Taleworlds talks new Mount and Blade II Bannerlord engine

Turkish developer Taleworlds has been hard at work on the true sequel to its seminal Mount and Blade (and Warband) for a while now and details have been very, very thin on the ground. Until recently all we knew is that it existed, was called Bannerlord and that it was looking a little prettier than its prequel. Over the past few weeks though Taleworlds has been talking about its development and most recently, it discussed the engine running the whole thing behind the scenes.

The big announcement right off the bat, is that the engine scene creator which allows the designers to build whole maps, edit terrain, skyboxes, lighting, everything, will be fully available to modders. That means much more in-depth and varied mods than we had with Warband and the original Mount and Blade, which is saying something, since those games are some of the most heavily modded in existence.

We also learn throughout the devblog that the new engine supports DX11 features like Tessellation, but will be DX9 compatible for those running older systems.

New screenshots aren't mindblowing if you've been playing any AAA games for the last two years, but they're much, much prettier than anything we've seen in the Mount and Blade universe before. It should be remembered though that M&B traditionally has hundreds of NPC warriors on screen at any one time, so you aren't going to get Crysis levels of detail.

There's also been a lot of work on different weather and day and night scenarios. The original M&B had fog and night battles, but they didn't really do much or look particularly engaging. The new night and weather systems in Bannerlord however looks far more affective of your battle plans and should be interesting to play with.

As Taleworlds explains though, it's much deeper than that: “In the screenshots you can see examples of different atmosphere settings used in the same scene. It's not possible to list here, the extensive improvements and additions that our atmosphere settings have seen. What is worth noting though, is that although in the examples here we have created realistic visual effects, all of the variables of the fog and the lighting are completely customisable with effects, giving endless options to those interested in playing around with them for their mods or maps.”

KitGuru Says: Bannerlord is the game I'm most excited for at the moment, even though I have no idea when it's going to be released. I have over 400 hours in Warband, there's no reason I wouldn't spend just as many in Bannerlord if they simply updated the graphics, but with the potential for new features and the mods – dear god the mods – it's got the potential to be something amazing. 

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