Despite what a lot of people seem to claim, sandbox gameplay is not a recent invention. The concept easily reaches back to some of the early Ultima titles, Darklands, Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The sandbox (sub-genre), if you can call it that, has occupied a valued niche in the RPG pantheon, usually with the same pros (addictive, open-world gameplay) and cons (quantity over quality, repetitive gameplay).
TaleWorlds’ indie action RPG Mount & Blade is no exception in its widest scope. It too has compelling and addictive gameplay offset by repetitive and uninteresting quests and NPCs. But Mount & Blade is a little different. Kind of like Arena, you can tell that this is not a game that set out to be a perfect sandbox title, but instead strove to be a fighting game first and foremost and this has its positive and negative sides.
Basics
Mount & Blade utilizes a simple character system: your main attributes are strength, agility, intelligence, and charisma, and each attribute has a number of skills tied to it. Broadly speaking, strength governs combat skills (power strike, ironflesh), agility governs physical aptitudes and combat skills (weapon master, riding), intelligence governs leadership skills (leadership, pathfinding, tactics), and charisma governs personal interaction skills (persuade, trade).
Mount & Blade takes the sandbox principle to its extreme: after character creation, you’re dropped into the middle of nowhere with no main quests or clear instructions of what to do. Astute players will notice they’re shoved into the world right next to an area marked (training grounds) and head there first, but it doesn’t really matter – you can go anywhere you like and earn experience any way you wish.
The lack of guidance might be daunting to players more used to hand-holding, but Mount & Blade does not throw up a lot of conceptual challenges: there are towns, castles, and villages dotting the world map divided amongst 5 factions: Vaegirs, Swadians, Khergits, Nords, and Rhodoks. Each location usually has one or more NPCs (of interest) that can provide quests (lords, guild leaders, and village elders) whereas the other NPCs are just there for the flavor or even better for recruiting into your very own party. Each quest is fairly straightforward, and most simply involve moving from point A to B and most likely bashing someone’s head in once you’re there.
Combat
Combat in Mount & Blade is fantastic, stunning, and easily sports the best real-time swordplay ever conceived in a video game – and that’s not even mentioning the mounted combat.
When asked why we’re supposed to prefer fast first-person real-time combat to the alternatives, the standard answer is that it’s more immersive, immediate, intuitive, and fun. Oddly enough, those four principles usually combine into click-click-click-click combat, like you’d find in something like Gothic 3. To get some direct comparison material for Mount & Blade, I started up Oblivion right after one session, and found myself laughing out loud at the horribly stilted movement and awkward controls.
That’s what Mount & Blade does to you. Once you go M&B, you can’t go back.
Now that the unabashed drooling is out of the way, let me try to give you a picture of Mount & Blade’s combat. The basics of close combat come down to striking and blocking, with you determining the direction of the strike (and of the block if you so desire) while viewing the field from first or third person. Shields block more easily but also wear down during combat until they break and you drop them. You can also block with your weapon if you have no shield, but it is tougher and requires timing. Ranged attacks can be blocked by a shield but not with a weapon, and blocking attacks multiple opponents is nearly impossible without a shield.
Skill, weapons, and armor determine how much damage you do and can take, but player skill factors into it heavily. Not so heavily that you can take down someone in plate mail with a club, but still so significant that all your fancy weapons won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to use them. What counts in Mount & Blade is timing and momentum. If you fail to block at the right time, you’ll be caught off balance and your opponent will likely land multiple blows before you can recover. Likewise, the speed of your weapon relative to your opponent’s is a factor, so you have to make sure you hit him head-on, as a backwards swipe while running past him won’t do you much good.
Ranged weapons may sound like the odd one out but they’re not. They’re not recommended weaponry, but whether you prefer bows, crossbows, or thrown weapons, they make a handy backup or alternate attack and can even be utilized on horseback if you’re skilled enough. Speed, damage, and accuracy for all weapons are determined by separate combat skills that you can raise each level, though they also rise themselves in a learn-by-doing scheme.
