Mount and Blade II Bannerlord finally received a release date at gamescom 2019. The highly anticipated sequel will launch in March 2020, although it'll be only in an 'Early Access' fashion.

　　Speaking with PCGamesN at gamescom 2019, TaleWorlds manager and founder Armagan Yavuz explained this choice:

　　It’s difficult to really pronounce any specific thing, but it’s not going to be years, hopefully. We just want to make sure that the game is reasonably polished and balanced, and we’re happy, and we’ll be able to say that ‘ok, now we’re ready.’

　　We have pretty much all of the features figured out and everything working, but we can’t really control all the millions of different combinations of how things play out with each other and what happens when different features combine or different paths play out in the game. I’m pretty sure that in some of them, something may go wrong, or we may discover that we’ve forgotten to address something. Those kinds of things will happen, and of course there’ll be a huge amount of balancing.

　　In order to really balance the game and make everything click with each other, we thought that it would be so much better if we just did an early access.

　　Also talking to PCGamesN, Yavuz said the new features of Bannerlord should be 'very valuable' to players when playing the game.

　　We want to make a game that’s similar to Warband, but we want to make it so that all the different mechanics are well fleshed-out and well-polished. We need to spend some time in early access. These features will hopefully be pretty much finished, but even if they’re not 100% there, it’s better to have them in and working and let the balancing happen down the line.

　　Those things are going to contribute to the game, and aren’t really incredibly expensive for us [to create], but they will be very valuable for the players.