Mount & Blade

From a small, relatively unknown studio comes a game that, with just few tweaks could be the best open-ended RPG ever. That’s right, I said it. Mount & Blade gets it right, where so many before have failed to deliver. This game is what The Elder Scrolls franchise should have become. Remember Daggerfall? Remember how cool it was to be able to go everywhere, and get quests and goals and items from wherever you wanted? Remember running into foes that you actually couldn’t beat, and thinking of certain places and areas as too dangerous to visit? Daggerfall is actually a pretty good place to start from when describing Mount & Blade. Okay: Take Daggerfall, give it modern 3D graphics. Change the world map to an  overland travel screen, add a tactics-style party management system, allow the player to fight from horseback, and remove the monsters and magic system. That’s Mount & Blade.

The overland view. You'll spend a lot of time here.

Rather than having the player pick from a list of classes, the game starts out by asking the player a series of old-school RPG style questions (What did you spend your time doing as a child? Where did you apprentice after you left home?) This determines the player’s starting skills and items. From there, the player can spend some time getting some fighting instruction at the Training field, or just head out into the world of Calradia. There are five kingdoms, each with 4-5 major cities, and lots of little castles and towns for you to visit.

The player can get quests from lords, peasants, or merchants or can simply start killing bandits and raiding caravans. As your character gets stronger, the focus of the game shifts dynamically. Sometimes you’re doing nice things for peasants, and defending their roads, sometimes you’ll be looking out to recruit more soldiers, and other times, your king may press you into service against his enemies alongside the other knights and lords of his realm. As you progress, you’ll hire soldiers and party members to join you. Party members have names, never die (only get knocked unconscious, like the player’s character), and advance in the same way as the player character. Soldiers die all the time, have no names, but get really sweet advancement trees that can make them potentially very powerful over a much shorter time than the party members.

The game can handle battles with many unique combatants.

Fighting other parties takes the player onto the battlefield, which is always different based on the location of the battle. The AI strategizes differently based on who you fight, and so the player must maintain adaptability. Everything from the nobility of the leader to the types of the troops will affect the enemy AI, and force the player to adapt. When I’m fighting a force of unmounted bandits with no ranged troops, it’s much different from assaulting a caravan with smart mounted units, which is vastly different from defending a castle from a lord with siege towers and ballistae.

In addition, once you get enough men, you can choose how much of an active role to take in the battle. Unless you’re ambushed, or some other story reason exists, you can tell your troops to attack while you stay back in the tent, if you’re down on the field with the troops, you can issue a variety of commands to the different troop types (not individual troops, each army is divided into Infantry, Archers, and Cavalry, and you have to give the orders to a whole group). You can either run from group to group issuing orders, or you gan give general orders at the beginning (the default is ‘charge’), and join in the fight yourself.

The combat engine is great, and unlike some RPGs in this style, it remains challenging the whole game. It never seems like one reaches a point where they don’t ever have to worry about the combat. There are easy fights, of course, when my army of 60 cavalry bears down on a group of 10 road bandits, there is no contest, but Calradia is always at war, and you eventually need to choose sides, and there will always be Lords on the other side with bigger armies. Individually it can become challenging if you are not cautious on the battlefield. No matter how well armed or armored you are, if you get surrounded by 20 bandits, they can drag you off your horse and beat you unconscious.

The big gimmick for this game is the mounted combat, and it is just as fun as it sounds. My usual strategy in battles that I’m not too concerned about is to set my archers on a hill top, set my infantry to defend them, then take my cavalry out into the field. Then I get out my jousting lance and run around the outside of the enemy forces at full speed lowering my lance, and attempting to take out their archers. Sometimes I get pretty shot up in the process, but it’s a lot of fun, and very satisfying to watch the crossbowmen tumble around in the dust behind me.

The item management screens are pretty typical for the genre.

