Taleworlds has explained how they approached the damage system in their next game.

The developers detailed in a Steam post how they want to make the medieval battles both realistic and fun. They need to find a balance between the two to avoid breaking the immersion, yet keeping the credibility of the combat.

„Damage is a difficult concept to get right in a computer game. Making the damage model realistic could be desirable since this can help with immersion and depth, on the other hand, what happens in a real-life physical trauma is incredibly complex and trying to replicate that in a computer model could easily get needlessly complicated with little benefit to gameplay.

While working on the system, we made great use of an excellent article written by George Turner. The article was an eye-opener about the intricacies and fine points of weapon dynamics. Of course, during implementation, we had to make several simplifications and assumptions, and if there are any unrealistic elements or errors in the end, the fault lies with us and not the article.

As our calculations are physically based, we no longer need to calculate an extra ‘speed bonus’ as we do in the previous games in the series. We simply get the attacker’s and target’s velocities and feed these into our equations. This results in a realistic and accurate way where the attack damage is affected by speed.”

In other words, Taleworlds doesn’t want to heavily rely on RNG, where an attack could cause X damage, while another one would cause Y, even though there are no differences between the two attacks. That sounds good, but Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord has no release date yet.

Source: Steam