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Thursday, October 02, 2008 |
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Mount and Blade
By DeuS @ 11:08 PM :: 834 Views ::
3 Comments ::  :: PC
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At the end of every year, major gaming press & community websites
do a feature on what they liked best about the year in gaming. An
entire team of writers tax their brains on which games made the cut
across the genre, which ones were great, which ones just missed the
boat (and are thus are mentioned as "Runner Up's") and which games
failed. A failed game is one that misses the boat so completely that
the damage it does to a gamer's mind is studied by highly educated
psychiatrists. Where-as the successful games are often written about in
a Best Games of the Year article or similar piece.
Then there are those games that are given mentions, games that
fly way below the radar and are invisible to most. Those games are only
found by the enthusiastic gamer who prowls the Internet or store in
search of the rarest find. These titles often (but not always) turn out
to be priceless in terms of gameplay, enjoyability and value and go on
to become cult hits. Mount & Blade can easily be one of those
games, the "Best-game-that-few-played" title which, regardless of its
somewhat obscure status in the large sphere of gaming, being
overshadowed by a number of high profile titles, manages to pack a
punch and leave a mark by laying something fresh and intuitive across
the "playing" field.
At its core Mount & Blade plays like a third person RPG.
However it doesn't stop at being just one genre as there's a fairly
large bit of strategy involved, drawing in elements of tactical RTS
games. It has features such as commanding troops, large scale warfare,
different types of combat units with their own advantages and
disadvantages, and so forth. In fact Mount & Blade remains a
role-playing game in spite of chucking out some of the most core values
of a conventional off the shelf RPG title. Allow me to glaze over some
of the important differences before I settle into the main body of the
review;
1. No Uber-character possibility . There are no enchanted ayelid bows to save you against hordes of angry nords with axes.
2. Combat is in no way a one-click pwn-fest.
And most of all;
3. NO MAGIC! NONE! NADA! ZILCH! - You get the point...
Along with other minor considerations such as how you wont ever
be told to fight rats. No, not even to join the almighty fighters
guild. In fact the game doesn't present you with anything as noble AS a
Fighters Guild. Also there are no undead for your Paladin to smite. In
fact there ARE no monsters. Yup. Only humans. Fairly normal ones too,
with leather boots and rusty spiked maces.
So how is it a RPG you say? Read on...
Upon starting the game you are presented with the most homely and
affectionate section of an RPG game. Yes, the character creation
screen. You are presented with a number of questions that decide the
starting stats, skills and weapon proficiencies of your character. Were
you born as a child of the wilderness and raised as a hunter and expert
horseman, and then decided upon roaming the lands as a troubadour (Bard
basically)? Were you seeking immense wealth and fame or do you just
have wanderlust? Or are you one of a fallen nobility, who keeps the
memories of the good days which are no longer and now have a burning
desire to rise to power and command armies, establish your domain and
own an impregnable fortress? Or are you just a street urchin, born to a
thief, whose is taken to the dark side of life in order to earn a
not-so-honest living?
I know it sounds cheesy and too promising, but in all truth this
game actually fulfills those claims to a rather large, if not complete,
degree.
After that bit you are moved onto the actual point-distribution
screen, where you get to oversee the meat of your character. There are
four core attributes, Strength, Agility, Intelligence and Charisma. I'm
sure every RPG gamer is going to say, ''That is just like every other
RPG I've ever played!'' which is true, but the Mount and Blade system
has some nifty changes that you need to experience yourself to get a
handle on. They dress it up nice. So it feels a lot different than your
ordinary RPG title.
Moving on, you then get to the the skills section. This includes
skills ranging from Iron Skin, Shield, Persuasion, Riding, to others
like Leadership, Trade, Prisoner Management and so on. The weapon
proficiencies are dictated and governed largely by how much you use a
weapon in combat, the damage done with it, the difficulty or penalty
with which you can use them and so on. Weapons you can use in the game
are distributed across different classes which include one-handed,
two-handed, bows, crossbows, throwing weapons, and pole arms. Different
weapons have different advantages and disadvantages. You choose them
based on your opponents and the situation at hand. A lot of thought has
to go into carrying the right weapon into combat. You wouldn't carry a
hand-axe into a charging army of spear-men.
As to combat, which is actually the real meat of the game, you
might have noticed that the title of the game is Mount & Blade and
I'm sure you might have assessed by now, that there might be a
significant importance given to the 'Mount' aspect of the game.
Cavalry combat is a major aspect of this game which differs it
from any other RPG titles on the shelves right now. You remember that
wish you had while playing Oblivion that ''Man, if only I could swing
my long sword around while riding on this beast and decapitate someone,
it'd be damn cool!'' Well, Mount & Blade gives you that ability. No
joke.
You mount a horse, gather speed while going towards your foe, and
charge your right hand sword swing. Let go at the right time and you'll
be rewarded with a satisfying. *Swissshh*. As your horse gallops away
you will be notified with the message ''Speed bonus +127% . Damage done
: 54 .You killed sea-raider'' or similar foe. You can then turn back
and do the same thing with another unfortunate unmounted infantry. That
is, if your hired and trained Swadian Crossbowmen haven't already had
them for lunch with their swift arrows. Not only that, but if you use a
non-lethal weapon (Mace? Quarterstaff?) the enemy will be knocked
unconscious. You can then take them as prisoners. Sell them off to
slave traders for cash or recruit them into your party at the cost of
some party morale. The choice is yours. Conversely, watch your back.
