Unusual gameplay, something like an economic action strategy. The game takes quite a long time to complete all the quests and there are many random events in it, which also affects progress. In the beginning, it is quite difficult to cope with all the mechanics, and after a couple of hours, having recruited a small squad, things are going as they should. You can safely send letters from one person to another and beat bandits along the way)) A note from me: The game really lacks the cooperative mode.

Необычный геймплей, что-то вроде экономической экшен-стратегии. Игра занимает довольно много времени на выполнение всех квестов и в ней есть много случайных событий что тоже влияет на прогресс. В начале довольно сложно справляться со всеми механиками, а спустя пару часов набрав небольшой отряд дела идут как надо. Можно смело отправлять письма от одного чела к другому и по пути бить бандитов )) Заметка от меня: Игре очень не хватает кооперативного режима.

Great game with full freedom and creativity.

I loved Mount & Blade. It is a RPG game in which you are in full control of the direction you want to go in. Create a character, drop somewhere on the map, and start your journey.

There is no story or plot in Mount & Blade. It is completely up to you what you want to do next. Recruit men for your army, visit castles and cities to receive quests, gain favor for one of the five factions on the map, join their ranks, become your own lord with land and tax income, the possibilities are endless.

The mechanics in Mount & Blade are very simple and easy to learn. On the world map, you can travel in any direction and you encounter various activities, caravans, bandits and Lords from different factions. You can enter cities to join tournaments, buy stuff, sell stuff and gather some gossip about ongoing wars and events around the world map. Although the game has no official ending or goal, the way to play is to gather as much renown as possible by killing bandits, winning glorious battles against other factions and do good to the people and peasants. This way, other factions notice you and grant you land, titles and positions.

Each faction has its own units and “theme”. The Kingdom of Nords and Vaegirs are both north themed and consists of stereotypical Viking and north men units.

The Khergit Khanate are nomads and horse people from the Steppes and present a variation on the ancient Mongol empire. Then you got the Rhodoks, which can be traced back in name and units to the Rohan empire from Lord of The Rings.
The units and their appearance does remind heavily of this comparison. Lastly, you got the kingdom of Swadia, which (in my opinion) is just a stereotypical, standard medieval nation, that resembles ancient England, because of their superior crossbowman and cavalry.

The most fun with this game is just exploring, helping people, earn gold, expand your army and get renown throughout the map. You are constantly managing your supplies, keeping your soldiers happy and overall, just be a Lord, mercenary or free roaming scoundrel that is control of their own destiny. I can play the first Mount & Blade for hours, without it ever boring me.

The graphics in Mount & Blade are crude and a little ugly. However, this is one of those games in which I don’t care one bit. The framerate and animations are smooth, and that is what counts for me.

The music is a little generic on the world map and in cities, but the battle tracks are great. When you hear those trumpets at the start of a huge battle, you know it is going to be epic.

There are some small issues with the game. For starters, a specific quest is broken beyond your wildest dreams. This is a quest in which you need to chase/guide livestock around. This can be livestock from farmers that you can return, or cattle for the army you are serving. Controlling these cattle, is almost impossible. Make one wrong move, and they are gone forever. And even then, you never know where they will walk off too.

Lastly, the combat is a little vague. I learned that the only reliable way of hitting an enemy, is by swinging your sword from the right. All other directions feel inaccurate and stiff.

