Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is precisely as addicting as I feared it to be, although its release time-frame is perfectly suited for addiction, all things considered. Sure, the title is in Early Access and suffering from a bit of Half-Life 3 syndrome, bugs are biting more than a few players in the rear as they attempt to envelop all of Calradia once again, and there’s a bit of a mountain to climb in terms of what the developers at TaleWorlds need to accomplish before it’s a fully-fledged release. The good news is that it’s out, and that means that modders can now rev their engines and start getting to work along with TaleWorlds to bring the game to the legendary status that it can be.
Interestingly, this is the exact comment that Dustin Barlow made in an article around mid-January, and it seems like he was rather on the nose.
Dustin Barlow via HappyGamer
The modding has officially begun, and NexusMods is hosting the lion’s share of them that can slightly tweak the games to make it more appetizing for your preferences, or drastically change large swaths of mechanics that we’re too impatient to wait for TaleWorlds to fix.
There are a few mods that are an absolute recommendation, even this early after the title has been released in Early Access. While there are mods available that fix bugs that will crash your game, I want to offer three mods that are an exemplary example of the modding community turning a game into something stronger, or at least better than what the developers have offered.
CharacterTrainer Export Import (CTEI), by maxracoongames.
This mod allows you to export your character into a text file, and then import it again for use in another game. You can also use it to cheat and give your character an ungodly litany of stats, but the primary interest in this is that you can save your character before your campaign becomes unusable, and bring them into a fresh start.
CTEI can help scavenge your character that you’ve spent hours building up, only to be foiled by the snowball AI that takes control of every region before the first year is up. Simply export them, and then import them on a new save. Easy as you’d like.
It can be a bit befuddling to command your troops while you’re prancing around the backlines with your pony and a spear twice as long as you are, and Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord offers a slew of options that you can work through in the middle of the battle. ScreamerLord invites players to instead give their commands to their armies using their voice, and of course a microphone.
You can tell your infantry to form a circle around you, tell your archers to cease firing and almost everything in between. It works seamlessly and feels like an option that is already in Bannerlord because of that. You’ll need an external program called Voiceattack, but there’s an unlimited trial version for you to test before dropping $8 on the full program.
Hideout Player Party Limit Removed, by leoHarlequin.
This is a personal preference one that doesn’t precisely what the title implies; it removes the limit that stops you from bringing your army into hideouts. Very helpful in this early version of the game, as hideouts begin to pop up all over the place and the AI simply ignores them, resulting in masses of looters and bandits cavorting around the countryside that you would rather prefer to keep safe for your villagers.
This allows you to enter them, and tell your entire party to attack while you sit in the back and enjoy the fruits of their labor. After all, isn’t that what you’re paying them for?
As time progresses, there are sure to be even more mods that pop up, and NexusMods already has 73 mods in total less than a week after the launch. It might be worth your time to peek around and see if they offer something that suits your tastes.
