Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is content to let me wander
Or, why games don't always have to care about us
One of the earliest quests I took on in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord was for a merchant in the first big city I happened to stumble into. He wanted me to guard a caravan as it traveled to another town, and I agreed sight unseen—I’d just been perusing the market’s selection of Sharp Pointy Things and had realized that all the sharpest and pointiest things were far too expensive for my current budget of about a thousand gold pieces and several sheep. And so I headed off to… actually, I’m not sure where. When my conversation with the merchant wrapped up, I immediately forgot, and so I just trundled along behind the caravan when it set out, chasing off the occasional group of bandits.
I wasn’t alone: while I hadn’t amassed a great deal of wealth in my short travels to date, I had recruited a decent-size crew of adequately bloodthirsty thugs. This group was pulled together from various village headmen’s personal guard details, a few greenhorns I was supposed to be schooling in “the ways of war” for some other corn-pone village elder who would never see them again, and several registered murderers I’d encountered in the woods and managed to take on as prisoners. (A brief note here on my prisoner policy: at this point, I did not realize that you can ransom prisoners in the tavern districts of most major towns, and so the way I handled them was to cart them around with me until they agreed to join my gang.)
Little did we know, though, that this caravan would be taking us most of the way across Bannerlord’s sprawling map. We crossed through distinct climatic zones, from the highlands around Dunglanys down to the gateway to the desert wastes at Quyaz. It was more trip than I had planned on, but it wound up being a perfect impromptu introduction to Bannerlord’s scope.
That quest wasn’t part of any predetermined narrative—there’s a chance that it’ll spawn in any number of places at any given time, and you can choose to accept it or not. Once Bannerlord’s brief tutorial is over, the game largely drops all pretense of caring about you or what you’re doing.
This is a good thing.
The promise of most role-playing games is to give you the feeling of freedom, for you to feel as though your decisions are the ones shaping the story. But that creates a potentially insuperable problem for traditional game design: each decision node (at least) doubles the amount of writing you have left to do. When I spoke with Colin McComb and George Ziets about creating Torment: Tides of Numenera at PAX in 2016, they told me the game’s complex, branching narrative had eventually grown to more than a million words. A typical novel usually runs from 70,000-120,000. Giving players a lot of choices in an RPG has traditionally meant creating a lot more work for yourself.
The solution Bannerlord has found to this is simply not doing it. It’s a systems-driven game, and while it’s undoubtedly an RPG, the approach it takes to narrative has much more in common with Dwarf Fortress than with Skyrim. It’s true that Bannerlord is in that protean ‘early access’ stage right now and this may change at some point in the future, but for the time being, you’re free to spend your time in the game however you see fit: there’s no overarching quest to fulfill an ancient prophecy as the Chosen One periodically nagging you while you’re having fun impaling outlaws in the forest.
That’s not to say there aren’t stories or character development to pursue in Bannerlord. I’ve just chosen not to do that, and the game doesn’t care at all. While various nobles battle it out on the walls of one castle or another, shifting the balance of power in Calradia this way or that, I’m fairly content to make my circuit between Dunglanys and Quyaz, picking fights and occasionally stealing barrels of beer. Perhaps one day my men and I will decide to see who can hoard the biggest stockpile of cheese—who’s to say? It’s refreshing to play a game that doesn’t present me with a laundry list of chores to complete or a narrowly specific idea of what ‘winning’ means. Bannerlord leaves me alone, and I appreciate that about it.
Til next time,
-Ian