But overall, Mount & Blade is a great game. Simple, easy to learn and hours of fun.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/2KYZPvAfRaE

In roleplaying games, the central narrative that guides the player’s journey is often colloquially referred to as the “main quest”, while all other branching threads are the “side quests”. Most roleplaying games rely on that main quest to direct the player toward the game’s various objectives, as well as provide the primary thrust to the game’s narrative. Without the main quest, most RPGs don’t even start. It’s the reason Harry is in Revechol, the genesis of the Devourer’s relationship with Krenze, and Enzo’s quest for power would’ve been unnecessary without the Bojaa invasion. But if this central narrative didn’t exist, would these games be considerably worse off? Sure, it’d take some re-writing, but would Shadows: Awakening really be much different if the Devourer simply came to be one day and began working to gain power on its own? Video game players like adventure, they’re curious and ready to delve into any old catacomb if the possibility of loot or a reveal is present. That quest for power is often more than sufficient, and Turkish developer TaleWorlds Entertainment have demonstrated just that. Mount & Blade has no main quest - no primary objective at all. The player is dropped into the fictional region of Calradia and left to their own devices. What they will spend their time doing, who they work for, who they oppose, where they will call their home, and how they will handle conflict are all down to the player. With all of these choices to make and things to do, does Mount & Blade ever feel like it’s missing something?

Mount & Blade takes place in the fictional - yet suspiciously familiar land of Calradia. There are five empires present within what is essentially a single river-valley, and each is trying to defeat the others to become the sole rulers. The player is dropped into this maelstrom and let loose to do whatever they like. They could build a diverse army by recruiting troops from all the different cultures, strictly align with one of the empires and wipe everyone else off the map, focus entirely on becoming famous at the tournaments, or become the world’s most powerful caravan baron - the player can even oppose everyone and go full bandit if that’s how they want to play. The game takes place primarily in this large map screen where the player can travel around, visit the various cities and villages, talk with the generals patrolling their territories, and get into fights. Battles are fought in procedurally generated battlefields determined by where the armies meet on the overworld map, which is reminiscent of something from a Total War game. It’s even possible to auto-resolve battles as if it were actually a Total War game; if the battle seems too easy or if you’d rather play as a backline commander instead of getting your hands dirty, or the situation is hopeless and a few seconds of menus is preferable to watching your character get hacked to pieces, you can just let the game calculate an outcome and move on. Of course, there are definitely reasons to participate in the battles, most impactful of all being the increased experience points gained from landing a killing blow on an enemy. Those experience points are spent on the player character’s massive variety of stats which influence everything from the player’s health and weapon skills to the quantity of soldiers they’re able to command and their ability to haggle over an item’s value. The battles are a strange semi-RTS thing mixed with some action combat that employs its own first-person directional based sword-fighting system. Well, it’s either first-person or you can piggy-back your character during battle. Why anyone would want to use this perspective eludes me, but it’s there as an option. I think it's probably a quirk of the engine since other games that used the engine also have this camera perspective available.

Mount & Blade looks pretty good for a game that came out in 2001. It didn’t; this game’s original release was in 2008, the same year Metal Gear Solid 4 and Dead Space came out. Things looked rough at release, but as time has gone on Mount & Blade’s visual presentation has retroactively become much more palatable, at least to me. It’s an older game, older games look like this, it’s fine. The Calradia overworld map is handcrafted and does a reasonable job of reflecting how a river valley like this would form in real life, but it has some unfortunate restrictions imposed upon it that definitely bring it down visually. The rolling hills and same grass texture desperately need more stuff to break them up. The occasional rocky hilltop and handful of trees just isn’t enough. But there can’t be too many forests since they cause armies passing through them to move slowly and if the player triggers a battle in a wooded area the battle map will be filled with trees that make cavalry and archers much less effective, resulting in really long, drawn out battles. Taleworld definitely noticed how dull Calradia looked and made an attempt to add some more variety to the landscape; the Khergit Steppe uses a slightly different shade of green for the ground and the eastern region of the Vaegir territory has a permanent blanket of snow burying everything. I don’t think the different green is a successful substitute for more interesting terrain, and the white snow makes reading the white text updates about world events and level-ups from training impossible. But all that said, I like Calradia, it’s a big space that adheres to all of our real-world natural conditions when it didn’t really need to. The same goes for the sheer quantity of different weapon and armour models. There are many different styles of clothing that take inspiration from the various Middle Ages European and Central Asian cultures present at the time, and even a set of samurai equipment that makes me think of Morrowind for some reason. The character models are a bit wooden, but it’s much less noticeable from horseback or through the sights of a crossbow.

There are clearly two major sections where gameplay happens in Mount & Blade: the Calradia overworld map, and the boots-on-the-ground battles. Neither of these two modes of play would be great on their own, but in combination I think they both compliment each other very well. As a 4X game only, Mount & Blade would be much too simple, especially before the big changes that came in Warband. The player commands a single army, and even if they manage to earn a Marshall position within one of the empires, they’ll never be properly able to issue commands to those other armies. They just kind of tag along and stand nearby like dad asked them to help with the car. There’s a similar shallowness to the battles; the addition of directional attacks and timed parrying is okay, but horseback combat kind of makes the whole system irrelevant. But as something to do between planning world conquest and chatting with the boys, it’s good enough.

I played two characters during the 60 hours I spent with Mount & Blade. Raez Steppecast was the daughter of a travelling merchant who got lost in a snowstorm after her caravan was attacked by bandits, and Yuzu Ganbataar, a frog-mouthed Khergit man held prisoner in a Nord city for years longer than his sentence. This mistreatment at their hands fostered a deep hatred of the Nord aristocracy who refused to acknowledge their mistake, and Ganbataar vowed to wipe their unjust nation off the continent. Raez managed to use her negotiating skills to earn an audience with the Vaegir king who would hopefully have some means of escorting her back home, but ultimately the Vaegir leadership weren’t very helpful. Raez would have to take things into her own hands, and soon enough she had recruited a small warband that rivalled her family’s caravan for strength and number. Upon finally being released from Nord captivity, Ganbataar immediately travelled home to the Khergit lands to try and raise an army, and while it took a little longer than anticipated, the Nord empire was repelled from mainland Calradia. Now, the game mostly gave me blanks to fill in regards to character motivations and objectives and when to call the campaign complete, which I’m in two minds over. Firstly, I like that the game allowed me to do this. Raez and Ganbataar both engaged with Mount & Blade’s mechanical systems in roughly the same way, but who they talked to and how much was required of each character was significantly different. Raez spent a lot more time speaking to the village elders as a means to earn some money, as well as use her newfound military power for the benefit of the less fortunate. I spent a lot more time herding cattle and training peasants in that first campaign than I did in the second. This was definitely the better path to follow first, though, as Ganbataar wasn’t able to just head to the Khergit lands and have the Khan’s forces at his disposal. He had to earn that, which meant grinding to gain reputation, which is done via lots of boring, menial tasks. Whenever I asked a lord if he needed help with anything, they would often send me across the map to deliver a letter, and then the recipient would say “hey thanks” and that was that. Now I’m multiple days away from the guy I wanted to rep grind, and there’s a good chance he isn’t where I left him anymore and now I need to ask directions. Once Ganbataar had done the legwork, though, the Khan eventually saw it fit to grant him a fief, which greatly increased his earning and ballooned the potential army he was able to field. Before long, Ganbataar was knocking Nord castles over and claiming them in the name of the Khan, which also accelerated reputation gain. Turns out, everyone likes you when you’re the one supplying the empire with new territory. Ganbataar managed to become so popular among the Khan’s lords that he was elected the Marshall twice in a row before eventually being captured, and likely executed by the Rhodoks. The reason I concocted this rivalry between the Nords and the Khergit was completely arbitrary. There are no real differences in management tactics across the various empires, they just have different visual themes. I did find it easier to target the Nords over everyone else - none of their troops ever figure out how to ride horses, which makes fighting them from horseback extremely easy.

The battles in Mount & Blade are fairly straightforward, but there are a lot of quirks that make them interesting to think about. TaleWorlds figured the engine wouldn’t survive them, so the battles have character limits that the player can also reduce if they need to. At a maximum, each side starts with 50 soldiers, even if the armies themselves have more. There’s a “Battle advantage” stat that shifts this balance toward something like 55-45, but that isn’t really going to impact the battles until Battle Advantage +10 or so. The fight begins and most of the time both forces will rush toward each other and fight somewhere near the centre of the map. When one army has lost a majority of their initial troops, a new batch of reinforcements will spawn in to continue the battle, which almost always happens when the player is looking at the place they’re going to spawn. The player typically starts the game with a horse and a crossbow so they can at least try out a few of the different combat styles and pick one they prefer. On-foot melee fights are fast as each participant tries to avoid hitting their opponent’s shield by attacking from different angles. Successful attacks deal significant damage, so a lot of the individual fights revolve around effective shield use. Or you can just swarm the enemy since they can’t block every attack. It is still possible to engage with this combat system on horseback, but doing this forfeits the horse’s real strength in battle. Horses are heavy animals, and in Mount & Blade they can carry some decent momentum on the charge; knocking down opponents and maybe even trampling them a little too. This momentum is also carried into the rider’s attacks. There are hefty multipliers when hitting an enemy while moving at high speed, enough to kill them in a single stroke if the sword finds their head. This is a good way of encouraging the true-to-life hit-and-run strategies cavalry have been employing on battlefields for centuries - smashing into a formation, taking a few swipes on the way through, and then circling around for another charge. Unfortunately the CPU didn’t get the memo. The player can command their cavalry units to follow them closely around the battlefield, but only the player will be making hit-and-run attacks, the cavalry units prefer to wade into the enemy blob and wait for their horses to be killed. The tools the player uses to command their army on the battlefield are very limited, and the interface used to issue those commands isn’t exactly elegant. There are options for things like which weapons the units should be using or how tightly units should group up, but there isn’t much more to it. Units are set to charge by default and they may as well stay in that default state. I only used the hold command to position my ranged units on advantageous hilltops or to have my army wait a little and let my allies take the brunt of the initial damage. Also, I preferred to take battles on the flattest terrain I could find to avoid the mountainous battle maps. These maps are by far the worst thing in the game and I don’t think it's close. Mountainous terrain does not look like this anywhere in this universe. Worms-tier land generations. I actually enjoyed the siege battles far more than these maps, but I can imagine those could be like pulling teeth to some. All siege battles work the same way; the attackers leave behind their horses and climb their ramp to hop into the mosh pit they’re greeted with at the top of the wall. The real test is whether the player can snipe enough enemy archers to ensure the Denny’s grand slam goes off without interference. No unit has infinite ammunition, including the player, so eventually the player has to decide whether to disrespect their surroundings or scrounge around for any bolts or arrows someone else dropped. Fighting through a city garrison regularly takes so much time that TaleWorlds put intermissions into these battles. Whether these breaks were put here to give the player time to refresh or lift some strain off the engine, I’m unsure, but at least the player gets a free restock of arrows when it happens.

I’ve mentioned the engine a few times because Mount & Blade uses a proprietary engine, which was not the done thing by this period in game development’s history, outside of maniacs like Jeff Vogel. The big studios had their own in-house engines, but most smaller developers were using tools like Source and Unreal Engine to reduce the amount of work they had to do in order to create a viable product. Creating a proprietary engine was a common occurrence during the 90s but the practice largely disappeared at the turn of the millennium. Doing this allowed TaleWorlds to tailor their engine to do the specific things they wanted to do with it, but it put a massive amount of pressure on the developers to get it working well, and required a tremendous deal of foresight to include all of the functionality they might want later on. So while Mount & Blade is most certainly a sandbox, the things the players are able to do aren’t nearly as broad as similar products. When the player gains control of a city, castle, or village they can build a small selection of buildings there for some minor buffs or to increase the village’s vision range. Oh wow, more prisoner space, great. The player isn’t allowed to attack any settlements if they aren’t affiliated with one of the empires. But once the player has that affiliation they can just attack anyone else as they like, even factions they’re supposed to be friends with. They can find and meet characters to add to their army which have the same levelling and equipment screen as the player so the player’s army can have access to more skill tree buffs, but there are two distinct groups of companions who complain when they’re mixed with members of the opposite group. They’ll offer small dilemmas which eventually result in the character informing the player they intend to leave the group, but you can just tell them no and they won’t leave. Because if they did leave the player would lose all the gear the companion has equipped. And even if they do leave they’re only a couple tavern visits away from asking to come back.

These limitations were apparent to TaleWorlds and ever since they’ve been expanding on the Mount & Blade base. Two years after the original game, Mount & Blade: Warband was released. Warband rearranged Calradia’s geography, added the Sarranid Sultanate faction, new NPC tasks, expanded diplomacy and empire management options, the ability to establish one’s own faction, and even a multiplayer component. These additions and changes are so expansive that - obviously - I’m inclined to treat Warband as a separate game, and I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this video. Warband is basically a resolution to all of the gripes I had with the original game, at least from what I’ve seen. Two DLCs were released for Warband too, which is kind of like an expansion of an expansion as far as I’m concerned. Both seem interesting though, so I’ll probably be back in future to explore this entirely new package. I’m unsure whether I feel the same about With Fire & Sword. Released back in 2011, With Fire & Sword is another standalone expansion of the original Mount & Blade which makes some improvements over that base, but goes in a different direction from Warband. Instead of retreading the fictional land of Calradia again, With Fire & Sword is based on the Henryk Sienkiewicz (Shen-kyay-vitch) novel of the same name. The Cossack-Polish War is raging and within the tumult the player character emerges to forge their own path. Since the game is based in the mid-17th century, the player has access to a range of firearms and explosives which aren’t quite effective enough to eliminate the use of swords and shields. It’s certainly a fascinating setting for a game, but I think I’d prefer a focussed narrative within the setting as opposed to the Mount & Blade sandbox style. With Fire & Sword also doesn’t feature many of the improvements Warband contains, so I expect bumping up against the game’s limitations to be the same as within base Mount & Blade. And, of course, an official sequel to Mount & Blade was released into early access in 2020, with a subsequent full release in 2022. Bannerlord is bigger, prettier, offers more freedom, and is much more complex than even Warband, and it has been received incredibly well. I’m very intrigued by the sequel and I’m similarly excited to see what TaleWorlds gets up to next.

For now, though, I do think Mount & Blade is worth a shot if the extreme freedoms of Bannerlord or even Warband seem too overwhelming to you. It runs right out the digital box on basically any hardware so the barrier to entry is very low. I think it makes more financial sense to just buy Warband since they’re basically the same price, but I had to know the differences and I didn’t have a bad time.

I think, judging by my ability to blabber on about it for this long, that Mount & Blade’s lack of a main quest isn’t detrimental to the overall experience. Without a list of mandatory objectives the player is entirely responsible for finding the fun, and there is certainly fun to be found. But there are weaknesses that come as part of this design style. The player needs to meet the game on its terms - they need to approach the game with a plan or at least a target, because the game isn’t going to give them one. At the same time, the developers still needed to think about all of the things they wanted the player to be able to do and then implement them, which is definitely a process where having a bunch of people involved would have been helpful, hence the Warband changes. But even still, those changes never involved the implementation of a primary objective or an interruption of the unbroken freedom the original Mount & Blade provides. These games are compelling all on their own, which some games can’t manage even with a scripted plot and specific objectives. Naturally, this kind of sandbox RPG isn’t going to be to everyone’s preference, but I think Mount & Blade embodies the role-playing aspects of the genre so well that it is genuinely a quintessential role-playing experience.

With all this pontificating about what a role-playing game really needs to fulfil that tag, I think it’d be best to play something a bit more traditional.