If you don’t remember my review of Mount & Blade from a little over a year ago, go take a look at it, because there isn’t really too much new to say. Warband is being marketed like a sequel, but it doesn’t even have as much new stuff as the controversial L4D2. They added a couple of features: multi-player and romance, along with a couple of new quests, but not only did they not improve the engine in any noticeable way, none of the few actual issues that Mount & Blade had have been fixed.
Something I didn’t mention in the original review was that the late-game is extremely frustrating. I mean like “I quit forever” frustrating. Once your protagonist gets to his army size limit, and has to start getting other Lords to fight for him, it becomes so difficult that it’s not worth playing. And it’s not difficult in a good way. Here’s what happens: Eventually you have to be able to take cities from other kingdoms in order to get more political power. This requires the help of other Lords and their armies to accomplish because the garrisons in the cities are simply too big to take down, even with the max army size allowed to the player. Taking a city requires several in-game days of concerted effort on the part of the attackers. Unfortunately, the other Lords will break the attack off and run after any little target that walks past the city, making it impossible to keep them on task for more than a few hours. This has not been fixed. The AI of the Lords on the overland map are just as dumb as they were in Mount & Blade.
The overland map looks just as nice, and the overland AI are just as dumb.
The only notable addition to the single-player campaign is a “romance” system. This adds the ability to woo and eventually marry one of the Ladies (or Lords) of the land for political power (or love, if you’d like). However, wooing the females of the game is just as time intensive and mysterious as wooing a real woman. This may be points in favor of realism, but on a practical level it’s just sort of boring. To woo the eligible females, one must return every few months to recite poetry and chat about politics, then after years of this, you might ask her to marry you, then she may or may not depending on a whole suite of hidden factors. I was personally unable to get anywhere with any of the Calradian women, and really just felt frustrated by the whole process.
A new kingdom has been added. Its city labels are yellow!
There are a few other small changes to the single player campaign, like a new introductory quest (the original game just dropped you in the middle of a field and let you go), a couple new quests (which are broken), a new way to give orders to troops in combat (which is the only good addition to the game), and a new kingdom full of cities (which are just like the existing kingdoms and cities, and really only serves to make the land larger, rather than more interesting). There are no updates to the graphics, and while some clunkyness in the interface was excusable in Mount & Blade, the lack of any effort to fix these issues in Warband is inexcusable.
Warband adds the ability to change a unit's class to the party screen, but fails to fix any of the actual problems with this part of the interface.
The other addition to the game is the multi-player. This works well for what it is. Fighting a group of humans is, of course, much different than combat with an AI army. The players tend to meta-game the combat quite a bit, which is to be expected, but the mechanics of Mount & Blade seem particularly susceptible to this. For TaleWorlds’ part, they do seem to have effectively balanced the combat by depowering some of the tactics that work very well in single-player. For example, in multi-player, players may only couch a lance for a few seconds, and there is a wait before a couch can be performed again, also horses are much easier to kill (one arrow or crossbow bolt will take them down), making them useless for close quarters combat. Of course this means that these mechanics are now meta-gamed, resulting in a standard practice of “kill all the horses first”.
Multi-player is a lot like single-player, except your opponents jump a lot more, and are more likely to call you "gay" when you hit them with a couched lance or shoot them in the head with a crossbow.
It honestly may not be possible to create a game with realistic medieval combat for an audience which is used to circle-strafing and bunny-hopping as standard tactics, so this might be as close as one can get.
Last Word
Mount & Blade: Warband is more expansion than sequel, and is frankly disappointing in the sheer lack of improvements to the single-player experience. If you are just looking at it for the campaign mode, you should give it a miss because the “improvements” are simply not worth the $30 price tag. The multi-player, however, works well enough, and if you’ve really been looking forward to 64 player Mount & Blade, pick it up on Steam or GamersGate and you won’t be so disappointed.
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