Realms Forgotten: A Mount and Blade II Bannerlord Fantasy Total Conversion Mod

Realms forgotten is a fantasy total conversion mod for Mountain Blade 2 bannerlord and just got its first major update in a while so I figured now would be a good time to give it a try my original plan was to record about 10 hours of gameplay before reviewing the mod properly and I figured this was a fair amount of time to both get a feel for the mod without showing everything it has to offer and also be able to make a fair assessment of how I think the mod is plus this is very much still in beta so anything I say please keep in mind that there will be rough edges and though I will talk about them I will be fairly light on that because I understand that this is still and development ultimately I recorded just about 8 hours for this review because I finished what is available of the main story and most of that was spent either doing that main story or just questing I feel like if you're familiar with mountain Blade 2 Banner Lord you know the gist of this besides the incredible map and really wonderful 3D models for the characters and their assets everything else is more or less the same there's not a whole lot different the first thing you're probably going to notice when you load up the game is that it has about 3 and a half minute at least that's what it was for me load time it could be longer depending on your system this is fairly normal with a lot of overhaul mods for Mountain Blade 2 bannerlord so I wouldn't really consider this a knock against it the other thing though that I need to mention is that there is a heavy Reliance on AI art as well as an AI voiceover for the introduction story thing I guess it's forgivable I think because of how many custom assets the mod uses besides this but I know how people feel about AI art I have a certain feeling about it as well so I just wanted to point this out for anybody who jumps in the mod and maybe has sort of weird queasiness about it I wouldn't worry about it too much I think that it's just they don't have an art team to devote the time to making those assets and so they're using what they have available to them and I don't think that's necessarily a problem the story is basically about Humanity leaving their home continent due to some natural disaster uh Crossing an ice bridge and then ending up in a new continent with elves and ancient races basically there's some race trying to resurrect itself from underneath the snow cap north of the map not a very elaborate or compelling story but I mean really who cares it's a bannerlord mod it doesn't matter in game there are about eight playable cultures as of right now I believe that they're still adding more which I think there's five races you can play as as well now I'm the reason I'm not sure is because I didn't notice that you could even play as another race so though I decided to play the newest culture which is sort of like a Mesoamerican tribal inspired lizard looking elf people I don't know how to say their name so I'm not even going to try I didn't end up playing as one of those characters because I thought you could only play as a human so throughout this playr you'll see that I'm a human much smaller than this race CU they're quite tall and I was a little frustrated about that after the fact but really it doesn't make a huge difference besides an aesthetic standpoint so whatever I'm just pointing this out for those of you who are curious on the character screen there is the option to scroll your race like I said I think there's what five I don't know I'm not going to count them now either but this is what make sure you click on this I'm a little confused why this couldn't have been automatically selected when you select a race like for example if you decide to play as one of the Elven you know holds I don't know why it wouldn't just automatically make you an elf or if I select this race the zalle I think is how you might say it I don't know why it wouldn't automatically have you be a giant or the other thing it's just kind of weird to me but then again I could just be being salty about having not noticed it in the first place which is probably true anyway I decided to play as sort of my standard which is like a mounted Warrior Archer I named my dude balam teit which Loosely means Jaguar horse so naturally my banner is going to be a horse now on the map we'll get our first glimp of the race here the lizard elf looking people they very cool the map itself is also quite gorgeous with its wonderful modeling and cool temples these like meso americ style temples and then we also get a event which is our start of the main quest basically somebody got kidnapped I don't know why they would come all the way over here to tell me that but we have to go save them I decided to wait to do this I decided to give myself a little time to get acclimated with the world of the mod first one thing you will not notice on this over map but you will notice when I get into the game itself is that the mod runs fairly poor I had a lot of stuttering in battles and in simply any scenario where I had to be on a physical map but I do think it's forgivable and I'll get to that in a second but basically I decided to wander around the map here to start off with and I found this dungeon uh this mod has Dungeons which is probably one of my favorite additions to it like you can collect loot you can go in and extract stuff some of them you can only go in by yourselves they're quite risky but they also offer pretty cool rewards but unfortunately I was a little underl so I ended up getting wrecked so we're going to have to come back to this one in a little while anyway I wandered around the map a little bit more until I finally found some uruks which I decided to fight of course because I had gotten a quest to do so and I was curious what these were and they all gained up on me and if you notice they look kind of like ukai but smaller from Lord of the Rings and I wasn't sure if I was going to beat win this battle of course because you know 95 against 61 should be winnable but you never know and so I I got in here and I noticed this was the very first time that I had got to do like a proper battle and once I saw the uks running around on Wolf mounts I was basically in love you'll probably notice here in the footage that it is a little bit stuttery I was not able to fix the frame rate for any reason no matter how many changes I attempted to do I wasn't really sure why I think it's just a problem with the mod itself having trouble recognizing the models because there's a lot of size differences between each of the races so I think it might have something to do with that but truthfully