This looks cool. Shame I don't have the laptop specifications to run the "quirky girl"...

TheCleaningGuy

@Agnates: I agree with this entirely.

Don't let the "realism" thing scare you guys away. This is not the Red Orchestra of ye olde sword & shield games.

The combat is ridiculously simple, you can get through most encounters by telling your men to hold or charge at the right moments, and the whole party recruiting/equipping thing is very basic.

It's a great game mainly because the combat is so damn visceral (charging your horse past a running enemy and hitting them in the face with a sword feels like something out of Braveheart. At the end of each scrap the battlefield is littered with corpses, some of which look like pincushions with all the arrows and whatnot) and its fun to keep adding different mixes of soldiers to your ranks while upgrading your character with helpful but realistic gear (no stupid glowy RPG swords).

The only thing M&B really needs is a better-focused campaign, or at least more response from competing AI based on how many villages, castles etc. you capture.

The last build I played was still a very fun sandbox, but to be honest, there's not much feeling of accomplishment or acknowledgement from the game world that you're rising in power.

I wish the AI resembled something like Galactic Civilizations, where general communication and military/diplomatic responses to your actions seem very believable.

Silverbackne

Oh, and one final comment: The mounted combat is EPIC. Best system attempt in any game I've played in ages.

CukyDoh

That quirky girl probably looks great sans clothes while that popular girl might have more than a few scars round the areas her parents for some reason helped pay for.

@jettokisora: Hot librarian glasses = freak in the sack.

Human Bomb

So... Barbie Horse Adventures 2?

Xagest

Been playing this game on and off since its first release years ago. Graphically it is pretty lacking, but the mechanics are VERY solid and makes for some incredible gameplay.

Practice makes perfect is totally true in this game as said above, and your'll need to learn how to fight. Commanding armies is good fun too, and use of good tactics can make all the difference.

Also, tonnes of mods make for huge replayability. I spent a few months ages ago and replaced half the weapons with replicas of Lineage II's equipment. Made one hell of a fantasy universe!

Play and you won't be disapointed if you like this genre of game. Just wait 'til you hit your first siege battle!

CukyDoh

Combat in this game is awesome and has a pretty impressive sense of scale. My main beef is that the orders system hasn't really gone anywhere since like the .6 era. You should be able to give mounted and non mounted troops different orders.

Also, for whatever reason I can't run the game with dx9. Taleworlds' only fix is to run the game in dx7. Hopefully the final will fix this.

Capitalist_Bagel

Oh, come on! Mount & Blade is the quirky girl with the hot librarian glasses. Oblivion is popular girl who spends most of her weekends drunk and spread eagle.

jettokisora

+ Watch video

Seita

@Agnates: Exactly. I think of it as a first person Total War.

(Not like the console games Creative Assembly did, though).

Krondonian

@DBrown4840: It's not a sim. Not in the sense of a racing or sports sim or that stuff.

You can basically go around looting villages and getting into battles with brigands/armies/peasants.

You can hop on a horse and decapitate swathes of enemies, or try shooting them with a bow from 100 metres.

Not realistic, but damn fun.

Krondonian

one of the more enjoyable things about this game is picking off people with your ranged calvary and then sending your melee infantry in to finish them off.

That and the cheering at the end of a battle when you win.

teeuwen

@DBrown4840: Maybe you're guessing the target consumer all wrong, since, you know, this is relatively realistic and does away with magicks and all that. Though, maybe you should try it before you condemn it because while it's more realistic than the likes of Oblivion or other shallow fantasy RPGs, it's still a damn fun game with the best weapons based combat system deviced yet, especially when mounted.

Think of battles like Medieval II: Total War except you're in the heart of the action with your army instead of ordering from above as an unseen God.

Agnates

Sometimes that quirky girl puts out. Never eliminate your options man.

BloggyMcBlogBlog

I've always been fascinated by the medieval era, yet the best I could get were games riddled with magic and myths. My only fix for anything historically accurate were restricted to shows on the History Channel and big-boy picture books in my middle school library.

I will give this a try, I hope the bathrooms are as dirty as they are in the books.

