Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord has crushed many crash bugs

A phalanx of heavily-armed bug fixes cut down a number of crashes in a new Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord patch released last night. The sandbox medieval warfare multi-hyphenate RPG entered early access on Monday but some players got off to a bumpy start. Enter this patch at 9pm, with fixes for over 18 crashes and soft-locks as well as some 'infinite loading' problems. I am so glad to see TaleWorlds don't mention anything about playing Bannerlord as a baby and I pray to god that this will remain in the game forever.

The e1.0.1 patch notes list fixes for crashes caused by everything from the Army Of Poachers quest to "running out of stamina while crafting charcoal". It's not just fixes, mind - a few balance tweaks and changes are in too.

This comes after a wee "release day hotfix" on Monday hitting a few other crashes.

Our Sin has tried to play Bannerlord but suffered crippling performance problems. She did like what she could see of the combat between her long loading waits, mind. She's hoping patches will fix it up for her too, and in the meantime I believe we're sending more of our troops into Bannerlord. Alice Bee is having a nose round, Dave is on the Bannerlord guides, and I've seen Astrid saddling up for the vidmachine.

Many players seem to be getting by alright, mind. Bannerlord is huge on Steam right now, with a peak of 219,787 in-game at once yesterday pushing it into fourth place in the stats ahead of perennial giants like Grand Theft Auto V and Rainbow Six Siege.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is available on Steam Early Access, with a 10% launch discount bringing it down to £36/€45/$45 until April 13th. You can get an extra 10% off if you own a previous M&B on Steam. TaleWorlds expect to launch the full and finished version after "around a year" in early access. They say they'll try to keep save compatibility across early access updates, but do say there's a chance players might sometimes need to start over.

This song is somehow running through my head every time I post about Bannerlord, and now you can experience the same too: