“Essentially, War Sails is a large mod”: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord devs on delaying leaving port and why custom naval battles were a late addition

Earlier this year, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s War Sails naval expansion had its release pushed back from June 17th to November 26th. You can give it a go right now if you fancy, so it obviously made that second date. Prior to the DLC dropping, I chatted with Bannerlord senior producer Falk Engel about what went into the decision to ditch the initial summer date, and why custom naval battles were only confirmed to be arriving with its launch quite late in the day.

Asked whether the delay was down to specific issues which needed to be overcome, or just a general desire to spend more time polishing the massive overhaul up, Engel told me it was a “bit of both”. There’s always this technical challenge to optimise it as much as possible,” he said. “Especially as you add more content and features, because everything that you add can also break stuff that you thought was already done with.

“Then on the other hand, there was a conscious conversation, conscious discussion that the title was not yet at the level of quality and the amount of content and features that we wanted. So, it was just the sensible choice for us to take additional time and that time as well allowed us to push out the base game changes for player feedback and react to that player feedback.”

So, Taleworlds spent time refining War Sails and patch v1.3.4, as well as answering questions from players in regular developer blog posts to keep interest in the DLC boiling away. In the fourth of these posts, the team answered a question about whether War Sails would include custom naval battles – standalone fights players can set up to their liking from the main menu in the base game – at launch. Surprise: the post revealed, following previous feedback, that those custom ship battles would be coming at launch.

When I asked Engel what went into the original decision not to have these custom naval battles right away, and how those plans changed, he conceded that it’s a “bit more of a technical question”, so he’d need to go out on a limb. “The way that I understand it, our custom battle is a separate module from sandbox, from campaign, etc,” he explained. “With the way that we’ve set up our base game, it can function like that. The way that the DLC is set up, the ships and so forth are set up, it’s more complex to access the relevant elements of the game. One of the things that I believe we still don’t have in naval custom battles, for example, are the [ship] figureheads. That is because of this sort of modular or module approach to different elements of the game.”

He added that, natually, this modular approach is a boon for modding, revealing that “essentially, War Sails is a large mod”. While he didn’t get into specifics, Engel did add that developing War Sails has “resulted in changes to the way that modding is supported”, which have had a “positive impact” overall.

As someone who’s always a bit more comfortable watching an assault I know won’t leave me having to lick my wounds and start rebuilding my army from scratch after a few painful nights in chains, I’m certainly glad Taleworlds were able to make custom battles work from the get-go. Plus, they’re an ideal way of trying the game’s fleet of historically-inspired vessels before you commit to investing the considerable coin to buy one in a full campaign.