Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord, has been in development for closing in on five years, but the Turkish team behind it at TaleWorlds, still have yet to give us a concrete release date, or even that it will release this year.
Bannerlord has been hotly anticipated by fans of the original Mount and Blade and its sequel, Warband, for years. The official discussion thread on the forums has gone more than 1,000 pages of discussion on everything from the game itself, to abstract related concepts. Taleworlds has kept them frothing with drip fed information over the years, but really seemed to be ramping up towards a release in 2016 when it showed off siege gameplay at different trade shows, alongside some exciting new features.
"Unfortunately it's not the right time (or really the right platform) to talk about unrevealed aspects of these features. Nothing is a guarantee and although we try to avoid it, everything has the potential to be changed entirely or dropped altogether; such is the nature of game development," said community manager Captain Lust on the official forums (via PCGamer).
"However, we have made every effort to ensure that features we mention are either fully/partially implemented or planned with a very high degree of certainty (which isn't a response to the actions of or reactions to actions of any other company—it has always been our approach!). We don't just mention things without consideration and permanent character death is still something you can expect to see in the game. That hasn't changed. It's simply the case that discussing finer details of the feature wouldn't be appropriate right now, to avoid giving information that could end up misleading, in relation to Bannerlord as a final product."
There was no detail on when we might see the game release and no current plans for external testing, which suggests the game is still a ways off from completion. Indeed Bannerlord still doesn't have finalised animations for the character during battle, so we really shouldn't expect the game to debut any time soon.
I just hope it shows up before I start having kids, because there's no way I'll have the time to put the hundreds of hours in required for a usual Mount and Blade playthrough.
