The Old Realms is a fan made mod project for the game Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. This project is 100% unofficial and in no way endorsed by Games Workshop. We do not accept donations nor do we receive any money from this project. © Copyright Games Workshop Limited. Warhammer, The Warhammer Logo, GW, Games Workshop, The Game of Fantasy Battles and all associated characters, creatures, illustrations, images, locations, logos, names, races, texts, vehicles, weapons are either ® or ™ and/or ©️ Games Workshop Limited.
Monthly Devlog: April 2024
Work on Environment:
Code: Some QOL improvements
The coding team added QOL and UI additions. While our Blessing system mostly works as intended, we know it is very hard to understand how long certain blessings are actually active and how to know what these blessings actually do. For this, we extended the Map information bar with more UI Elements.
In addition, you will be able to easily understand what kind of effect and attributes certain Units have.
In general, we want to make all information and changes in our mod more accessible with measures well-known to players.
Custom resource system:
We mentioned back in January that we worked on a custom resource system that will add a new mechanic for gaining, upgrading, and maintaining troops. We try to make each faction's gameplay a bit special and make upgrades to troops more meaningful.
While a lot is still under development and playtesting we can tell the following:
Dark Energy:
Dark Energy will be a resource that will be used in Mousillon and for other Vampire Count factions. While it is easier to obtain, it is also costly to create and maintain your army of undead with dark energy.
Gaining: The player will be able to gain Dark Energy by not taking prisoners after combat and for any eliminated troop. As a Necromancer or Vampire, the player can now defile shrines which provide additional dark energy.
Undead troops like skeletons and Grave guards require Dark energy to upgrade them. All other costs are nonexistent.
Higher undead troops like wraiths or vampire units have in addition to the upgrade cost also a dark energy upkeep. Inside keeps or towns troop garrisons are only costing half the upkeep. This makes the use of special undead troops rarer, and encourages the use of lesser undead units.
Prestige System:
In the empire, we will make use of a different resource: The Imperial Prestige. Especially stronger units, like gunpowder units or knight units, will also cost quite an amount of Prestige. While Units are overall more expensive Prestige cost-wise, none of the troops actually cost any Prestige Upkeep.
Engineer shop upgrade
In addition to troop upgrades, saving your earned prestige allows you now to upgrade the engineering shop, providing more high-tiered weaponry, which is otherwise inaccessible.
Prestige Projects
In Altdorf, you will also now find a well-connected Noble who will allow you to finance or use your influence throughout the empire, to gain more Prestige, or make use of it for extremely exotic things.
New Career: The Knight of Mousillon
The Knight of Mousillon shares some commonalities with his Bretonnian Counterpart. The silver-tongued men serve the Serpent of Mousillon and can ill-fate the most noble knights. With the help of Necromancers and Vampires in his party, the Knight of Mousillon can conquer back the lands of Mousillon, and free Bretonnia of the Lie of the Lady.
One feature of the Knight of Mousillon is the ability to transform regular Bretonnian knights or troops into Mousillon knights. While peasant troops can be slowly transformed into their Mousillon variant, Bretonnian knights (it doesn’t matter if imprisoned or of your own troops) can become Knights of Mousillon.
For this our new feature of the career button becomes handy. We will make use of this button for a few career mechanics. stay tuned!
March Devlog Update
Hello!
Another month past, and new content has been developed. As usual we want keep you updated on recent things we worked on.
Lore of Metal
We are pleased to announce our new Magical lore, the lore of metal. Baltasar Gelt would be pleased to hear that in the next update, we will introduce the new magic lore. The lore will provide several spells and buffs that provide fire, and physical and magical damage as well as slow down enemies due to the heaviness of metal.
We will provide the following 7 new spells:
Gehennas Golden Hounds – Vortex spell
Gehennas Golden Globe – Projectile Spell
Final Transmutation – Ground Effect
Quicksilver Swords – Buff
Plague of Rust - Debuff
Gleaming Arrow – homing missile spell
In addition, we worked on a few of our new maps. The Castle Reiksguard.