Seita

Wow, this sounds pretty nice. Might have to give this a go!

dead_red_eyes

I have a feeling this game is going to be like banging a fat chick. Fun till you get caught mounting.

AssassinTRIP

The realism in this game inspired by Pirates? Everything other than the game's realism is inspired by it from where I'm seeing it. If anything, a much better comparison than Oblivion for this game is that it is Pirates! except on medieval lands, realistic, and with actual gameplay depth. There's just so much to do, and you slowly discover it at your own pace, with so many neat little touches popping up all over the place.

The game gets repetitive as you end up more and more powerful but once the Pirates esque retirement conditions and options are more fleshed out it'll make for a more compelling experience, it's basicaly neverending at the moment and no matter how much depth is included you can imagine some players will crave for a little more focused, guided gameplay instead of the wide open sandbox (which I love, and have only grown tired of after a couple of years of playing this, ha...).

Agnates

Hhhmmmm "focuses on recreating realistic 14th century life", no thanks, pass. While the analogy is cute I can't see this quirky girl as anything other than a self absorbed prude. I mean WoW is ugly and look at all the action she gets, its not so much the looks as it is the concept.
Reality simulators are best kept to the sports crowd cause the fantasy people (I'm guessing the target consumer here) are not interested in reality.

DBrown4840

I got the demo when Stuart posted about it before. Since then I have the full game.

I was a peasant, who grew up in gangs and is now on a quest for revenge...though not sure what I'm avenging.

Anyway, I'm a level 20ish horse riding bearded knight, a Vassal of the Kingdom of Nords, and own Jamiche Castle after an epic seige with 3 Rhodok Lords.

It was a 300-esq 40 vs 400 battle which I endured until finally I held my stronghold.

It's got a deep combat system and is great fun. A hearty recommendation. Especially as buying it pre-release means you get it cheaper, earlier, and still get the full retail version with no extra cost.

(As a side note, I thought the graphics were pretty nice. I have an AMD Sempron 2800+, GeForce 6600 and 1.5GB RAM- a machine utterly incabable of running Obilvion- and it runs along nicely).

Krondonian

And Two World would be the ugly bug infested friend that I still look back and wonder why i even bothered. I think I'll give this one a try too. Here comes another drunken one night stand Mount & Blade.

Rykon

Shame on you comparing Mount & Blade to Oblivion!

Dark_Jon

Anyone who runs away from this game because of the graphics, there are some addons and mods that really improve the graphics.

Playing M&B with HDR and higher-res textures is not really bad, let alone the awesomeness of the gameplay.

So if the graphics hold you back, these mods and instructions on how to get them to work can be found in taleworlds.com's Forums.

SegevRaz

The only reason people say this game is realistic is because it doesn't have knights wearing oversized, colorful armor and shooting fireballs while riding a lizard-penguin-badger thing. This game is easy to get into and has, as others have said, one of the most amazing combat systems ever conceived.

Switch0025

Wow, this is totally up my ally! I can't wait to get home and give this thing a try. I loved Oblivion, and with the mods, it gathered alot more realism to it, but it was still lacking. I also love Dwarf Fortress because of the random generation and the freeform gameplay. This seems like an awesome blend of the two!

Strider817

i think the so-so graphics actually adds to the experience, to the bleakness of that era; i always laughed at those old 50's movies about the American frontier, with the women in log cabins with perfect makeup and clear skin - this seems to be keeping it real, in a dirt-under-the-fingernails-for-god-knows-how-long kind of way.

F22

Had this game for years. The mod community is up and down, through there are several out there (until updates hit) that transform the game a bit and make it a lot more enjoyable.

It's not a system hog, and the horse combat is, IMO, unequaled. Bethesda could take some queues, though they'd probably just screw it up.

Great game, worth the pittance it costs to purchase, and it's always got a good stream of new content coming in from the community.

Worth a play in my book.

mitsoxfan

@TheCleaningGuy: Size does matter. :/

I watched the vid in comments, and it's totally not my thing, I'll pass.

Omnimon

@SagatSon:

This, folks, is why you shouldn't post while drunk and/or angry.

PapaBear434

(1) Likening games to girls is trite, sexist, and juvenile. Grow up.

