With Fire and Sword is the newest expansion for Mount & Blade. If you’re not familiar with the game as it stands, first check out my review of the base game, and then the Warband expansion.
The big thing this time is the addition of gunpowder. The muzzle-loading boom-stick has apparently been invented in the Mount & Blade world, along with the hand-grenade. Players will now be equipped with rifles and muskets in battle (you get a simple musket right from the get-go). The enemies get them also, of course, and it makes a lot of changes to the battlefield. The guns work much like crossbows—they have to be loaded after each shot, and they punch through armor easier than arrows. In fact, the only real difference between the muskets and the crossbows is a small load-time-to-damage ratio change and the fact that nearly everyone on the battlefield now at least has a side-arm. Imagine a battlefield full of crossbows in Warband. That’s what it’s like.
The bombs, on the other hand, are actually a pretty neat addition. They introduce the first AoE damage in the game. They come in very small packages however, with the most damaging bombs only having an ammo of one per battle. Also, if you want to use bombs in the single-player campaign, be prepared to wait about 40-60 hours into the story because the cheapest (and thus crappiest) of the bombs is over $60k. “Oh, I can make $60k in less than 40 hours,” you say? Keep reading.
This version of the game has a much wider variety of foes, which might be the only new feature I don’t see a downside to. Rather than just little groups of bandits, and gigantic companies of Lords’ armies which were the only fare of the previous iteration, Fire and Sword introduces some middling parties. There are scouting parties which seem to be 10-30 men on horseback, and similar foraging parties. I also noticed some minor Lords with smaller forces, which means that you don’t have to keep bandit hunting to fight small groups of enemies.
I thought it was nice that a tutorial was tacked on to this edition, though I’m not sure who it’s for, since very few people would be playing this expansion who didn’t already know how to play, but I’m sure it’s nice for first-timers. Unfortunately, players are required to play through the tutorial, like it or not, which got a bit annoying after I started my eighth game.
Once in the game, I traveled far and wide, but found no villages anywhere in which I could recruit some soldiers. None. This is not hyperbole. There are no more free soldiers willing to join your cause. This means that every soldier you add to your army must be purchased, which isn’t cheap. Thankfully, they added some ‘mercenary camps’ at which new soldiers are always for sale, but that doesn’t make them any cheaper.
I also found very few blunt weapons. Perhaps I was just extremely unlucky, but in the many hours of play I put into this game, the only blunt weapon I ever found were basic clubs. Some of the most fun I’ve had with Mount & Blade has been running enemies down with a blunted lance (though since they removed lance couching, that isn’t as much fun anyway), but now it’s not possible. Which means, it’s also not possible to capture any prisoners, since any enemy defeated with an edged weapon or bullet is killed. This removes the game’s most lucrative mechanic, and means that the only way to make money now is through quests. The only way to solve quests, however, is to have a large army. This combination makes the early stages of the game excruciatingly slow. Mentally steel yourself to spend 3 to 4 times as long being a no-name bandit slayer (which there is also no money in), or allowing yourself to take the low road and start attacking peaceful caravans for money and goods.
It’s nearly impossible to rise up from failure. If you get captured, and so find yourself with a handful of failed quests, no money, and no soldiers, you can’t just start going from town to town recruiting up the local boys and train them into a fighting force against the local bandits. There is no way to get back on your feet, since you can’t get money without soldiers, and you can’t get soldiers without money. This is why I started over so many times.
It’s also no longer an option, in this version, to have a female protagonist. Not much to say about that. It’s just kind of dumb, and doesn’t really make sense. I mean: Why remove something like that? You can still choose a female in multi-player, but not in single-player. It’s not like the story requires a male—in fact, the story is much less interesting than the base game, when players got to choose a bunch of things about their background to affect their starting situation. In Fire and Sword, everyone starts with the same story, which is no story at all: you’re just dropped, context free, into the harsh world.
As for multi-player, it hasn’t changed much. It is still dominated by horse-archers. If you want to win, be a horse-archer. No one in the multi-player game is even using guns or bombs. Well, no one who’s winning, anyway. Also, don’t be not very good at the game. People hate that.
With all of these terrible changes to the game, I wonder just what Taleworlds is thinking. I loved the original Mount & Blade, but each expansion has made the game incrementally less fun. They probably think they are improving the game, but I have a feeling they are pandering to a tiny vocal minority of fans on their forums, a group of people who apparently favor realism over enjoyment—since most of the explanations for changes have been that they make the game “more realistic”. So, what’s happened is that all of the things about the base game which were fun—recruiting villagers, conking people with couched quarterstaves, selling prisoners to the slave-traders, etc—have been slowly bled out of the game, leaving it a dried and joyless husk in which no more gaming nutrients can be found.
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