Defeat at the hands of those mightier than you is a VERY real
possibility. You will lose a large portion of your army. Some
(including you) will be taken as slaves and dragged around the
wilderness. You may be sold off to a slave trader. Even if you escape,
you will lose a lot of your gold and goods, your horse may be injured
to the point of it being lame, and your war-party will be in tatters .
The open-ended nature of the game is real and very engaging . As
you travel with your party, it may consist of archers, infantry,
heavily armored knights on horseback, as well as prisoners. You will
be alerted of castles being seiged, war parties being lost, villages
being pillaged, economies booming or conversely the ruining of once
large citadels into ghost towns . And although you are not the center
of the world, which the game makes very apparent to you from the
beginning, you can definitely be one who shapes a small part of it.
You can make your mark, whether as a noble knight, a wealthy merchant,
or just in your own way as a vigilante who is satisfied hunting
bandits, theives, and helping out the nobles with their less noble
deeds. You can be their right hand man, in promise of coin and
notoriety.
A personal satisfaction that I had with this game is that it's
one of the very few action based RPG's that have an immersive economic
system spread across the kingdoms. You can actually be satisfied just
being a trader, going from town to town, buying cloth, oil, fur, salt,
meat, grain etc. and enduring the risk of traveling across the lands to
deliver it to a place less fortunate in the availability of those
goods, sell high, and reap immense profits from it. You have the
option to upgrade your horse, or arm your troops with better armor, or
even recruit that Hero character from the Tavern that you spotted in a
different town and develop his party skills to aid you in your
ventures.
I've been blathering for a while about how great the game is. In
all honesty, even as I write this (intending this and the next few
paragraphs to be the ones where I proceed to try and downplay the game
a bit and point out it's flaws, bringing forth the critic within), I
have just found that Mount & Blade is a brilliant game . For what
it's achieved in terms of gameplay satisfaction, immersiveness and
downright enjoyability, it is way beyond its league.
It's worth a mention here, that this game for the most part has been
developed by a Turkish couple . When you play the game, the largeness
of it will overwhelm you and you will not be able to believe that a
team so nanoscopic can actually dish out something so great. Trust me,
this game will make you wonder what exactly are the multi-billion
dollar companies doing when they develop a crappy title for years and
years. While a small development house can build something so grand.
One of the best highlights of the game is its open ended nature which
leaves you filling a huge void, the plot, which this game outrightly
doesn't have at all. There is no Demon god of destruction coming to
rain death upon a kingdom with no king or a powerful mage who will
change reality to his twisted form. None of that. You make up your
own story. It is much more in league with something like what Sid
Meier would dream up.
At the end, if your a gamer who appreciates the destination, rather
than the journey, you may find that this game does fall a bit short.
On another note, which personally doesn't bother me too much, is that
this game is Indie in the purest sense, and hence, there's nothing like
an Unreal Engine backing up the graphical core. On the good side,
it'll run quite well on older computers which don't yet have the
nuclear power reactor required to power today's computers and run
modern games. As a result it is also takes tremendously less space, can
easily be downloaded, and can be shipped in a single CD. Although that
does take a toll on some of the graphics as the character models do
look a bit stiff and animations are a bit weak, which is somewhat of a
disadvantage because in combat, for the sake of realism, there is
nothing like a crosshair of any sort, and you have to depend on your
character's movement and direction to understand how your lance is
going to connect . Add a clunky camera, and it can get REALLY annoying
to a new player who hasn't understood the tricks of the game's
character hit boxes yet.
On the other hand, the game's control system is fairly simple to grab
and master within a few minutes . It also gets a miscellaneous plus
point, which I'm sure a lot of gamers will appreciate. The actual look
of your character's face is not decided and written in stone, at the
start of the game. If you want your archer to look like a regal bald
guy as opposed to his current disheveled out-in-the-wild hair now that
you own a castle, fair enough, change it from the character window. No
issue at all.
Another plus point is that, for a game with such a small
developer base I did not experience a single bug or crash or any
technical problem at all. The game ran beautifully, and although the
load times between entering a battle from the world map and so forth
gets a bit annoying, it's nothing to crib too much about . Mount and
Blade has a large and loyal fan base, most of which are polite,
educated and not your run of the mill ''OMFG !! 7h1s G@m3 r0xxxxx !!"
types .
If the vanilla version of the game wasn't enough for you, due to the
very supportive nature of the developers, a number of mods are also
available, which surprisingly for a game that hasn't been commercially
released, are quite mature in terms of development. The changes the
mods implement can range from minor tweaks to significant game
alterations, which can range up to changing the very setting of the
game's universe to that of Lord of the Rings, using the same combat
engine (The Last Days mod).
In conclusion to this review, I'll just say that my fascination
for this game is pretty high, and it is a brilliant game in the sense
that it takes a fresh, new spin on the classic RPG framework, and adds
a large chunk of engaging strategy elements. And it is still very lean
and contains no excessive, unnecessary baggage (which has known to
break a lot of high-profile titles and sent them down the drain).
I give this title a 9/10 . Bold.
- Ashwin Kumar a.k.a. "DeuS"
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