Mount & Blade 2 is now out in early access

It's time to saddle up and ride out, for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord entered early access this morning. The long-awaited follow-up to Warband (one of the best RPGs, don't you know?) will once again send us out to ride around a sandbox medieval world, raising armies, politicking, laying siege, and charging around big battlefields with hundreds of soldiers throwing down. But if you'd rather wait for the full and finished game, it's expected to leave early access in "around a year." For now, onwards to the launch trailer!

TaleWorlds Entertainment say the initial early access launch comes with Custom Battle and Campaign singlelayer modes, though some features may be missing, some content is re-used, some bits are placeholder, balance is not settled, and you might find bugs. It also has multiplayer with four modes: Skirmish, Captain, Team Deathmatch, and Siege.

Over the course of the next year or so of early access, the developers plan to create unique maps for all towns and castles, add more localisations, and generally polish it up. On the multiplayer front, they say they "expect to enable our community to host private servers closer to the full release of the game."

Bannerlord 2 is out now on Steam Early Access, with a 10% launch discount bringing it down to £36/€45/$45 for the first fortnight. If you own a previous M&B on Steam, you should get a bonus 10% discount coupon in your Steam inventory for it on top. M&B2 will be on the Epic Games Store too, but isn't yet.

We've just sent our hordes into Bannerlord for all sorts of thoughts, performance reviews, videos, and more. But in the meantime, perhaps you'd enjoy Brendy's campaign impressions from 2018.