How a solo modder’s attempt to make conversations matter went viral
AI Influence (Bannerlord mod)
Over the holiday, the AI Influence mod in Bannerlord went viral across the internet. In this blog post, we interviewed the mod author MFive about why he built this mod, what’s special, and how he leverages player2.
A lot of “AI in games” stops at dialogue: you talk to an NPC, you get a clever response, and the world continues exactly as before.
AI Influence is trying to push past that. The mod (currently in BETA) focuses on AI-driven interaction where conversations can connect to diplomacy, actions, and systemic outcomes—closer to the “your words change the world” and players went crazy over it.
AI Influence takes up all my time
AI Influence is MFive’s main project:
“My most important mod is, of course, AI Influence. A lot of time and effort has been invested in it, and I’m still working on it… the mod is in BETA, and its functionality is still far from being released.”
They’ve also built other mods over time—Balanced Battle Resolve and Advanced Battle Resolve, Dynamic Clan System, and Lords Gear—but AI Influence is their current focus.
How AI Influence started: personal project → public BETA (for bugfinding)
AI Influence began as a personal mod that later went public:
“AI Influence was initially created purely for personal purposes, after which I posted it on Nexus.”
The core inspiration was seeing AI used in ways that go beyond flavour text:
“…old Mount and Blade 2 videos, where the AI performs actions and your conversations actually influence something technical…”
They did early diplomacy/action testing alone:
“I conducted the initial tests of diplomacy, actions, and so on alone. I didn’t have any beta testers or anyone else; I’m working on the project alone…”
Then came a practical decision many solo modders will recognise: ship the BETA publicly and let real players surface edge cases.
“…it was decided to distribute the BETA version online so players could help find bugs and issues.”
They explicitly credit active bug reporters as part of the project’s progress:
“Therefore, every active player who has ever submitted a bug report is a participant in this work of art… a huge thank you to them all!”
Why Player2: convenient iteration, stable infra, and “a happy medium” model
MFive first discovered Player2 through another mod, then used it during AI Influence development because it was convenient for testing:
“When I was making AI Influence, I tested my mod using Player2’s AI because it was convenient for me: a few hours were enough, and a few hours in Player2 is free. My daily energy was more than enough.”
Their experience summary of player2 is pragmatic:
Reliability/support: “pretty good support and servers” (no issues encountered personally)
Model tradeoff: “a happy medium between smart and expensive and dumb and weak”
User growth: “Yes, Player2 helped attract more users. I think we help each other out to some extent.”
Revenue share: “A revenue-sharing program is a great way and motivation to work on projects like AI Influence… or other games.”
(That last point matters because big “systems” mods tend to be long-running efforts, and sustained maintenance is usually the hard part.)
What’s changed recently on Player2: a free gpt-oss-120b option for players
A platform update worth noting for mod developers: Player2 now offers an entirely free option for players using OpenAI’s open-weight gpt-oss-120b model.
Two reasons this is relevant to AI mods:
It lowers friction for players trying the mod (they can play without worrying about cost at all).
It gives players access to a model scale that’s often unrealistic to run locally.
OpenAI describes gpt-oss-120b as an open-weight reasoning model that can run efficiently on a single 80GB GPU. OpenAI The official repo, likewise frames gpt-oss-120b as targeting use cases that “fit into a single 80GB GPU (like NVIDIA H100 or AMD MI300X).” GitHub
In other words: while some enthusiasts can run strong local models, most players can’t practically host something in this tier—we are now offering this model as our smallest and free option, so “free to play on Player2” can still mean “powerful enough to feel good in-game”, beyond a few hours free a day.
See it working: install walkthrough + gameplay
If you want to understand what “AI Influence + Player2” looks like end-to-end, these community videos help:
Installation walkthrough (community-made, not sponsored by us, all credits to spartank): YouTube
Gameplay video from Spartank:
We asked for MFive’s advice to new mod developers: design for model churn, don’t freeze your architecture
Their most actionable guidance wasn’t about “prompt craft,” but about future-proofing:
“For anyone interested in working with AI as a developer, I would advise building your structure to find a happy medium. AI is getting smarter every day. Models that are expensive today may become cheaper tomorrow, and smarter models will emerge.”
And a direct encouragement to avoid building an artificially “small” mod just because today’s models have limits:
“So, don’t be afraid to make your modifications with an eye toward the future and don’t limit yourself to the complexity of your AI requests.”
That’s a useful mental model for AI mods in general: treat models as a moving dependency, and keep your integration flexible so you can swap up in quality/latency/cost over time without rewriting the mod.
Now, if you are interested in building your own AI Influence mod with player2 in games, go to the developer portal on the player2 site and read the tutorials/documents there!