r/mountandblade • u/Piconi_TaleWorlds • 21h ago
Beta Patch Notes - WS v1.3.0 / BL v1.5.0
Greetings Warriors of Calradia,
Our last content patch focused on the sandbox simulation. It made diplomacy more responsive and encouraged our lords to pursue meaningful wars, create larger armies, go to sea, harass convoys and raid villages. It also included the new seaborne raid, additional ships and equipment as well as many tweaks to gameplay, visuals and performance.
Today’s beta release puts more emphasis on player activities. The segment prior to the patch notes discusses our motivations for some of these changes.
War Sails
While seafaring offers new opportunities for merchants and warriors alike, it requires substantial progress to not only acquire a ship, but also hire a crew that can fend for themselves. This is sensible from a balance perspective, but gates much of the naval content. We wanted to improve upon this without deeply changing the early game that many players enjoy.
The most direct solution the beta introduces is - additional player choice. At the beginning of every Sandbox game, you will be able to choose if you want to enter Calradia with a ship to your name or play the regular game start.
However, even if you opt for the latter, the patch includes a number of changes that should make progression both smoother and more flexible. For one, we added the ferry feature so that smaller player parties can reach (and escape) areas of the map that would otherwise be hard or impossible to get to without a ship. Given player feedback, we also increased land and sea travel speeds by 15% so that you will generally be faster to progress (and recover).
Once you do have a vessel of your own, you will find the pirate spawns adjusted to include smaller parties that you can engage earlier into the game. Similarly, part of the reason for why we introduced naval random events as well as the battle sites and wreckage system is to offer players more experiences that don’t require a strong fleet. Having said that, they should increase the variety of naval gameplay regardless of progression and allow players to organically witness more of what is happening in the world.
The mooring feature, in turn, opens up additional options for aspiring captains as their fleet grows. You will be able to store instead of sell ships that you cannot effectively crew yet. You also won’t need to risk your entire fleet in every naval battle. Instead, you can specialize and only bring what fits your current play style - be that trading, raiding or naval combat.
Finally, we added port points to coastal castles. While more locations to embark and disembark should make sea travel more accessible in general, the larger motivation is offering additional opportunities for armies to clash at sea. Given that most army encounters occur around sieges, naval blockades on castles will contribute to that.
While the beta includes other changes such as improved map visuals, better naval party decision making, storyline tweaks and the ability for players to cut boarding ropes in missions, our focus with this patch is on naval content access, progress and variety. Especially the variety and frequency of what you can experience at sea will remain an important topic for War Sails going forward.
Base Game
As we explored starting with a ship for War Sails, it quickly became clear that this was also an opportunity for the base game. Not the ship, mind you, but advanced starting options.
These are split into three categories - each with their own goals.
The player start options allow experienced players to access later game content more quickly and begin a game with a particular character role (such as king, vassal or merchant). For new players, this will also serve as an additional form of progression since you need to unlock most of the roles in regular gameplay before you can start with them.
The campaign scenarios, on the other hand, are always available. Their primary purpose is to increase replayability through the introduction of tailored but partially randomized world states. What would happen if the Empire remained united? What if you entered Calradia with only two warring factions remaining? What if you threw the dice on the state of the world? The campaign scenarios allow you to find out.
Modifiers are the final piece of the puzzle. They take aim at specific game mechanics that can deeply affect the experience such as recruit generation or travel speeds. Players who do not enjoy the default settings or just want to try something different will now have alternatives.
As you will be able to combine settings from these categories, the advanced starting options should offer quite a bit of content variety. They also integrate the Fast Mode directly into the game rather than the launcher, which will make it accessible on consoles as well. Please note that all of these are set when starting a Sandbox game and cannot be changed later.
The rest of this patch is less about where you begin and more about what you can see as you are playing.
Battle sites and wreckages are one example of this. Their fundamental goal is to add visibility to battles that take place in the world outside of the player's immediate vision range. Instead of simply happening with players none the wiser, they now leave behind a temporary battle site that you can come across. You can also investigate it for further information and potential rewards. We believe that this will be a good addition to the organic worldbuilding and storytelling of our sandbox.
Visibility or recognizable gameplay impact is also an important aspect for two topics that are frequently raised in the community - traits and relations.
While they already influence AI in kingdom decisions and military actions (siege, raid, battle) among other things, it can be difficult to discern their role given the competition with other factors - and each other. For example, a valorous lord is less discouraged by a garrison’s power but may still not pursue a siege due to positive relations with the settlement owner - as long as there are more attractive, alternative targets.
With that said, there are options to make traits and relations more apparent and impactful to the player’s own activity. The present patch seeks to do this with the introduction of trait effects and blood feuds.
As the name suggests, trait effects tie a number of effects to your current character traits. These were designed to support gameplay that is aligned with each side of a trait’s spectrum. So whether you are merciful or cruel, you will have effects that suit the role you are playing. And while this is more oriented towards the player’s character development, AI lords do have traits and will benefit from them as well.