(2) "Mount & Blade" is more interesting than any supposedly "medieval" game released in years. Fuck this WoW/Diablo/Everquest/Elder Scrolls myth and magic crap--it's all the same Tolkein derivative flash-bang bullshit.

I'll take a sword, a horse, and some fucking men over a half-elf necromancer with auto-regen faerie wing boots and a +10 sword of mild calamity ANY day.

Please god let this come to Mac.

SagatSon

I've never heard of this! Why oh why do I find out right before Fallout 3 is released?? Damn my luck.

When someone is finally able to marry Oblivion style play with Total War style scope, then we will have a game! This sounds like a step in the right direction.

Blue Oyster Cultist

Hell, this game sounds kind of interesting. I'm gonna have to keep an eye out for it.

PapaBear434

I played the game a good 2 years ago and was pleasantly surprised at how fun it was. Well, for a time anyways until masses of enemy crossbowmen made me dread venturing anywhere. If they refined the combat abit then this would be a great game indeed. Also, I don't think "recreating 14th century life" would be the best way to put it. Just 14th century combat would be more like it (thought I suppose most don't think of anything else other than knights and swords when they think the high middle ages).

Turambar

@Silverbackne: Take up a quest to restore power from an usurper to a "rightful" kind/queen. You get enough reaction there, it almost feels like a "story" mode, and it's much more fun than bowing to an established king and doing his quests since you do it at your own pace rather than be told to follow some lords around.

You get to slowly take over the land, try and convince enemy lords to betray the king and join your cause, decide who gets the castles, cities and villages, etc. I won't spoil everything, but I think it's the best campaign quest line offered in the game.

Agnates

The quirky girl is always cooler. Fuck the hot girl (literally if you must), but the quirky one is awesome and way underrated, hot or not. Even then, often the quirky girl is beautiful in more than one way. I hope this extremely corny analogy holds up, because this game certainly has my interest.

Erwin

@Capitalist_Bagel: You are able to do that. Try using one of the "Infantry! Hear me!" - "Cavalry! Hear me!" - "Archers! Hear me" commands first, THEN use the actual order you want the given unit to do.

Agnates

I would like to note for people to please ignore the gameplay videos posted by the community for anything but a most basic representation of the game. The sandbox aspect is never shown, only the combat, and it's usually at low difficulties, against shitty enemies, with uber powerful player characters. With a decent difficulty and proper damage settings you never play like that and do rely a lot on your army rather than take out 100s of enemies yourself. Even a stray arrow can sometimes kill you if you get unlucky and it lands in your eye socket during a skirmish like that.

Agnates

@SagatSon: BWAHAHAHAHAHA

Anywho, it sounds interesting, though I found Oblivion to be too unfocused for a singleplayer game. Worth a try at least.

rdj

HELLO...

my name is

godot

...and I have been addicted to Mount&Blade for 3 1/2 years.

godot

Sounds good. If you check their site, they have a try before you buy, beta feature. I'm gonna give it a whirl to see if the mechanics are good.
The comparison to girls is valid. That's not to say that all pretty girls don't have depth, or vice versa. Gender relations are the fundamental experience in life.
Reducing gender relationships to "banging the hot girl", is trite, sexist, and juvenile. Comparing games to girls is not.

AllegraStreit

@PapaBear434: Or on your period.

AssassinTRIP

I just downloaded and tried this over a lunch hour because of this article. The game is free up to level 6 and so far I actually quite like it. I stopped in a little hole of a village and recruited 3 dudes to ride with me. Then when we got jumped by bandits we rode them down like dogs. Well, 2 of my dudes died. But the dude who lived and I rode them down like dogs. Quite fun and definitely a sandbox. So if you need linear hand holding it won't work out for you. I'm off to raise my prison keeping skill so I can enslave some bandits and sell them for fun and profit!

Shawn

@SagatSon:
Gotta say, I'm female and not offended by this in the slightest. I thought the analogy was really funny and seemingly appropriate.

I'm not really interested in the game though. Doesn't sound like my kind of thing.

Shrinkydinks

One of the greatest moments were when my king was captured and i snuck behind enemy lines and managed to enter the prison deep withing the castle he was held captive in.

