My prediction for this is gonna be like that:
- Game is going to be released in 2020 (in best case), when the people started playing cRPG in 2010 are 10 years older, have a job, children and stuff like that.
- Game mechanics stays the same. I talk about the combat system and it's same 4 directional attacks/blocks, not a various singleplayer improvements. So there will be no really much point in switching to M&B2 in this perspective. It is likely that we'll have a situation that happened with the elder versions of Counter Strike - when a Global Offencive came out, lots of people still stayed with the Source, just like some stayed with CS 1.6 before. So I suspect that Warband community will [though reduced, but] survive. Anyway, who is so eager to continue on grinding, doing pretty much same shit as they did in cRPG1 Warband edition? Even though I love the game and I miss the cRPG sieges, I feel like I'm kind of fed up with it by now. Also I kind of reached the edge of my level in terms of skill (surely, it depends on how often I play the game), and I have basically nothing to do to explore with this game anymore. The most part of fun for me was being a noobie, learning this game and the people around. And it's not like this can be repeated with Bannerlord coming out.
- Since guys like chadz, CMP and Harald are not seem to me like they are gonna be those who'll create cRPG for Bannerlord, there will be lots of different tries on carrying out this idea. So there's gonna be like 5 different versions of cRPG-like mods with various degrees of quality and the community will split on these. And since the engine is new and there will be lots of newer mechanics (I'm talking about Strategus related ones, since the singleplayer regime is gonna be massively enhanced) it is gonna take a lot of time to make something good out of it anyway.
- It's like good 4 years since this mod has died - I mean the moment when the original devs quitted to start their Kickstarter campaign and were replaced by someone else. I think "The Destiny Patch" (Nov 2014) became the last one Harald did. After that we had buggy February Patch (2015), which killed EU siege and one year later the mod was abandoned completely when the oKaM came out. Community has died so long ago. Even these forums are pretty much dead. There are still like 20-30 same folks wandering around, but when I think about how many good, funny and clever people are missed - I can count 100 of them easily. And it's not likely that they come back (family, jobs, children, tired of game). So Bannerlord, if it even comes out, is gonna be a completely new story with new younger people around, and the remains of this community will be just a part of something else. All the topics, the clashes and the debates we had will be repeated by somebody else, and we're gonna be some guys casually showing up shaking our beards a little in front of these youngsters - nothing else. And if someone is going to repeat their cRPG experience going full in and sacrifying as much time as they did for this mod - it is somewhere above my comprehension.
R.I.P. cRPG community, can't say that I miss you a lot since all the memories I need are still with me.
