Mount & Blade 2 finally gets Steam Workshop support ahead of full release

(Image credit: Taleworlds)

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord will finally leave early access on October 25, but before it does, developer TaleWorlds Entertainment has been rolling out a few patches and hotfixes to prep for the big day. The latest adds Steam Workshop support to the sometimes-buggy, always-brilliant medieval mercenary simulator.

Until now, the best place to find Mount & Blade 2 mods has been the Nexus Mods site, which you'll almost certainly be familiar with if you've modded almost any game in the last ten years. For now—about two hours after Bannerlord got Workshop support at time of writing—that's still the case, but you can bet that many of the game's big mods will migrate from the Nexus over to Steam pretty quickly. It's a lot more convenient to subscribe to a mod on Steam than it is to futz around with mod managers, even if the Workshop can be a bit more limited.

Workshop support has been a regular request from the Bannerlord community ever since the game released on Steam early access in 2020, and it's one of several bells and whistles that TaleWorlds is adding before the game's release in just under two weeks. Besides Workshop support, the game will also be getting voiceovers for storyline dialogue and greetings, AI updates to stop your men getting stuck on one another during sieges, and various Steam knick-knacks like trading cards, emoticons and so on.

Oh, Bannerlord will also be receiving banners before October 25. You'd think those would have been in there from the start.

We liked Mount & Blade 2, jank and all, when it came to early access, and it's only gotten better since, the occasional bout of existential horror aside. It's a unique thing: a big box of weird and wonderful systems that can't help but produce incredible stories as you play. It's the kind of PC game born for a vast library of mods, and with Workshop support that library just got even more accessible.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.