Mount&Blade

Developed by TALEWORLDS, originally just two Turkish developers, Mount&Blade is a sandbox game that muddies the water between Role Playing Games (RPG) and Real Time Strategy (RTS).

Players choose a back-story, name and appearance and then are thrust into the medieval world of Calradria. Unlike most RPG titles, Mount&Blade does not force the player down a particular path, there’s no friendly patriarch to ease the young hero into his destiny. The bleak landscape of a medieval society also allows freeform morality as frontier law prevails; as long as you earn somebody money then typical issues of morality such as “Who did you kill to get this?” are ignored.

Think of Mount&Blade not as a freeform RPG like Oblivion [open world, open ended - do what you want style] but rather as a chance to live out your fantasy in an imaginatively realised medieval world. Fancy the chance to become the greatest arena fighter of all time? Do it. Want to usurp the crown and become king of a nation? What stands in your way? In this game the phrase “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” has never rung so true. Unlike so many other traditional MMORPGs [Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games] (this is the model Mount&Blade most closely follows) stats do not govern the outcome of a battle. Due to a unique combat system, where almost every blow can be blocked with a turn of the mouse or dodged by careful timing, Mount&Blade only uses stats to improve upon your skill. If you can’t aim a bow then paying off the enemy is the best approach.

A well designed levelling system combined with the carefully constructed economy means that when you buy better weapons the rewards come instantly. The weapons aren’t just bling to boast about, each type (ranging from bows and throwing knives to lances and scimitars) have differences in speed and reach so every purchase requires a carefully thought out decision. If their usefulness runs out then you can donate them to one of around a dozen companions, whose skills count towards the party (so if you need a siege tower built quickly, then boost yours or a companion’s engineering skill)

The open ended nature of Mount&Blade means that it isn’t a game that you will play for any sense of completion and this is perhaps its biggest fault. Towns are largely the same excepting visual differences, NPCs have only a few stock responses and the number of quests on offer means that repetition or boredom can set in fairly quickly if you try to follow this like a conventional RPG.

Whilst combat is very well polished, the visuals are not, new graphical technologies like reflective surfaces and ragdoll physics look oddly out of place in a game where character models are blockier than your gran’s TV. Sieges too are under-developed; the only siege machine that functions is a tower which is moved by running into it repeatedly. Whilst you have some control of your party through commands like ‘Advance, Hold Ground and Mount/Dismount’ the majority of the time the best laid plans dissolve into a melee ruckus as soon as combat sets in fully. Perhaps this represents the chaos of war but I’m wary of trying to explain bad AI away as an attempt to capture realism.

If the price were a little lower than this would be a must for pen and paper RPG and MMORPG fans, the modding scene adds value but illustrates that in many ways this is a toolset not a conventional game. Still there really is nothing like this out there and there are precious few games that can say that.