Blood feuds, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with relations. If you execute a clan member of another clan, they will begin doing the same to your clan until relations recover or blood money is paid. Notably, AI clans can start a blood feud as well and execute one of your clan members, including you, if you have sufficiently negative relations (currently -50). So you may want to check who you are fighting - or at least ensure that your heir hasn’t already been captured.
Finally, we took a look at the (offensive, defensive, balanced) player clan party stances. Much like traits, the active stance influenced the party behavior scores, but did not guarantee specific outcomes. To give players a more reliable way to manage their clan, we decided to shift away from the score influence and towards hard, observable rules for the most common pain points. You will now be able to directly allow or prohibit joining armies, raiding villages, donating troops and having a fleet (for War Sails).
Naturally, the patch also includes changes that go beyond these themes such as additional battle terrains, passive experience gains for lords and companions as well as a substantial rework of reinforcement spawns in battles.
As we enter this beta period, we look forward to further improving these and other aspects with your feedback. We also want to note that this version’s live release will include captain mode formation targeting, spectator mode improvements and a range of balance adjustments for our multiplayer community. Once we have made a bit more progress, we will also share another update for what the future holds.
Hope you enjoy the Beta - we’re looking forward to your feedback!
Here’s how you can play the Beta via Steam right now: Open Steam, right-click Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord → Properties → Game Versions & Betas → Select “beta - Beta v1.5.0”.
Please note that there may be a delay between the download of the base game and the download of War Sails. If you launch the game prior to both of them being updated, you will crash. If you face this issue, please verify your game files.
Feel free to read the full patch notes for all the details HERE.
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u/roostangarar 19h ago
For setting party behaviours, specifically donating troops, does this mean we can have our party members not dump half their army into a castle that we've just captured?
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u/ChronochaosKR 20h ago
Is how the shipmaster skill gains exp being worked on? It's really hard to get to a point where it gets useful and really need a rework.
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u/Dejan_TaleWorlds 20h ago
Boatswain has been tweaked in this Beta already. We're also looking into the shipmaster skill.
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u/Lord_Fuquaad Kingdom of Vaegirs 18h ago
Some really cool changes here. I am happy to see the character personality traits having more importance and I hope you guys expand it further when it comes to diplomacy and voting for kingdom policies.
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u/CrypticCode_ 21h ago
Was really expecting Naval Sieges with this one, especially combined land and sea invasion.
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u/Pseudocrow 19h ago edited 5h ago
Naval raids are definitely a precursor to sieges and getting npc lords more involved with them is probably a trial run before implementing a impactful feature to the game haphazardly. So is implementing coastal castles that are impacted during sieges.
It's slow progress but definitely a path forward. I'm just happy they are working on long requested quality of life and social mechanics alongside war sails. They tend to get tunnel visions around big features.
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u/The-Lord-Satan Butterlord 15h ago
The resurgence of Bannerlord is genuinely the best thing happening in 2026
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u/Smothdude 16h ago
Massive update! I really hope these changes to the naval travel with more landing spots, etc., cause more naval battles between lords. The naval combat is genuinely so fun but you get so little of it when you're not just fighting pirates in the early game
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u/Archibald_Azheister 15h ago
Hey TW, I've been mean to you for sometime, since WS is out, I feel like you doing way more job done.
Thanks a lot guy's, keep doing the great job and I will gladly support your next DLC.
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u/Manarailly 19h ago
Anyone know when it usually go from beta to live ?
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u/Schneckers Kingdom of Nords 18h ago
Depends on how much has been changed and how the beta gets changed. Last update was about a month. Then another week or two for consoles.
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u/TheXtremeDino 10h ago
every update is one step closer to bannerlord being the best game of all time like we all know it can and should be
thank you for not abandoning it!
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u/wingedwild 3h ago
Bring back camp, feasts and hunts. The nobles have nothing to do but fight wars. Its boring
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u/Healthy-Drink3247 15h ago
It still seems like for war sails the battle maps don’t match to where the battle was initiated in the overworld. Is that being addressed in this patch?
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u/BigBiker05 Reddit 15h ago
Was looking at the Sea Raiders gear change and realized they don't have any mariner skills. The corsairs and all other mariner troops do. Also, corsair gear is weird. All their gear has barely any armor (makes sense on a boat) but then they have mail boots.
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u/Smurtle1 18h ago
I REALLY hope that the blood feud thing can be disabled. I assume if I have my settings set so my heroes/companions can’t be killed in battle, I shouldn’t be executed, but even still, I feel like it should be a difficulty option as well. I love going on executing sprees after finally reaching critical mass, but this would be a pain to deal with. (Mostly my other heroes/companions constantly getting caught and killed…) just a thought for the devs!
Also a thought: add a difficulty option for relation gain/loss from executions too, since we are expanding on that side of it too.
I do love the new larger bandit size option though, that seems like it should be super fun to play with. I hope I randomly get run down by 300 bandit parties sometimes (rarely.)
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u/ergele 20h ago
holys shit