He told me he wanted me to keep things running until he was released, and so i did.
A few weeks later he managed to escape not knowing my lust for power had made a rather impressive foothold.

So i grabbed a few of my best men and awaited the kings return in a nearby forest and slayed him before anyone knew of his freedom.

And so i reigned for many a day. >:)

Mupp

I was playing this right now. It was fun but I put everything on the hard difficulty and I must say blocking is a B!tch.

Some guy came lunging at me with a spear so I blocked it, it pushed me back and he twacked me in the head with it.

NIIIce.

Terrorsaur.

Mount and Blade is an awesome game.

The beta version is free for the most part and light on your computer so everyone should give it a shot.

McPaper

I started playing M&B 2 weeks ago, and played for 2-3 hours before buying a license in order to break the lvl 6 cap of the demo/free version. I'm now level 14, and plan on playing it until I am the ruler of the land!

The horse ridding is just the best out there. The mix of RPG elements, economics, strategy and action gives the game a very healthy depth.

Looove it!

seoman49

Agreed, on of the greatest experiences you'll ever have in your gaming life if leading a cavalry charge into enemy infantry. The most terrifying is having your horse killed in the middle of an enemies line with your own troops totally unable to help.

P.s. France technically won the The Hundred Years' War, so natch (i'm not French or anything; i just thought it should be known that the English got their arses handed to them).

Captain_Fitz

Anyone who digs indie PC games should really consider some of the other stuff on this list (it leads off with Mount & Blade). I read this last week and spent a good deal of time messing around with trial versions of Depths of Peril and Evochron Renegades...both of which are pretty awesome.

www.skorks.com/2008/08/top-indie-games-you-wouldnt-mind-paying-for/

Silverbackne

@AssassinTRIP: Or on a Mac!

Blue Oyster Cultist

@Dark_Jon: Mount and Blade looks better than Oblivion ... or at least more fun.

magictroll

For the record, there are player mods that greatly improve the textures and lighting of M&B :)

But just to reiterate for those who missed it, this is NOT a fantasy game. There are no mages, no spellcasters, no demons, no magic, nothing. This is purely a realistic "knights in shining armor" game.

But it is hella-fun, definitely worth picking up.

Morithain

FOURTEENTH CENTURY - -YEAAAHHHHHHHHHSSSSSSS!

They should have stuck to a purely middle ages setting.

Arleas

I brought this game years ago for like $12, and I'm so glad I did. Easily one of funniest games I've ever played... I definitely recommend this to anyway even remotely interested.

drhojo

@godot: Where the hell have you been, man? I've been waiting here for years!

Yenzilla

@Captain_Fitz: Key word "technically" - and in the beginning, they lost a lot of ground because they didn't have longbows - only crossbows. It took a whole generation for them to breed little boy archers strong enough to pull back a long bow and by then the fallout from the first 30+ years of the fighting had severely weakened both sides.

w00t history nerds!

AJ Glasser

@PapaBear434: Actually, I was on my period when I wrote the article.

AJ Glasser

@Yenzilla: God damnit I was beaten to the punch.

@Mupp: Ahahaha, really? You can do that? I downloaded the trial and have messed with it a bit, but that sounds epic. If the trial holds my attention I'll pick this up ;o

Mister Adequate

This game has some of the best gameplay ever. I bought this for cheap a long time ago and I love it. I added a mod for some muskets and it is awesome. There are many great mods for it, just make sure you get the one that increases the battle size. 150 man battles are AWESOME!

nitromic

Alright so I downloaded and played for about 15 minutes before concluding it sucked. But, for some reason, I decided to try it again. I picked some different settings in the beginning and I've been hooked for the past 4 hours...haha.

Kapazza

Has definitely appealed to me reading the comments people have left.

Will pick the demo tonight.

SansSanity

Mount the blade, stab with the horse.

Protector one

The intro took too long to get to the point with the analogy, so I got bored and moved to the next article. Just fyi. Intended as feedback on the article from my personal perspective, nothing more.

weables

wouw is he Turkish?

GimmeCat

@GimmeCat: good point

ub