I first played Mount & Blade back when it was in beta and the Turkish husband and wife team who made it were selling licenses for cheap on their website to fund the game’s continued development. Though sorely lacking in content, it was a revelation at the time, fully deserving of its reputation as the preeminent medieval combat simulator. Even now I still can’t think of any game that handles mounted combat better and it’s incredibly satisfying to learn the use the full array of weapons at your disposal. You can pepper enemies with arrows, skewer them with lances or cut them down with your sword. The innovative control system put you fully in charge of the direction of your swing and the damage system reflected not only your character’s skills but also the speed at which your blow contacts with the enemy.
While I spent many, many hours mastering how to couch my lance properly so that it will do maximum damage, how to swing a cavalry sword from horseback as I gallop past infantry and how to circle strafe enemies with my horseback archery, even I got bored pretty quickly by how sparse the game world was. Basically you rode around an almost empty world, traveling from city to city to buy and sell goods. Occasionally, you’d run into bandits that you can fight. You spend the money you earn on better equipment and to recruit new soldiers to join your army. Rinse and repeat. After a while, I went and downloaded the Last Days mod that turned everything into Lord of the Rings. Running around recruiting elvish archers and Gondorian infantry to slaughter orcs by the hundreds turned out to be much more fun.
Instead of doing a completely new sequel, TaleWorlds, which was formed out of the success of Mount & Blade, has opted to make standalone expansions based on the same engine. Warband was the first of these and was released in 2010. They’ve also since released With Fire & Sword, which adds firearms into the mix, in 2011, but I don’t think it adds enough new content and probably won’t be getting it. While this saves them money, the downside is that the graphics are seriously getting along in age by now and Mount & Blade was never a pretty game even back when it was first released. In Warband, the team added multiplayer features which I’m sure many players appreciated. However, since I only play single-player, I’m only going to comment on the changes on that front.
Foremost is that there is now more of a directed goal in Warband. While the graphics, overland map, items and combat mechanics are mostly the same, the diplomacy system has been greatly expanded upon. So you can now formally become a vassal of one of the six factions in the game and work to advance yourself in the hierarchy. You can also choose to go it alone and try to found a nation of your own from scratch by grabbing a castle and its surrounding lands, but I’d imagine it would be pretty tough to defend yourself against the thousands of soldiers that will be sent against you. In my game, I opted to be a loyal vassal of the new Sarranid Sultanate faction.
The process starts as usual by doing good deeds, like ridding the realm of bandits for the towns and villages and getting your renown up. Soon enough, you’ll be liked enough by the lords of the faction who will allow you to sign up with them as a mercenary captain. This means a nice weekly salary that varies depending on the size of the warband you’ve managed to amass. In peacetime, you basically get the salary for free. In war however, the lords of the realm will elect a marshal who will organize a campaign. When he feels like it, the marshal can summon you to accompany his army and assigns you tasks like gathering cattle to feed his army or scouting enemy castles and villages. You can also join in the battles which will increase your renown very quickly and make the lords like you even more, particularly if they are in trouble before you show up.
Perform well enough and you can speak to the sovereign of the realm about being a vassal. If he agrees and you swear an oath of fealty to him, you become a lord of the realm and are given the poorest village available as a fief to start you off with. You no longer get your mercenary salary but you do get to collect rents from your fief. As you might expect, the more prosperous your town, the more rents it pays you, so you need to invest money and time in building improvements for it, making sure that its farmers are safe from bandits and most of all, make sure sure that raiding parties from enemy nations don’t get to loot it.
Being a vassal opens up a ton of new options. You’re automatically invited to feasts where you can meet ladies and woo them. Marrying one of them takes some effort but this allows you to organize your own household, hold feasts of your own and gives you more opportunities to improve your standing among your peers. Playing politics is essential if you want to own more than a measly village. As your realm conquers more castles, villages and even towns from the other nations, the sovereign will award them to the lords of the realm according to whoever gets the most support. This means you will need to butter up your fellow lords and persuade them to support you.
The politics go further than even that. Depending on your influence and power, you can persuade your liege to initiate a war against a kingdom of your choice or to ask other lords to go along with your battle plan. You can conspire with a lord against another or attempt to reconcile two lords who have a dispute with one another. All this adds a meaningful context to the battles that take place all over the map. It’s quite exhilarating to participate in sieging and storming a castle or defending one against an enemy. You can visibly see a nation’s fortunes wax and another one’s wane depending on how and where you throw your weight.
Unfortunately, the interface for all this is still as unwieldy as always and it takes far too much grinding to get to a point where you can start playing a part in the great game. For this reason, I strongly recommend using a mod like Diplomacy to make things easier. Then there’s the fact that while giving the battles more meaning is cool, combat is pretty much the same as before. One improvement I did notice is that the enemy AI is much better now. Enemies that are led by lords will try to stay together and advance in an organized formation across the battlefield, so you can’t bait them into chasing you all over the map so that your own army can pick them off at their leisure. But if you’re already bored of the combat in base Mount & Blade, it’s unlikely you’ll get much out of the combat in Warband.
I do confess to being disappointed by the poor production values. It’s one thing to tolerate it in the original but now that they have solid financials, you’d think they could invest more in polishing the game up. But Warband still looks and sounds too similar to the original. In many ways, this game feels more like what the original should have been in the first place and it’s a bit annoying that they took the money from customers while the original was still in beta but then asked for money again when they’d done this. So yes, this is a good game because it is essentially Mount & Blade finally being finished, but at least for single-player mode, there isn’t that much that is truly new.
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