And yes… We are working on them. Don’t worry ;)
Monthly Update (February)
The Witch Hunter
We introduce our new Career, the Witch hunter. Even the vilest creatures of the old world fear the hunters. As any other career, the swift melee and ranged hybrid provides iconic advantages in form of the career ability, and passives obtained via the tree.
Accusation:
The player selects a target on which a debuff will be attached which increases the damage against the target. The debuff gets modified by several choices made in the career tree, like slowing down the enemy or increasing the taken damage further.
Apart the witch hunter will gain the options to recruit a new unit type the “retinues”. Retinues are the personal guard of a witch hunter and allow for magical attacks using their silvered weapons.
Environment
Our Environment Team made significant progress on the world map. We finished up the whole north of the empire and even gave Altdorf a little facelift, to better connect to the new territories.
We also have a new battlemap and a siegemap implemented
Marienburg
Middenheim
Reworked Altdorf (Northern exit)New 3D Assets
New Weapon types and reworked weapon effects
A new initiative being undertaken is what we are calling the Weapons Overhaul Project. The primary goal is to add more variety to melee combat. In addition to this primary goal we will also be doing a sweeping balance pass on melee, ranged, and armor items. The last goal is merging TOR melee weapon parts and vanilla parts so you can craft them together in the smithy.
Since it is still in its early stages, we will give you two examples that we have got working to some extent.
Maces (includes hammers, flails, and just about everything blunt)
Poleaxes (includes halberds and most bladed swingable polearms)
Stay tuned over the coming months as we talk about how the overhaul is progressing.
We are proud to showcase the new ambient music for the empire region. We thank Jalrick for his awesome contribution
Monthly Update:
First of all we want to apologize for the missing update for the current released version. Not only were the features like the snow flow map and the preloaded shader cache unexpectedly complicated, the testing and side effects we were trying to investigate started to affect the development of the new content. After a few days we decided then, to not release any update, until we have enough content that makes it worth playing and all desired features work stable enough. Which most likely means that an updated playable version of the mod will take a long time.
The positive from this is : we put all our efforts into producing new content and there is ALOT to cover.
Environment:
Progress on the World map
As we mentioned we are working on the map expansion, and so far were able to expand up to the very north of the empire, working on the area for middenland, Nordland and co.
The lore team is assisting our map artist with references and map material but also we're writing out the clans we will introduce in the next update.
Apart from that we also worked on new maps you will encounter:
Coding
For the next big release, the coding team intends to make overall the game more enjoyable with more QOL improvement, introducing more balancing factors and providing more playable content.
Spell selection and casting Rework:
Internally, as work in progress we are working on a more straightforward UI for the spell casting. The spell selection will now take place via a radial menu. Internally we still need to fine tune factors, yet we already see a lot improvement in the way how our mod plays
Career reworks
All 6 existing Careers were and still are under rework. All Careers got a 7th perk line. The maximum Career points are set to 30 though, so the player has a pool from which he chooses.
Most noteworthy a significant buff to the Blood Knight which now Slowing down the time during his ability, but also gets a perk for life leeching and extending the career ability duration.
New Career : The Necromancer
We want to present our first implemented new Career : The Necromancer!
The Necromancer will be provided with lots of perks benefiting his summoning spells and spell casting behavior, without having him to fall into melee combat and highly benefit arch type - typical behavior.
His career ability is very unique to him : Summoning a Champion!
The Ability allows him to summon an undead champion, which is upgraded by the several final perks in his skill tree groups. The clue however is: The player controls that champion.
This makes the player not only extremely strong but also extremely vulnerable for the duration. The Necromancer needs to actively shift his consciousness into the Champion, which leaves his body vulnerable for attacks. In all means you need to make sure that your real body is not dying. There are perks to disarm that situation, but the player has to make tactical decisions for making most of this ability - in combat and in decisions on the used perks.
