Two years ago, Paradox Interactive's action RPG Mount & Blade came to us on PC, offering a unique brand of dynamic gameplay with a focus on mounted combat. The game differs from the usual fantasy fare by avoiding many common fantasy cliches and setting players loose in an open-ended medieval sandbox. At this year's GDC, Paradox brought the expansion to Mount & Blade, called Mount & Blade: Warband, and allowed us journalistic types to try it for ourselves.
Combat in Warband exhibits several obvious improvements. For one thing, damage is based on both your position (if you're firing arrows from atop a castle wall, you'll do more damage than someone firing back at you from the ground) and the manner and speed with which you use your weapon. For another, the emphasis on multiplayer means a greater challenge due to swapping the so-so AI for real live players. Ranged weapons seem to be more effective than before as well, especially if the player wielding them is in a strategic position.
With all these differences, one thing that does remain the same in Warband is that without a horse, you're more or less hosed. Upon first entering the world in the demo, and trying to get around on foot, I was easily (and repeatedly) trounced by guys on horses. I somehow though, made it to the base of a large tower which was being attacked by one group of players and defended by another. Warband features new mechanics like being able to raise ladders to infiltrate castles, and that's what we were trying to do, with uneven success. At this stage, the game still suffers from a bug here and there and so malfunctioning ladders and doors made a difficult situation even more challenging.
While trying to climb a particularly uncooperative ladder, I was told about the new multiplayer system which allows for 64 players at once and features a good range of classic modes like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Battle (basically survival mode), Conquest (where one team defends two objectives and the other tries to destroy them) and Siege. All these changes and additions are a result of Turkish development team TaleWorlds maintaining a very healthy relationship with the Mount & Blade community. The team has listened to its community's feedback and has changed the game's balance and added new features to Warband according to this feedback. The TaleWorlds team also supports the work of its broad group of dedicated modders who will be happy to hear that TaleWorlds and publisher Paradox Interactive is making all of the new multiplayer features fully available to them, so they'll be able to create any kind of multiplayer mode they can possibly dream up.
Most of the Mount & Blade community's requests thus far have been fairly predictable—changes to AI, balancing, additional weapons, etc. What's surprising is that outside of combat, one of the most commonly requested feature additions in Warband is the ability to marry. This new system (which was not on display at GDC) allows players to become powerful in a way totally unrelated to defeating enemies on the field. As a male, players wanting to be married will have to jump through quite a series of hoops. First, they'll have to find a viable mate by gaining invites to and attending feasts where groups of single females are likely to be. Next, they have to court their girl of choice either by winning tournaments or learning how to write poetry. Last, they have to approach the girl's father and convince him they're a worthy addition to the family. By contrast, as a female, the whole mating process is much simpler. Basically, you forgo all that stuff and just put your charms to good use in order to attract a powerful nobleman.
Mount & Blade: Warband at this point looks like it'll be a worthwhile augment to the core game with its new systems and multiplayer modes, if only the bugs witnessed in the GDC demo can be hammered out. Of course, it's hard to say how the expansion will really play out until we see a full-on 64 player battle and it's not sure yet, when that will be. A firm release date was impossible to pry from the Paradox reps at the show—the best they would offer is “March or April of this year”. In light of that, it's probably safe to assume it'll be another six weeks or so until we get to see the game in action. Mount & Blade: Warband--coming to you "soon", only on PC.