I've not seen this much variation in a mountain blade mod since prophecy of pandor which was my favorite back in the warband days so I was really really impressed so far here now naturally I decided to wander around more collect some armor close down abandoned Camp do all that sort of stuff you know the normal like War band trajectory but I didn't get to talk about this yet but what I really like about this mod is that in the character creation you can actually select if you want to be a vassal or like a mercenary or if you want to start off the normal way the default I think that's really smart I decided to just become a new vassel not a powerful vassel so that I would still get a little bit of growth you know that way I wouldn't be overpowered but that way I'd be able to get directly into the story without having to waste what is usually about 10 hours getting your character into a vassel position for this review itself though I decided that I wasn't going to be doing this the whole time that I would actually try to cover the main story obviously here you can see this island is quite quite beautiful and I was just blown away by all of the giant models to it however before I managed to start the main quest and I believe I stayed on the island for maybe like a half hour I ended up getting this blow gun which is basically just a gun it it's it's really funny to me the only problem I had with it is that after the first shot I would lose the Crosshair and so I'd have to just sort of guess where I was shooting it didn't really matter though because the thing can fire pretty much instantly and I had about 24 Shots and this this stayed with me the entire playthrough I never upgraded it and there is another version of it but it was super super useful and also really funny which is why I put it on the thumbnail if you notice CU it's just it it was too good not to you might not have noticed it when the main quest was talking about having to rescue that person from the Bandit camp but the translation for some of the these things is pretty bad I assume that the lead Dev or whoever writes most of the story is not a native English speaker it's not really a big problem for me I don't really care I've played mods from all over the world for years so it's something that I'm kind of used to but for somebody who maybe expects a little bit more polish I would say either volunteer for the mod or I guess just get over it because that's just the way it is it is something that you'll have to get used to but I doubt it's something that's going to change anytime soon you can understand more or less what they're talking about it just sound a little stilted though so after about a half hour I decided I would finally leave my homeland with my new ally Thum who will be with us for the majority of our journey unfortunately I noticed we were at war with the culture directly next to our home one uh but the war ended pretty much immediately after I got there for some reason I guess they saw me coming and they decided that they didn't want to fight us anymore so that was a problem solved on its own as I wandered the map and I decided to do a tournament in the first town I saw I definitely noticed that the map is quite large now normally this wouldn't be a problem but there's really only one way for my character to go which is basically a straight line from their Island so it's quite a long traversal if you decide that you want to play as this race this is just my my caution to you because if you play somebody like the elves they're basically in the middle of the map so none of this is very difficult but I just noticed that the the distance was quite long as I was making my way to this Hideout I think it took me in game like maybe a week maybe a little bit longer than that and that's quite a while in a game like Mountain blade I really want to stress too just how wonderful the models are for a lot of these Bandit camps because they're all unique in their own way and they have you know T they've taken a lot of care to make them look as cool and beautiful as possible I know doing Bandit cams can get kind of old over time but if you can stomach it I definitely recommend going in and giving them a look because they're very very fun and the main quest will take you along to some of them as well but with the first Quest done we have to go to this Kingdom in the north and drop off of our prisoner whereupon we will meet with a queen who will basically tell us that we need to capture some zombies for her this is probably the worst quest in the game I'm not even exaggerating I hated doing this because the zombies are virtually impossible to find it took me nearly a half hour just to find any that we able to catch I also found this crazy boss fight which I was definitely underleveled for because I did not have the troops to do it I was probably not supposed to come here yet but as you can see this ashel dude absolutely wrecked my life this is way up in the Frozen north of the map which is basically all frost covered and full of Undead people people are apparently just chill with this the zombie Quest I would say in particular is not very good so let me to summarize I know I jump through that really fast you basically rescue this kid he tells you to take him back to his benefactor which is a queen and then she tells you to find some zombies to bring back to her for reasons I was like all right eventually I did find some Undead folk I captured them but then unfortunately this group of Alchemists come along and they basically tell you hey don't give those to the queen give them to us and I was like like okay they pay me Quest doesn't advance so naturally I have to capture five more I'm not even going to lie to you I almost quit at this point I was very much over trying to chase these tiny groups of zombies but eventually we did manage to do it I bring the zombies back and the queen tells me to talk to somebody named owl now this is where I ran into my first crash because I wasn't sure where owl was so I figured I would talk to the barkeeper but the minute I talked to the barkeeper I lost control of my character and I had to restart which meant I had to once again capture five more zombies because I had not saved which very much made me want to quit although I didn't now keep in mind I only had about five crashes over the whole course of my game and only maybe two of them maybe three of them were really egregious but a lot of the other two were sort of just normal bannerlord stuff so again I didn't really care now owl this is where I started having issues with the main story because owl tells you to find these map pieces to find some ancient Relic this also starts part two