Mounted combat is the core of the title but to be perfectly frank not the part I enjoyed most. True, nothing can beat charging head-on into a group of infantry and slashing someone right in the noggin as the speed-bonus can easily double or triple the damage and kill the opponent instantly. Or the grandeur of two horsemen charging at each other with whoever times his attack right probably knocking the other guy out. But I find that while the initial rush is great, after a while you’ll note that open-field battles against infantry involve a lot of circling around the enemy to go in for a new charge, while cavalry versus cavalry is even worse, as the enemy AI mostly avoids you and only cautiously moving in for a strike. This means that fights against light cavalry (the Khergit Khanate) can be an extremely frustrating affair. Still, Mount & Blade easily provides the best mounted combat I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in.
Mount & Blade does not stick to only one type of combat. At the start, the open-field batches will be mostly small, pitched battles between your party and assorted forest bandits, mountain bandits, sea raiders, or looters. As you advance in levels and renown, your maximum party capacity grows and it will be needed, for if you join one of the factions you’ll find yourself involved in full-scale open-field battles, where armies of hundreds face off. The game does not handle all these NPCs all at once, instead putting two initial teams against each other and sending in waves of replacements as combatants fall.
On top of that, Mount & Blade has non-lethal combat in training (in Mount & Blade, you train people by beating them up true hard knocks philosophy) and in arenas. Arenas are usually a welcome change of pace, as they pit two to four teams of size varying from 1 to 8 combatants against each other in the small confines of the arena, using a variety of weapons and often mixing mounted and non-mounted combat. In the final release of Mount & Blade, arenas have some added flavor in that the equipment is adapted to the tastes of the regions you’re in – Khergits sending gladiators in on mounts and with javelins or bows, while the Nords often arm them with axes. Arena fighting offers a good source of revenue (if you’re smart and skilled enough to bet on yourself and win), as well as a welcome change of pace.
The combat I personally enjoyed the most was during sieges. Sieges are not what you might expect them to be as forces storm up a ladder or a siege tower to fight the defendants on the battlements. It doesn’t feel quite like a real siege, but what it does feel like is a massive and often challenging slaughter, as you swing your sword through ranks of recruits until you emerge victorious and very, very bloody.
Flavor
Now, I’m making it sound like combat is all there is to Mount & Blade and that’s not really fair. For one, TaleWorlds went all-out in making the world living and breathing in its own right: the wealth of villages, castles, and towns changes as they prosper in peace-time or suffer under prolonged sieges or lack of caravan trade. All lords move around the map, and if they’re at war, they will engage in battles with one another, even besieging towns and castles, all without any need for instigation from the player.
The factions are all basically similar: each owns three or four towns, has a single ruler and a single pretender to the throne (who you can support in a full-scale rebellion), and a number of lords (about 20) with their own estates. But the culture of each faction is different, from the Middle Eastern Khergit Khanate to the wealthy merchants of the Kingdom of Rhodoks to the hardy sea people of the Nords. The makeup of the armies is influenced by these outlooks: the Vaegirs and Swadians depending on heavy cavalry, the Nords on heavy infantry, the Rhodoks on light spearmen, and the Khergits on light cavalry. All factions also have bow or crossbow infantry, except the Khergits who are all mounted.
In open-field battles, this gives a clear edge to the Vaegirs and Swadians. A few of their knights could easily cut down two dozen Nord infantry. In sieges, this advantage is lost, and the heavy infantry of the Nords and sharpshooters of the Rhodoks will do the job just as well. The Khergits are kind of the third wheel in this story, as their light armor means they’re nothing but arrow-fodder during sieges, while their inability to seriously damage heavy cavalry means they’re just an annoyance in open-field battles.
