Monthly Devblog - June news - The Old Realms mod for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Sorry for the delay but we have quite a chunky monthly update for you guys this time, with a detailed look into one of our upcoming major mechanics that will come part and parcel with our next update!

Keep an eye out as we plan to reveal more about our future release during updates to come, now as per usual let's start with our 3D assets.

We have fantastic new armour for our Imperial generals, both fashionable and armoured as per tradition.

We also have our first Knights of the Realm armour, ready to serve ze lady, and a range of shields to keep Bretonnias elite fighting all the longer.

Now for the chunkiest part of our update, our very own Career system:

For the upcoming release, we plan to introduce a new gameplay mechanic that will be (for now) mostly beneficial for non-casting characters. Our system will work on top of the base Bannerlord skills and basic game logic, allowing the player to choose their ‘gameplay’ career and advance in it during a playthrough. Allowing for a specialisation of sorts.

These careers will provide unique combat and campaign-related buffs or abilities that are exclusive to that career to ensure that each playthrough has the potential to be unique. Of course, each faction will have its own unique set of careers that will have requirements to access, so no vampires being warrior priests for example!

It has been some time since we have added combat-focused mechanics. We have had lots of fun playing around and expanding our magic system, but there is more to Warhammer than just magic! So for this update, we wanted to give some diversity, and opportunity, to any non-magic-related playthroughs to change things up.

The desire behind this mechanic is mostly to present a sense of progression that is missing in base Bannerlord, while the skill system from vanilla is still there it lacks a little oompf when playing a campaign, especially a campaign in the Old World. Allowing us to have our own ‘factional skill trees’ if you will.

Warhammer has no shortage of archetypical hero characters, such as Grail Knights or Warrior Priests, and so as you start a new playthrough you will have the option to choose a career you wish to pursue (this is temporary). A skill tree related to the career in question will be unlocked, so that as you play you can progress and adapt your role to whatever your ideal character may be. Usually these Careers also comes with an ability, not necessarily magical, that can be used in combat, these abilities can be modified or buffed by spending points in the skill tree. As you level, these powers become far stronger and so forth.

Our first example is our Grail Knight.

On the character screen there are two new buttons, the spell book and the careers button. The spell button will continue to work the same, whereas this here is a look into how to view your career progress.

After clicking on the career button you will be confronted with this, our new page dedicated to a skill tree related to whichever career you have chosen. You can spend points across the board with no limitations, so you aren’t stuck to one path, however to access higher levels you will have to fulfill certain requirements, which for now is simply based on clan renown.

On the left side, you can read the career description, and you notice below the Career ability.

During his playthrough example, you will progress through the stages of the Knight Errant and Questing Knight to finally become a Grail Knight. The career ability is called the ‘Knightly charge’ which makes it easier for you to plough through enemies on horseback with a couched lance for a limited time period.

During the active ability, for every point in riding the chance of your lance remaining couched increases, until eventually you will have a 100% chance that it won’t be interrupted.

The 5th perk in the choice groups will usually modify your career ability. For the Errantry War, it allows your one-handed combat skill to be counted towards your career ability, whereas one perk in the “Questing Vow” will stop your horse from rearing during the ability.

Passives on the other hand increase your Character, heroes or whole party’s capabilities on both the campaign and in battle, by giving extra damage to certain combat attacks or reducing wages, recruitment costs and so forth.

So, your next question might be, how many careers are planned for our first release of this system?

We plan to release 5, most of these careers are melee focused. We will provide a nice cross-section of talents, where some perks and benefits even reside in the realms of magic and ranged combat. In the future, depending on how well this system is received, we plan on increasing the selection. Also, we want to make clear, it is for now in a beta state,it will need further improvements down the line. A specific quest related to the careers for now will not be included.

We want to continue with a few other careers, or should we say, “bloodlines”? As other archetypes, we want to depict, vampires

The Vampire

Reigning over the night, the Vampire Nobility Career will incorporate many aspects of all bloodlines and is intended as the ‘allrounder’ vampire career. The Mistform ability will replace our Shadow step, which can be modified with several perks from this career.

The Blood Knight

A vampire that doesn’t use magic and focuses on mastering his combat skills to become the ultimate fighting machine. The Blood Knight receives “Red Fury” as a combat ability which will, for a fixed amount of time, unleash absolute terror in the enemy lines.

For both this new mechanic and our future release, we also have a number of fantastic new 2D art to help you feel that warm Warhammer feeling.

Credits:

3D : Merlin, Shawmuscle, Valor3f7

2D Art: Tino, Gersio

Programming : Hunharibo , Z3rca

Gamedesign: Mungo Overkill, Z3rca

Lore directors: Kriegan , Ecthelion, Jax

Music

For those interested in the music of our mod, we have a new soundtrack to showcase for the Vampires, making the ambience all the more chilling and fantastical.

Of course, while all of this is going on, the coding team is also trying to move our mod onto the latest version of Bannerlord, which is as ever a delightful experience.

Lore

As for lore, they’ve been at their desks helping to flesh out the career mechanics to be as lore accurate as possible, while also ensuring each and every lord, location, clan and faction has an accurate and interesting description. For those who do not know everything about Warhammer Fantasy, there will be plenty to dig into and learn!

There are also some other tasks being worked on in this darkness but we’ll have to leave that for a future update!


As ever, a massive thank you for following our mod and being a part of our community. It is a massive pleasure, on behalf of the team, to be able to present to you our work and have it loved so much.