Mount & Blade 2 Modding Contest Offers €30,000 Prize

TaleWorlds Entertainment, the developer of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, has announced a modding contest for its War Sails expansion. The contest is divided into three categories: Conversion Mod, 3D art, and scene design. The Conversion Mod contest asks players to create total or partial conversion mods using War Sails, while the 3D art contest revolves around building new ship types for the expansion. The scene design contest challenges modders to create Seaborne Village Raid scenes.

The top prize for the Conversion Mod contest is €12,000, with €6,000 and €3,000 available for second and third place respectively. The winner of each of the other two contests will take home €2,000, with awards of €1,000 and €500 for second and third place. The submission deadline for all contests is November 22, and the winners will be announced in January next year.

The contest is likely an attempt to showcase War Sails' modding tools, which were released a few days prior to the competition announcement. War Sails has been controversial among Bannerlord players, with a Mixed review rating on Steam. Many of the negative reviews complain about bugs, technical issues, and difficulties getting the expansion running. The expansion's additions, such as ship navigation and naval combat, required significant rewrites of Bannerlord's code, rendering many mods incompatible with the DLC.

The modding contest may help to resolve the divide among the community, as War Sails having some enticing mods of its own could make the expansion more appealing to players. However, some players have suggested that War Sails would have fared better as a standalone experience rather than an addition to Bannerlord.