Skill advancement is pretty typical: level up with enough XP, and choose your skills and proficiencies. There are no magic spells to learn, but there are plenty of party management, and battlefield skills to learn. There are six categories of weapon to learn, but in each of those categories is a wide variety of weapons of varying quality and use. The character I’ve done the most with specialized in polearms. She has a lance for mounted combat, a staff for sparring, and a spear for siege defense, and that’s only a few of the possible weapons she could use, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Finding and managing the equipment for your player character and party members is one of the most fun parts of the game.

I mentioned that to become really great this game needs a couple of tweaks. At first, what I thought it needed was a magic system and some monsters, but I’ve since changed my mind, the game manages to create great conflict, and wonderful variety of combat without anything supernatural. The ins and outs of the war for Calradia is enough drama and combat. The tweaks this game needs are very small indeed:

The party management screen leaves a bit to be desired

First, it could use a slightly more intuitive party management screen. Everything is easy to find, but some things take a lot more clicks than I would like. For example, if I find a cool new piece of armor, and want to give it to one of my party members, which I might have ten of at a time, I would have to figure out who has a high enough strength score to wear it first. This consists of clicking on the party member, then clicking ‘talk’ to start a conversation, then through the course of the conversation, I have to ask to see the character’s skills, at which point is shows me everything about them. Doing this for each member is tedious, and once I decide who to give it to, I have to start another conversation with them and ask to see their equipment. It just takes too long, and more than once, I’ve just sold a cool horse or sword because it wasn’t worth the rigmarole of trying to figure out who should get it. A screen with party member skill summaries, and a place to quickly switch pieces of equipment around would have been awesome to have.

Second is an aspect of overland navigation. For most things it works very well: The player character is shown in the middle of the screen, and you can zoom in and out, and pan around to find your destination. You can see other parties on the map with you, and if you have the tracking skill, you can even see a bunch of nice little arrows that tell you how recently someone passes and how big their party was.  If you stop moving, the game pauses, while you figure out what to do next. As I said, it’s great most of the time. It has a weakness when it comes to traveling with a group of other parties. I’ve spent some of my game time following allied war parties around on the map, looting towns and besieging castles, but there is no good way to just follow the other parties. I have to click where I want to go, then watch where they go, and click again, and if I’m faster than them, I’ll keep running into them, and initiating a conversation. What it needs is a simple ‘follow’ command that I can give when I want my party to follow behind another party, such a simple option would cut down on lots of wartime frustration.

As I said, however, these are minor issues, and as a whole, the game is fantastic. I hope to see more games on this engine (perhaps even an expansion pack or a different land to explore), and to see other developers follow this lead with their own games. Mount & Blade is what open-ended RPG gaming should be like.

Rundown

Pursuit

The story line is about as open as it gets, which is wonderful. The player is left to develop their own story for their own reason from start to finish, and the player decides when the adventure ends. The NPCs are various, and interesting. It would be nice if the party management system was more intuitive.

Panorama

The graphics are on par with Morrowind. Not the best that 3D cards can do today, but it means that my mid-line PC can easily handle battles with a hundred unique characters. The artwork is great, and the general visual style is consistent and well-thought-out. No two towns look alike, and all of them have a sensible and unique layout based around their terrain.

Noise

There is no voice acting in the game, understandable considering the wide variety of dialog needed to create a truly open world. The battle sounds are well-done, and the music fades pleasantly into the background.

Reins

The controls are about the same as from Oblivion or Might and Magic: Dark Messiah, and are completely customizable. Fighting from horseback is fun. A follow-mode on the overland map would have helped.

Encoding

No bugs or flaws that I ran into. I didn’t get stuck in any walls, there didn’t seem to be any hit-detection problems even with a hundred men in the battle, and everything worked the way it seemed it was intended too.

Last Word

Every fan of open-ended RPGs, especially those who were disappointed by the direction Elder Scrolls took after Daggerfall, must get this game. It is outstanding.