Warband thankfully expands on the original game’s meager vassal options, but I still wish that I could do more with my individual followers. Hiring heroes is a lot of fun and should be deeper than it is. This is the part of the game that I wish had some more meat on its bones. You take missions (which have incredibly annoying time limits), collect rewards, buy and sell people (prisoners) and items, and attempt to create a name and reputation for yourself.
So, if you’ve played Pirates!, you’ll be completely at home. Once you’ve come to terms with the game’s clunky, almost feedback-less combat, you’ll start riding around the countryside, hiring troops, and attacking all manner of travelers, bandits, and wanted men. The single player portion of Warband is a game of exploration, fighting, and skill and character nurturing. They’ll probably go back to the single player, and they’d be right to do so. It’s a toxic experience, and only the most diligent, ardent fans of the game’s single player combat will bother sticking around longer than an hour. Imagine playing a jousting/sparring sim with the steepest learning curve ever (and bad controls) and then imagine playing it with the charming, charming denizens of the internet. The UI and controls are one step away from being completely incomprehensible. Suffice it to say that combat in Mount and Blade has always been a finicky, hate it or love it thing, and it’s incredibly difficult to master when playing against a computer. I’m going to avoid discussing the added multiplayer because it’s completely opaque and lacks any of the sinuous, hard-to-find charm of the single player campaign. Warband adds some excellent features to vanilla Mount and Blade, but it also adds some completely useless ones. It’s a vast host of almost-minigames, wrapped up in a few RPG bits, just like Pirates! The important difference between the two games (aside from just about everything but the setting) is that where Pirates! Was possessed of a surprising wit and whimsical humor, Warband is humorless, drab, and stiffly obsessed with its brand of authenticity. It isn’t concerned with finely, painstakingly recreating one particular brand of industrial or civic construction or management. It isn’t a strategy sim, a castle or city building sim, or any kind of sim, really. It’s really Sid Meier’s Pirates! set in the Middle Ages. The thing that most people don’t realize, or say, is that Mount and Blade: Warband (the new M&B game that offers a host of new options to this experience) is nothing like all of the medieval RPGs out there. If it sounds a bit complicated, that’s because it is.
MOUNT AND BLADE WARBAND LANCES HOW TO
The game throws you right into the world, sets you up with a simple quest, and then lets you figure out how to fight on horseback, command armies, deal with diplomats and lords, and marry into royalty, all on your own.
You can be a noble, poacher, steppe hunter, or any other number of vaguely defined classes. You start out as some kind of ambitious warrior or adventurer. Knights, lords, ladies, peasants, and bandits all scuttle around the various kingdoms of the land of Calradia. It’s a grand exploration, expansion, and combat sim that takes place at some unspecified point in a medieval time, in a fictitious medieval land. Mount and Blade can be an incredibly frightening franchise to get involved in.