You don't need to force complete loadouts to have decent balance... you can just as easily tune weapon stats and weapon costs and disallow certain broken combinations.
Yup. Mordhau is a great example. There is no single "overpowered loadout", because the weapons in general are balanced, and they cost the right amount. A long reach, high-damage weapon means your armor is going to be limited, etc. If you want a bow, you won't have enough points for decent armor or a decent melee weapon. There's no reason Bannerlord couldn't do something similar.
From the devblog:
Some classes are clearly stronger and better equipped than others
Huh? Why?
Some of our game modes feature a respawn system, so how you manage those points throughout the course of a round will determine which classes you have access to
I think this is more or less how it was in vanilla, but I played very little of that outside of duels. Either way, I really, really dislike this "CSGO" economy. I want to play what I want to play. It's stupid I can't use whatever weapon I feel like using, or whatever armor set. Not to mention secondary effects like snowballing because of the economy. Again, no reason for limitations like these if your game is balanced, รก la Mordhau.
With these changes, the entire focus of the gameplay is put onto player skill and teamwork, rather than whoever has the superior equipment or loadout. We think these changes will go a long way in preventing a snowball effect, in which the winning team just gets stronger with each consecutive round win. In Bannerlord, every round starts on a somewhat level playing field, which should provide for a more exciting back and forth between the two teams throughout the course of a match.
But... what? You just got done talking about how different classes cost more, and some are flat-out superior to others. How does that put the focus on skill rather than who has the superior loadout? How does that prevent snowballing? Your team wipes out the other team's high-cost classes, and now they either A) have less points to respawn or B) have to use shitty classes. That's the definition of snowball.