll find elves, giants, dwarves, and even magic – although it’s worth noting that players can’t actually use magic.

The most recent update rolled out five new factions including two factions of giants, which are now a playable race.

Perisno has powerful weapons like the Flamebringer and Skyfall relics, and as well as invaders, players need to be on the lookout for the “Dreaded One,” adding another dimension to the gameplay with the potential for some interesting random events.

Chivalry is alive and well

Prophecy of Pendor is for those of you who don’t want to go too far off the reservation.

The setting is low-fantasy, and Knighthood Orders, voice acting encounters, and “Well thought out cultures, armies, and conflict” lend themselves to a greater sense of immersion.

The AI battle system is new and there are even more quests and events than the original expansion.

Definitely a must-have for lovers of the original.

Looks aren’t everything, but they help

It’s no surprise to anyone to say that Mount & Blade: Warband isn’t the best looking game out there, but the Mount & Blade: Retexture mod sets out to rectify that.

The texture pack is for the vanilla version of the game and makes it a hell of a lot more easy on the eye.

Expect an update for hair textures soon as well.

Bigger is better

If you think your PC can handle the challenge, you should look into Warband Battle Size Changer for some epic fights.

The mod increases the base limit of 150 soldiers to 1000.

But fair warning, “Don’t even expect to be able to have battles of size 1000 even if you have the latest and greatest hardware; that upper limit is that high to give plenty of leeway. If you experience crashes, you should lower the battle size.”

Floris Evolved Coop

If your game starts to slow down or crashes, obviously you need to lower your expectations somewhat, along with the number of troops.

Mount And Blade Viking Conquest Co Op Campaign

But this should serve nicely to spice up your battles.