If you’ve ever fancied giving PC game modding a go but have struggled for motivation, maybe a share of €30,000 will provide the incentive you need. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord developer TaleWorlds Entertainment has just announced a modding contest for its War Sails expansion, inviting players to create the best add-on for its nautical DLC.
The competition is actually three competitions, with players asked to submit mods in a trio of different categories. The first is the Conversion Mod contest—which asks players to create “total or partial conversion mods” using War Sails, reimagining the expansion’s ship battles and naval campaign travel.
Conversions are something of a speciality within the Mount & Blade modding community, with huge overhauls like Shokuho and Eagle Rising giving players whole new historical settings to explore. So it’s no surprise the contest would have some focus in this area. The top prize for this one is €12,000, with €6,000 and €3,000 available for second and third place respectively.
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If a complete rework of War Sails seems a little ambitious, there’s also a 3D art contest and a scene design content. The former revolves around building new ship types for War Sails, while the latter challenges modders with creating “Seaborne Village Raid scenes”—plotting out an exciting coastal assault by placing navigation meshes, spawn points, environmental details and so forth.
The winner of each of these competitions will take home €2,000 for their efforts, with awards of €1,000 and €500 for second and third place. The submission deadline for all contests is November 22, while TaleWorlds says that winners will be announced in January next year.
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If you’re curious why the competition has been announced, it mainly seems to be a way to showcase War Sails’ modding tools, which were released a few days prior to the competition announcement. But there are likely other motivations too. War Sails is controversial among Bannerlord players, with a Mixed review rating on Steam.
Many of these negative reviews complain about bugs, technical issues, and difficulties getting the expansion running. But others suggest War Sails would have fared better as a standalone experience rather than an addition to Bannerlord. This is because the naval features tend to exist around the periphery of the game and so don’t receive the attention they perhaps deserve on a conventional playthrough.
Moreover, War Sails’ additions like ship navigation and naval combat required significant rewrites of Bannerlord’s code on TaleWorlds’ part, thus rendering many mods incompatible with the DLC. While some modders have strived to address these compatibility issues, they nonetheless make the expansion a harder sell for players who are heavily invested in Bannerlord’s mod scene.
War Sails having some enticing mods of its own may go some way to resolving this divide among the community, so it makes sense for TaleWorlds to incentivise modders to focus on the expansion. But it does seem like some TLC for the DLC wouldn’t go amiss, either, especially now that work on the modding tools is done.
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