Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord stuns the world with early access penciled in for March 2020

What you need to know

  • Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is the highly anticipated sequel to Mount & Blade.
  • Many within the M&B community started to give up hope that the game will ever be released.
  • Early access is planned to open up in March 2020.

Mount & Blade is an incredible game, allowing you to take control of a single character. Your adventure pretty much starts there. Do what you want, how you feel like doing it. The realistic medieval combat mixed with an open-world and plenty to do keeps players returning to the 11-year-old game, even to this day. Turkey-based developer TaleWorlds Entertainment has been hard at work on a sequel since announcing it in 2012.

This new entry in the RPG-come-strategy series is set to steal countless hours from many lives as players create new characters, join or create their own factions, make plenty of babies and cause general havoc across Calradia. Early access has been announced for Steam and it's set to commence in March 2020. That's still some way off in the future, but at least we have a concrete date as to when we can all get our hands on it.

Luckily for those who have been ignoring anything related to Bannerlord — just in case it turned out to be a hoax — there has already been a closed beta with plenty of time for the developer to make changes and whatnot before releasing a version TaleWorlds feels comfortable allowing the wider community trying out. You can expect to lead sieges, storm gates, and get muddy.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is not yet listed for pre-order, but you can add the game to your wishlist on Steam.

Rich Edmonds
Senior Editor, PC Build

Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichEdmonds.