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A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse! Let's Play Mount & Blade: Warband



Mount & Blade: Warband, essentially a more polished version of the original Mount & Blade, was released in March 2010 by Turkish independent developer TaleWorlds. Another sequel has since been released a few months ago, brandishing the subtitle With Fire and Sword. All three are available on Steam for cheap.

Now, what is this Mount & Blade? If Speed is Die Hard on a bus, Mount & Blade is Medieval: Total War in a sandbox. The game features plenty of roleplaying opportunities, least of all is the option to play either as a man or a woman and allowing you to define certain aspects of your character's past. Your choices during character creation influence your starting stats, and you gain experience and levels just like any other RPG.

The Medieval: Total War comparison comes into play during Mount & Blade's campaign and its battles. Battles are in real time, and can include hundreds of Middle Age soldiers hacking and slashing each other's limbs. However, we get to control our own character throughout, giving basic orders and indulging in a little bit of butchery as well.

As I mentioned earlier, Warband is more or less the same game as the first one, though with a good number of extra features. As it is, it's pretty much an improvement in every single way, as nothing has been removed or reduced.
I could tell you more, but perhaps it'd be best to let the game speak for itself. Or, at the very least, allow me to slowly clue you in on its different features.

This will be a hybrid Let's Play. Most of everything will be told through screen shots, but I'll make use of video for the battles. At first, I'll record the whole fights, but later I'll resort to a "Best Of" reel.

On a side note, this is a game in which we pretty much have to set our own goals. However, there is one singular objective that is definitely the hardest to reach: starting our own faction and subsequently conquering every single settlement on the continent. That's what we'll be aiming for, so strap in. It's going to be a long ride.


The title screen. Yes, there's a multiplayer option, but I've never touched it. In it, you can only choose to do battles, though there are a number of modes, like ?Capture the flag? and ?Besiege the castle? and whatnot. There's no multiplayer campaign.

Let's see what ?Start a New Game? has in store for us.


Character creation. As noted, you can play as a man or a woman, and can choose to be of noble birth or common birth.

I'm going to play as a woman. Now, let's have a closer look at our next few options.


Each choice changes our starting stats and equipment.

Now, if you'll allow me to indulge in a little bit of roleplay, I'm going to decide that our young lady was the daughter of an impoverished noble, spending her early life as a page at a nobleman's court. As a young adult, she was allowed to become a lady-in-waiting, but later in life, struck with a sense of claustrophobia and deeply curious about the world that laid beyond her bedchambers, left everything behind to become an adventurer.

In fact, let's see the biography the game has chosen to write for us:

You were born years ago, in a land far away.

You came into the world a daughter of declining nobility, owning only the house in which you lived. However, despite your family's hardships, they afforded you a good education and trained you from childhood for the rigors of aristocracy and life at court. You started to learn about the world almost as soon as you could walk and talk.

As a girl growing out of childhood, you were sent to live in the court of one of the nobles of the land. There, your first lessons were in humility, as you waited upon the lords and ladies of the household. But from their chess games, their gossip, even the poetry of great deeds and courtly love, you quickly began to learn about the adult world of conflict and competition. You also learned from the rough games of the other children, who battered at each other with sticks in imitation of their elders' swords.

Though the distinction felt sudden to you, somewhere along the way you had become a woman, and the whole world seemed to change around you. You joined the tightly-knit circle of women at court, ladies who all did proper ladylike things, the wives and mistresses of noble men as well as maidens who had yet to find a husband. However, even here you found politics at work as the ladies fought each other bitterly to catch the eye of whatever unmarried man was in fashion at court. You soon learned the ways of turning these situations and goings-on to your advantage. With it came the realisation that you yourself could wield great influence in the world, if only you applied yourself with a little bit of subtlety.

Only you know exactly what caused you to give up your old life and become an adventurer. You're not even sure when your home became a prison, when the familiar became mundane, but your dreams of wandering have taken over your life. Whether you yearn for some faraway place or merely for the open road and the freedom to travel, you could no longer bear to stay in the same place. You simply went and never looked back...

Yes. Our name? Clarissa Winterbottom.

There's more. Since we're descended from nobility, we get to carry our father's banner always. The game has a large selection to choose from, as I'll show you now.


I picked the ?Dog Posing inside Japanese Flag? model, in the first row. We'll see it on our shields and above our allies in battle. This particular banner actually provides gameplay advantages, increasing our Overall Excellence by 2 and our Aura of Dread by a whopping 4.

Nah, I'm kidding. It's purely cosmetic. Computer-controlled nobles get them, too.


Here's our finished character screen. There's a lot to explain here, but I'll keep quiet for now. Not too many of these stat names are particularly self-evident, honestly, but I'll only tell you more when it's actually needed.


We can now choose where we first spawn. These are the six kingdoms, and we'll watch them wage war and declare peace many, many times throughout this campaign. Each faction has its own unit promotion tree, with some specialising in cavalry and others in infantry or whatever. Basic strategy game fare, of course.

I'll provide brief descriptions for each:


And there you have it. We'll be picking the Kingdom of Swadia, only because the bandits residing in their land are definitely the easiest to dispatch.

Let's move on.



You are exhausted by the time you find the inn in Praven, and fall asleep quickly. However, you awake before dawn and are eager to explore your surroundings. You venture out onto the streets, which are still deserted. All of a sudden, you hear a sound that stands the hairs of your neck on end ? the rasp of a blade sliding from its scabbard.

Oh dear.

Time for some combat.

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v21727770mr4GFHP9
Ambushed!

A flawless victory, minus the one missed crossbow shot that somehow grazed past the bandit's groin. But who is this ?Merchant of Praven? character who accosted us as we were wiping our enemy's blood off our face?



The merchant takes you to his house. Once inside, he stands by the door for a while checking the street, and then, finally convinced you have not been followed, comes near you to speak...

What exciting new adventures await us in this frightening new land? Find out the answer to this question, and more, in the next update.