Taleworlds is clearly grossly mismanaged. The term is overused in many cases, but I think it fits like a glove here. A massive increase of personnel, and a product that was delayed several times and was still released as unfinished.
But the biggest telltale sign is that they couldn't even manage simple fixes like the implementation of perks. For example, you had a perk that was supposed to increase whatever by 2%. Instead, when they implemented it, the increase was 0,2%. They couldn't get even that one right. Clearly, this was the work of one programmer, whose work was probably not reviewed by anyone. Moreover, at no point during the past year, no one bothered to place a simple placeholder text on the character screen that would have indicated what even works. Players had to learn it by going to an external site that looked at the code to see what was implemented and what wasn't.
The company was, what, 200-300 people at its peak? Probably 10% of that is doing the heavy lifting, which incidentally is the size of Piranha Bytes, who have released several competent open world games over the years. What we probably have here, on the other hand, is poor organization, undefined roles, miscommunication or no communication between different teams, doing things in the wrong order creating bottlenecks, etc.
The thing that makes it possible though is that Bannerlord's only competition is Warband. They can do fuck all and people still have to throw money at them if they want to play anything like it. Moreover, as it is now, the game is pretty enjoyable actually. The meat of the game, the combat system, works great and is superior to Warband. Sieges fun and issuing commands is much better than in Warband. But still, what a missed opportunity Bannerlord is. I think that's what irks most players, they see the outline of a brilliant game, and massive failure to deliver it.