of the main quest line the only problem I had was I couldn't find any of these map pieces because while there's a marker as soon as you get off of this this marker goes away as soon as I reloaded the game cuz basically I was like all right I've played for like almost 3 hours I'm going to give myself a little break I also wanted to go back to my homeland and just sort of mess around there for a little while get some new gear cuz we had been exploring for a little bit and I decided that I would do that so I took about an hour I left I went back there I decided to do some questing you know just normal stuff unfortunately when I reloaded into the game The Hideout that was marked on my map was gone which was incredibly frustrating for me because I had no idea where I was supposed to go we'll get to that in a second I decided to do some dungeons over here the very first one though I got to the end of and this is where I ran into crash number two I the game froze as I got near some treasure which was unfortunate so I decided not to do that one reloading the game I figured before we left this home area we would have to do the big Temple because you know we obviously got wrecked there earlier but I had I had grown a little bit as a character so I managed to get in there we managed to clear it managed to get all the good loot which was really nice and then I just was questing for a while I think I like I said I did it for about an hour was pretty good time I honestly had more fun just questing and doing missions in combat than I did doing the main quest which is pretty normal I mean for a mountain Blade game the main quests have never been the big draw I don't even think there is a main quest to warband for example after I was done exploring my home territory I decided I would head back out and try to find this location although upon loading as I said I noticed that I didn't have a map mark anymore so I had to go on the Discord to try to find it this isn't a problem for me necessarily but I do think that somebody who doesn't have a quick like quick access to the internet maybe or Discord which again how would you download the mod but you know I'm just saying they're probably going to have a frustrating time only because there was basically no way to solve any of the quests after this point and I mean there's quite a few other ones after this this is only part two this goes all the way up to part three and it does stop in part three you don't get a conclusion to this story I'm just going to let you know now but there is quite a lot more to do and most of the time I had to look up what I was supposed to do for this Quest though you're supposed to go way up to the north to this dungeon and you're supposed to grab the first map piece from inside of the dungeon now normally I wouldn't hate this sort of mechanic because I actually think it's quite cool that they were able to implement this in the game my issue with it was that there's no notification when you get inside of the camps basically that you should grab something so if you're familiar with mountain blade band then you know that when you do a dungeon you fight the main boss and then you're free to go it tells you that You' You've Won and that you can leave most people would probably assume that this means that you done and that you have the map piece in your inventory that is not true each of these three dungeons require you to find the map piece and then physically pick it up to take it with you which can be really frustrating especially because if you don't do this you'll have to restart you'll have to do the whole thing over again which is what I did eventually though I mean I figured it out after the first time thankfully but it is annoying and it's something that I wanted to point out I don't know why it wouldn't just automatically go to your inventory I feel like that makes way more sense because on the off chance that something glitches out or bugs out that map is not going to be there and now you're going to have a broken Quest chain and there's nothing the player is going to be able to do but we battle with all these forces we go to some pretty cool dungeons I have to say and then we end up meeting this dude called zaratustra I don't know how to say his name and basically we give him these map pieces because I decided to help The Alchemist rather than the Queen the queen gave me weird Vibes I don't know why he basically tells me that there's an ancient civilization that these mat pieces belong to and that they're going to decipher them I wander around I do a little Bandit camp and these Bandits are actually way more Aztec than my race was which I thought was pretty cool and then I get captured and I have to free myself from an Elven dungeon I don't know why exactly the elves had captured me whatsoever there's never a story explanation for why this happens but the first time I messed up and I just died and I assumed that I had failed because the quest markers said failed so I reloaded I managed to equip myself with some equipment before they captured me and then I freed myself it still had said it had failed so I decided to ride back to this archon dude who basically told me that I now need to find a scholar to help them translate it because they're having trouble so basically I have to go to this desert land I have to smuggle myself in for some reason as a caravan they didn't actually care so I don't know why I had to do this and then we escorted The Scholar back after basically kidnapping them they decipher the Scrolls the story tends to jump around a lot so if you think I'm jumping through it this is basically just exactly what happens I had to find this scholar he translate the scroll for us and then he tells me that I need to go to some Mountain Pass now the mountain pass part is where I started getting really frustrated because there was never a mat marker for this they basically just tell me to meet owl there ow is the guy that we talked to in the tavern earlier on he also pops up throughout the main story sometimes the only problem was owl never told me where to go owl never showed up and so I had to sort of just go on the Discord again and find out where I was supposed to go so I did that and I found out that I'm supposed to go all the way to the North in this random dungeon on this random Mountain that isn't even marked because some of the dungeons most of the dungeons actually you have to go up to them before they'll actually pop up for you and so I went up to that and then we managed to go in and then the story finally kicked off and marked itself which was nice but this dungeon I actually quite enjoyed it because it has many tears and then you end up fighting in this really beautiful room with the iron thrown in it for some reason I was confused again though cuz once we finished doing it there was never a marker telling me what to do so I ended up having to look up on the Discord and it just told me to leave and so I left and then I ended up talking to this Necromancer who I guess I was supposed to capture I don't I don't actually remember having to do that but apparently I was supposed to capture him and take him back so that's what we were doing along the way however we got waylay by these nuro demons basically The Necromancer had told us that they are trying to raise these ancient race from the dead and that they're bringing demons into the world for reasons that they they just want to the demons I tried to fight them but as you can see in this video and apparently this is a bug but they evidently have like infinite health because my entire Army got wiped and we didn't even kill a single one of them I have no idea what I was supposed to do I basically figured out how to get around this by just retreating from them but I did end up having to do that mountain past dungeon again which was really annoying eventually after we do the that Al basically tells me that there's some weird things going on and that he shows me this tablet I'm supposed to find some monks now that owl also mentions but he never tells me where they are so again I had to go on the Discord and they're apparently on this little island off the coast of this Northern Frozen place a lot of the quest line takes place up here really and I go in there and the monks basically tell me that I need to interrogate a cultist and they also give me a bunch of troops and they also give me things that I can throw like fire throwable things which are cool they're like fireballs and once I capture a cultist they basically confirm what I've been telling you the whole time that the main quest's whole purpose is that they're trying to resurrect the dead this dead race under the snow to bring them back because of evidently they were defeated long ago and they're just trying to save them I guess or not save them but Doom the world rather that's that is pretty much it after talking to the cultist it's kind of anticlimactic but that was the end of the quest line as it is available right now I believe they added all of part three with this update so I assume with the next one we might get part four so I don't know exactly how to feel because part three was super buggy I didn't mind part two so much it felt fairly laid out but it seems like it seems to me that the story jumps around a lot and I wasn't terribly engrossed in it I was mostly just doing it for the sake of this review I think if I was going to play in this mod otherwise I would probably just play as I normally would like a normal Mountain blade player would and just ignore the story I just merely wanted to present it to you so that you can sort of know what it's about final thoughts though I think the races are really well done the map is beautiful although I do think it is a little too big it could be shrunk a little bit to make it Traverse a little easier it's very ambitious the magic and dungeons in particular are quite fun I really enjoy people including magic and Mountain blade mods I think the assets are really cool the map itself looks gorgeous again I have to stress this I was blown away half the time when I was walking around just because of how cool it looks and plus all of the races and their models and their unique armors it's there's so much to it there's so many of them and it's it's very much worth the time for that alone a couple other criticisms I think the world and the the lore of the World in particular is kind of weak it's sort of just there to be a Sandbox and that's totally fine but if you're looking for something deeply engrossing I don't think you'll find that here the quest line also as I've said is basically unplayable without the Discord but the Discord which I have not mentioned is very helpful everybody is super accommodating and super nice so at least there's that at least they're not belittling you or something for not knowing what to do they are very very welcoming and accommodating this is all a beta so of course take every criticism with a grain of salt I'm really just presenting what this mod has to offer for you right now I think people coming to play this game I would highly recommend just ignore the main story and just play the game as you would a mountain blade mod or a mountain blade itself and you'll have a great time it's really beautiful it's a lot of fun I am already jumping back into it and make sure you select your race because if you're like me that's going to bother you now that you know and I almost re-recorded the entirety of this review but I decided that would be crazy also I ended up getting a raptor in case you were wondering where that came from um in on the thumbnail I ended up getting that way later and I only wrote around with it like once but I really wanted to include something big on the thumbnail cuz it's so cool it's also really fast but yeah that's that is it this has been Realms forgotten you guys can let me know what you think about this sort of video if you want me to do more mod reviews like this where I just sort of do a narrative summary and walk you through what I did obviously I could have been a little more organized I did a lot of this off the cuff and I sort of just talked as I did or I just talk my way through watching the footage as it was happening in front of me 8 hours is a lot to squeeze in like 20 minutes but I think we did did an okay job I think that this will give you a good understanding at the very least of what the world is all about there's a bunch of human races there's some elf races there's some other weird races and there's a lot of fun to be had ignore the main story until the mod is finished and you should have an okay time but that's going to be it for me thank you guys so much for watching if you like the stort of video make sure you like comment subscribe as it lets me and YouTube know that you like this sort of content you'd like to see more of it if you like to support the channel you can consider becoming a channel member we have two tiers Squire and knights which you can see in the join tab I'd like to thank everybody who is a member who has been a member and decides to become one and that's it for me I'm Soul this has been Realms forgotten a mountain Blade 2 bannerlord mod review and I will happily see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Soul Tomato

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Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024