Blood & Faith - Development Blog #1 & Explanation news

Blood & Faith is a Mount & Blade: Warband modification set in the time of the Third Crusade (1189-1192). This mod puts forth the very first multiplayer open world in the game and offers unique features to its players. These features will be introduced in the following paragraphs. That being said, B&F is principally based on two OSP mods: Persistent World and Crusader Way to Expiation.

Blood & Faith plunges players into a new immersive universe: the Holy Land during the eve of the Third Crusade. This mod has the goal of offering a completely unique immersive experience to every player by allowing them to shape their own destiny in this universe. By entering this open world, players from the onset will be able to evolve depending on their actions, such as becoming a crusader and fighting for the cross or joining Saladdin and retaking the Holy Land from the Christians. Players that do not walk the path of violence can also till the lands as a peasant, take the vows of a monk, and much more! In addition to these features, Blood & Faith offers hundreds of gameplay possibilities to its players, which can provide an enjoyable experience for the times to come! In B&F, the players will be vital components on how the open world evolves!

We are very excited to introduce this feature, as we have been tailoring it for a long time (on previously worked mods aswell), and we are finally able to release it in all its glory. We, of course, are talking about server travelling, which is the most vital component of the open world feature. The reason being that it allows players to freely travel between the servers constituting the open world.

The early open world version of Blood & Faith will put forth an immersive universe of two interconnected servers. In this model, a single server portrays a specific region of the universe (like Syria for example), and altogether establish the whole open world. Of course, we plan to expand this open world in the future with more maps/regions, but this will depend entirely on the interest of the community. If there are enough players supporting us, the open world (OW) will surely grow!

Technically speaking, server travel works in a very simple way. If you wish to venture into a new region/map, you will need to locate the specific spot on the map border and press the "F" key (or whatever button you binded for the action command). Once done, you will automatically be kicked from the server and only be able to join the server you travelled to. This means you will only be able to join the server your character is located in, and travelling to a new region/map will lock the previous one until you travel back to it.

Contrary to the many PW and multiplayer-based mods set in the medieval period, Blood & Faith offers a historically accurate open world for players to explore. This whole immersive universe has been created and configured for that very reason. Of course, you have to take into consideration that due to engine limitations it will not be 100% accurate. Despite this, we have been working to make it as accurate as possible through reproducing important historical locations ranging from castles, towns, and even minor positions like outposts. This process of reproducing the locations of "ye olde" days of the medieval period will allow any player to have a veritable, and immersive experience; something we consider very important!

In our first open world variant, B&F will bring the Holy Land to the players, and contain two historical regions. The first one will include the primary demense of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which boasts the citadel of Jerusalem & Ibelin, aswell as the famous town of Acre, home to the Teutonic Order. Our second region that will be added will contain the lands of the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, aswell as the Empirate of Damascus.

This feature is brand new, and also makes its first appearance on our multiplayer mod. The specifics of this feature involve the ability for factions to benefit from military-oriented NPCs during wars. Akin to levies, these bots have the aim to fight with the factions that are at war with the faction they are aligned with.

The NPC reinforcements or waves are based upon the faction player size. As more players the faction has, as more NPC it will get. The defending faction has two waves. One set up on the walls and one set up down at the village (outside of the castle basically). The attacker faction has one but stronger wave which will attack the castle. AI meshes will make the NPCs walk and act with a brain. They will chamber, block and feint aswell.

Blood for the blood god! A gore system has been crafted to make battles even more epic. This will allow players to see copious amounts of blood spill when engaged in combat, as each hit you give or take will cause blood to spue. Additionally, well-aimed strikes can cause a decapitation to occur!

By creating this mod, we wish to offer the best experience for our players and to do that we felt a new, realistic, and exciting siege system was in order. After some hard work and deliberation, we've reached this goal!

This reforged siege system is more complex in design and engaging for those involved, with the idea of having preresequites for the attackers to achieve before capturing a territory. Instead of just capturing the flag of a settlement (like in PW), the attacking side must capture 4 different strategic points located outside and inside the fortification. The first in this order is one district linked to the fortification, such as the village, farms and outpost(s) located nearby. These districts are often the source of resource production, and, as a result, are key strategic points for factions. The next two strategic points to capture are linked to the walls of the castle or fortified town, the inner and outer wall. The latter will be a point to be captured from outside the fortifications while the former will be targeted within the fortifications. Once these 3 strategic points have been captured, the attackers will have the opportunity to push further and ultimately capture the last strategic point, the faction flag.

This new siege system will bring to B&F two main advantages, the first being longer and more realistic sieges, and second being the ability to lock castles or fortified towns when members of the faction are offline. The first advantage, to us, is essential for the general gameplay of the mod, and for the portrayal of a true medieval period siege. In the majority of PW-based mods, including PW itself, siege experiences are very uninteresting as it is generally too easy to capture a castle. Not only that, but there was also a lack of systems emplaced to dislodge unrealistic capturing of whole towns, such as one person sneaking in and taking the town for himself while everyone else is offline. We find this abhorrently unrealistic as real life sieges took far longer. In B&F, we will try to replicate this sort of scenario with our reforged siege system. Also, the application of our new "lock system" will certainly make a huge impact in the gameplay aspect, specifically in regards to sieges. In the case where a faction is below 10 players, it will not be possible to capture their castle or fortified towns as they will be automatically locked until they have more players online. In essence, this means that taking settlements from a faction that either has no players online or a low amount of players will not be possible. However, this lock feature is only applied in one situation, when the fortification is not under attack. If the players of a faction were to go below 10 during a siege, the siege will be allowed to continue. This is mainly to counter any attempts of abusing this system with a "massive quit strategy".