14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord was announced back in 2012, all of us, fans of the franchise, kept wondering when will the game be released. Developer TaleWorlds Entertainment seems to be overwhelmed by the task of getting this right, which is one of the reasons it has decided to bring the game to Early Access first.
Seven years after it's official reveal, the folks at TaleWorlds announced Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord will enter Steam's early access program no earlier than March 2020. Although the game was playable at Gamescom this year, it's at a very rudimentary stage, which is why entering Early Access sooner than March 2020 is quite impossible.
A rather small studio like TaleWorlds with just 90 people clearly needs the help of the community to test a game as ambitious as Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. Apparently, developers need to test and check out millions of different paths, hence the need for testers.
Long story short, it looks like the folks at TaleWorlds will heavily rely on the community to test and offer feedback during the Early Access period that's expected to debut in March 2020. It remains to be seen whether or not developers will be able to put together a beta build until next year or players will be offered an alpha version.
Either way, it's important that things have started to move in the right direction after a very long time of nothing to report about the state of the game.
If you haven't played any of the Mount & Blade games, then you probably don't know that Bannerlord is a prequel to Mount & Blade: Warband, a standalone expansion pack for the original game launched 11 years ago.
Set 210 years before its predecessor, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord draws inspiration from the Migration Period. A brand new trailer that revealed when the game will enter Early Access has been released as well, check it out above.