Mount & Blade Preview
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I've seen many attempts to quickly describe Mount & Blade. It has been said that the game looks like an interpretation of Dungeons & Dragons from someone who never played D&D, it has been called Pirates! in a medieval setting, and, most aptly, a mix of Pirates!/Elite with role-playing mechanics.
In other words, it's a very unique independent game, having started out as an experiment to bring an oft-ignored mounted combat component into the realm of gaming, and ending up as a massive freelancer game with RPG elements and plenty of things to do.
The Bones
The bare bones of the game can be divided into two areas - the combat system available in many different battle modes and the open-world system, simulating 5 different factions at peace or at war, as well as containing an economic simulation (and, of course, roaming bands of bandits, looters, and deserters).
The combat system is simple and intuitive; you control one character (the PC), in third or first person, his movement and attacks being controlled by the WASD keys and the mouse. The basic weapon types are one-handed and two-handed swords/axes/clubs, two-handed pole weapons for unmounted fighting, one- or two-handed pole weapons for mounted charges, and the ranged crossbows and bows.
When fighting, the left button attacks, with a mouse-nudge when clicking determining which way you're swinging, while the right button blocks. When holding a shield it will block in all directions automatically, but without a shield you will have to time your block so that you're defending in the direction the attack is coming from. A shield will shatter once it has absorbed a certain amount of damage. Crossbows and bows work with an expanding reticle for aiming, meaning it's best to shoot while standing still, and almost impossible to hit someone when you're walking and difficult to do so when riding a horse, unless you have sufficient horse archery skill.
Mounted combat is when fighting starts becoming something special. Damage is calculated based on your skill, what kind of weapon you have, the opponents armor and what kind of spot you hit, but it can also get enormous speed bonuses. This system means that if you ride your horse at full speed, lean into your blow and hit someone in the back of his head with a sword, you can be pretty damned sure he'll be dead. Mounted units are often armed with lances, and if they charge at full speed they can couch the lance to cause hits that are nearly guaranteed to kill the opponent. Even if the opponent is smart enough to raise his shield against this, it is immensely satisfying to see it shatter into pieces under your blow.
Battles can happen in numerous formats. There's non-lethal combat in training, arena fights, tournaments and when suppressing revolts. For fighting in a war or hunting down bandits, your character can gather a number of men around him and fight other large bands with his group. Your group can include mercenaries and certain unique (hero) NPCs from taverns, prisoners you saved from other armies or towns, recruits from villages. The hero NPCs level up just as the PC does, often have specific talents in training or tactics or engineering, and can be equipped by the PC. Other (nameless) NPCs advance from simply recruits into hardened veterans or knights through experience they gain in your service. These faceless NPCs can die in battle, whereas the PC, lords and the hero NPCs can only be knocked unconscious.
Mount & Blade features open-field battles between large forces, where you can fight bandits or enemies from opposing factions. You'll also participate in sieges, where you either defend or lead a charge against a castle or walled city, using a ladder or siege engine to mount the wall and penetrate into the interior.
Battles can be very large, with armies of thousands facing each other. It'd be a chaotic slaughter if all these men fought simultaneously, so open-field battles are handled in several pitched battles, in which forces of 20-or-so men face each other. Sieges are handled in much the same way, and in both fights reinforcements will arrive for you and for the enemy when losses mount up. There are no save points in between battles, nor are there any healing potions, so you can expect plenty of casualties. You have to be careful how you handle your all-important main character, too, as he serves as your commander by giving orders to infantry and cavalry to charge or stay back (orders which don't occur if said commander is unconscious). If you choose to let your troops continue fighting without their commander, the results of the chaos tend to be more negative than if you just let the battle take place in front of your eyes, even if you don't get involved at least, this is the case if you're using heavy cavalry (hired blades and knights).
One thing I should mentioned here is that the world has 5 factions (Swadian, Vaegirs, Khergit, Nord and Rhodok), and while your party can include any type of fighters, the majority of their armies will consist of their own men. While Swadian and Vaegirs have heavy cavalry, Khergits have only light cavalry and Nords and Rhodoks, to their detriment, no cavalry at all. The game balance is set to give mounted warriors a big advantage in open battles, meaning that a team of 60 mounted hired blades or knights can take on an army of 500 Rhodok infantry in an open field...and win. The Khergits are so weak that they will barely damage heavy cavalry, but because they keep riding away from you on their fleet-footed horses battles with Khergit armies can become really, really frustratingly long.
You go through all these motions as a freelancer in a fairly open, dynamic world, as 5 factions have carved up the kingdom of Calradia amongst themselves. As you progress, you can affect the way the war goes more and more, but even without you the world moves on, the factions conquer castles from one another, towns are besieged and the prosperity of villages and towns can increase or diminish.
Even without joining a faction, you can maneuver between towns and factions, hunting down bandits, solving quests or even simply buying up wine in one town and selling it in a town where it is much more expensive, getting a hefty profit for your effort.
The Meat
When all is said and done, Mount & Blade is a pretty empty game. There is no overarching plot and I'm not even sure if there's an ending (or how you'd reach it possible by eliminating all opposing factions). NPCs all act the same way and the ones that can give quests (lords, guild masters, village elders) just randomly generate them from a set list. I personally wouldn't have it any other way, since this is just the type of game Mount & Blade is, and too much narrative would ruin much of the game.