Game balancing: Waging wars and bandit population:
Yes we hear you, the bandit density is too high, and the game rather feels like “peacehammer”. We put a lot of effort into sweet spotting the densities for bandits, but also provide configurability, for anyone that wants to have either more or less bandits.Apart we try to make wars more frequent and lore friendly, so arch enemies are more likely to wage wars, while neutral factions wait for opportunities their neighbors are weak.
Custom currency:
In the upcoming update we will introduce for factions a new global currency or resource, that is used for accessing high power units. All of these resources work a little bit different, and provide unique play styles in each culture. This resource is used for upgrades, but also can in some cases act as an upkeep alternative to gold - which is a lot harder to obtain or to keep due to new forms of upkeep of new units. We will use this system for example to balance out very powerful units like wraiths, Grail Knights or demi-gryph knights.
Dark Energy:
As our first example we will take Dark Energy. Dark Energy is a new form of resource used for the maintenance and upgrade of undead troops. It is obtained by not taking prisoners after a combat (and using those prisoners for sacrifice). In turn , your obtained Dark energy can then used for the maintenance of high power troops like wraiths or vampires or upgrade undead units ( gold costs are removed). We hope with this change to make all factions and their specifics more interesting and increase the replayability.
The coding team currently has a lot of things in their works which we will show once the time comes. Among these: A lot of new Careers, new magic and a lot of mechanics that improve the overall enjoyability of the mod. We probably can show new things in february.
2D:
3D:
Our 3D team made some shiny new assets for the wood elves , we want to show our progress we made in December and January.
It feels like an eternity since we created our last blog post. We are sorry about it! It’s been a busy time as we continue to maintain our mod, push updates and during that time time new complications led to us not being able to progress on new content and not being able to produce meaningful status updates here on moddb.
We have a lot to talk about, and a lot of good news. With of course a look into what we have in our works and will be soon released (December) as well as what we are doing in future.
Changes that are coming soon:
Shader loading Improvements
A huge shout out to Taleworlds for their 1.2.5 beta update. They allowed us to create a prebuilt shader cache. After some internal testing, we feel we can give it out to the community. For those who already downloaded and built their shader cache not much will change, but in future the second shader loading process will be gone! Unfortunately, we can’t get rid of the first loading screen. But in our testing, a usual 20-minute shader cache loading on the first screen and a 40-minute shader compilation from the menu went down to 20 minutes loading plus 1-minute loading in the shader cache sack. Meaning: The Shader loading is cut to 1/3 of the previous time.
Snow map
With the same update of Taleworlds, we will also manage to implement the snow map. Very fitting for Christmas time.
Translatability
We are aiming to provide the ability to have our mod translated into any language using additional translation modules. Everything like popup texts or the adventure texts you see from time to time in-game have the required codes. We suggest those who are interested in providing translation into a foreign language, should use the template we will release together with the update.
The mentioned changes will roll out soon on Moddb, and the steam workshop.
We also worked on several maps, here of our environment team.
Blood pine woods.
Shrine of ill omen.
The Future.
We are pleased to announce, we finalized the sketching of new plans for the next big update targeted somewhere in the future.
Summarizing our big goals for the next update: Season of Doom.
- Introducing the new faction: the woodelves
- Fill troop rosters, assets, and scenes for existing factions.
- expand the world map and finalizing Empire and Bretonnia.
- Adding at least 2 new lores of magic.
- Adding several new careers for the TOR Career system, for existing and new factions.
- balancing and gameplay improvements as well as QOL improvements.
Is this a lot? Yes. How long will it take us? We can’t make any comments. Changes of plan? Maybe. But we are progressing, and we will deliver it.
In the following, we want to show a few creations that are already in the making as well as concepts.
And a big Shoutout to Samuel Alexander-Ford for profiding his Ghorgon model to use for the mod.
Artstation.com
Concepts
Finally, we were confronted with a big problem. There is not a lot of material, that describes or even depicts the way of living of the forest elves of Athel Loren. More problematic, for the proper depiction, we are lacking many custom environment assets. So we started on conceptualizing how Wood elf halls could be represented.
We are thrilled to work on the new content and hope we can keep you up to date more frequently again.
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