Rather than being driven by any kind of narrative, Mount & Blade is driven by a feeling of advancement. You start as a simple adventurer with a succinct background influencing your skills, and gather a small band around you. Doing small quests for lords or guild masters, fighting in tournaments for fame and money and hunting down bands of robbers, your character advances strongly in equipment and skill. So the progress goes naturally from individual progress to group progress to town progress.
As your character advances, you can opt to take a mercenary contract and work for a faction for a set time. You will not gain any fiefs, but your band will advance strongly, as simple mercenary guards advance to elite hired blades.
Once you're ready, you can join a faction (or you can support a pretender to a throne and start a rebellion), and as you push forward you will gain villages, castles and even towns, heavily stocking them with garrisons of hundreds of soldiers.
So, for example, my character started out mostly by fighting in lucrative tournaments and helping guild masters by guarding caravans. Then he went for a mercenary contract with the Khergit Khanate, helping them deal defeat after defeat to the Kingdom of Rhodoks. After this, he decided to help Lethwin Far-Seeker in his resistance to the Kingdom of Nords, convincing lords to join the rebellion and taking over towns in Lethwin's name. And finally, after the rebellion succeeded, wars with the Kingdom of Rhodoks and Kingdom of Swadia ended in disaster for them, the Kingdom of Nords having taken over nearly all their towns, castles and villages. At the end of this ride, my character was level 33, held 1 town, 3 castles and 9 villages (having refused ownership of another town) stocked with garrisons of over 600 men.
Doesn't sound like a lot of gameplay when you put it like that, does it? I didn't clock my gametime, but I'd wager it to have been well over 40 hours and I didn't even feel like I was finished not until the frustrating battles with Khergit armies turned me somewhat sour to this game. The game is very addictive, and even though quests go in an endless loop there are enough of them for you to never get tired. Because there are different situations and match-ups you get into in different battles, combat also does not really get tiring.
The Skin
I could mention a lot of smaller things that still do not quite work in the game here, but there's no real point. The development of Mount & Blade works with very active community feedback, and the version I played was 0.950. Any version number that read 0.*50 is bound to have a lot of bugs and to need some polish, so no surprise there.
One thing that's probably good to mention is that the graphic level is, unsurprisingly, not extremely high. It's pretty damned good for an indie, but that doesn't mean it can match up with current AAA titles.
I mentioned the game is empty and this is to be expected. The game offers enough to enjoy yourself for quite some time, but I personally feel that while .950 was a leap forward in content, in personalizing hero RPGs and offering more quests, It could still do with some more. In particular, the rulers of the 5 factions and the 5 individuals pretending to their thrones could use more personalizing, as could the factions in general (faction-specific quests?). Moreover, while you can work on and customize your fiefs (villages, castles and towns), this is very limited for castles and towns, and I would like to see more personalizing of your own locations - particularly their defenses.
But all this is somewhat swamped under by the great combat. When we're talking RPGs people often mention that the reason to prefer first person or over-the-shoulder and real-time combat to bird's eye view and turn-based is because it is more fun and intuitive. And sure, the real-time combat in a game like Gothic works fine, but it's also pretty damned flawed and limited. Rather than being a lot more fun than turn-based combat, RtwP combat like in Baldur's Gate is mostly just a lot quicker, so you can get combat out of the way sooner. That's not particularly (better) in any sense of the word.
Mount & Blade's combat systems is leaps beyond any we've seen in RPGs like Gothic 3 or Oblivion. It is intuitive and easy to use, but it also requires concentration and intelligence from the player. You will soon notice in smaller tournament fights that you need to adapt your tactics very specifically to how your armed and how your opponents are armed. Mounted fighting with a lance against someone on a horse requires vastly different tactics than facing two guys with sword and shield while you're alone and holding a two-handed blade. With the battles being so varied in nature, you also have to adapt your open-field tactics to whether you're in a field, or in a forest, or in the mountains. Mount & Blade offers all this, and does it a lot better than any RPG I can remember playing.
That doesn't mean battles are perfect. Sieges can be a pain, as faulty collision detection and AI means all of your troops trying to move up on a single ladder tend to get stuck, ripe for slaughter. Also, sieges don't happen in pitched battles with pauses in between them, meaning there's a respawn that just goes on and on at one point in the middle of the castle. A bit unconvincing (as are the spawn points in the open-field pitched battles) and occasionally unfortunate (ever had 6 warriors spawn around you? Not fun).
The... Uh... Corrective Surgery
One last thing I hate to mention but really should is the modding community. Considering that this is an independent game in beta testing, Mount & Blade has a surprisingly active modding community already working on adaptations and additions for the game, which is pretty accessible to modding.
I think it's nonsense to defend a game based on its mods - you're paying for the game and not for its fan-made mods, after all - but with such an active community there's a lot of promise of added content to follow soon on the game's commercial release. And since Mount & Blade is almost more of an effective combat simulator than it is an effective game, there is a lot of potential for adding to this solid groundwork.
As of this writing, Mount & Blade is at version 0.951 and available from the forums over at Taleworlds' official website. The last stable release available on the frontpage is version 0.903. The beta is open but without a purchased key can not be played beyond level 8. The game is slated for commercial release in Q2 2008 by Paradox Interactive.