These 5 factions warring to rule Calradia (Mount & Blade’s setting) is the game’s backdrop. As stories go, it is not fleshed out very well. While you can get a lot of flavor text and history from various NPCs there never seems to be one consistent line or story to tell. It doesn’t help believability that every king (or khan) has one single pretender to the throne, who has a good story for which the king (or khan) has an equally good counterpoint. To put it simply: the setting is fleshed out enough to serve as a somewhat believable backdrop to the swordplay, but nothing more than that.
Dialogue is the usual horrid sandbox affair: standard boxed dialogue choices come with standard boxed replies, the only real variable being when you’re trying to persuade someone (an NPC to stay with your party, or a lord to pay back his debt) in which case your rarely-used persuasion skill comes into play. The only dialogue of more interest are the lines where you try to convince a lord to abandon his liege and join the rebellion, a dialogue influenced by the lord’s personal liking of you, the strength of the rebellion versus the kingdom, and your choice to either keep a consistent line of argument or try to tell the lord what he wants to hear.
The quests aren’t much for adding more substance, either. Guild masters have boring quests like escorting caravans or herding cattle while village elders are even worse, sending you to find and fetch cattle or food. Lords are just as bad at the start, trusting you only to deliver letters or go out to claim debts. A lot of fetch and deliver quests, in other words.
It gets better later on, though not by much. The problem is that interesting ideas never have interesting execution. Sent out to pay the ransom for a kidnapped girl? No intrigue here, just hand over the money and you get her – the only trouble is of the type you can start. Have to track down a killer amongst his kinfolk? Just look for the guy with a sword. Need to follow a spy and capture him and the person he’s reporting to? Just follow their tracks, equip blunt weapons, charge in and knock them over the heads to knock them out and take them back. You should be seeing the pattern here: it’s almost exclusively fight or fetch, and since there’s only about 2 dozen quests you’ll start running into the same one over and over soon enough.
Music, Sound Effects, Graphics
The game’s music is well suited to the setting, but not really good enough to be called memorable. It is kept well in the background of the noise of war, so the chances of it bothering you are slim. The sounds range from the somewhat weird (some of the attack sound effects are a bit odd) to the immensely satisfying thud of hitting someone on the head with a hammer or your bow twanging as you release an arrow.
Mount & Blade’s graphics are detailed enough to make out all the necessary details and then some, as combinations of armor, gloves, boots, helmets and weaponry make for unique NPCs. The face generation system allows you to get creative when making a character and is equally released on the game world, making for a wide array of lively characters to meet. As one might expect, there are a few points where the graphics stand out (the sky often looks great, particularly at sunrise or sunset) and a few points where they obviously fall short (texture detail is wanting, there are a number of odd graphic glitches, and at times the world looks a bit repetitive). A lot of the animations have been spruced up during the game’s development, and character movement looks fairly realistic. The ragdoll deaths can still act pretty weird, but at the same time bodies hurling about in random fashion just enlivens the battle.
Ultimately, if you’re looking for top-of-the-line graphics and animations, you’re on the wrong side of the industry. Independently developed games typically lack the manpower and/or money for graphic fluff. As indies go, though, Mount & Blade looks pretty damn good.
Unfinished Business
Mount & Blade is out of beta and you can tell, as it now has quite bit more polish and shine than it did previously. However, as a finished product, it does not yet feel complete.
To start off with, I still encountered some minor and major technical issues in the game. A few crashes to desktop weren’t the worst of it, nor were the remaining clipping and collision detection issues. Where it started to get really frustrating was when I could not take over Dhirim for the simple reason that the siege tower did not appear at ground level but instead appeared floating high up in the sky, leaving my guys to idly run against the town walls. Essentially a (quest-killing) bug since I was working on the Swadian rebellion (there are ways around this, but considering the entire remains of the Swadian army was holed up in there I could not really use automatic battles) and not something I can easily excuse in a finished product. But I have seen worse from AAA companies, so overall this is not that big of a deal.
More importantly, it being out of beta immediately makes me regret that it is no longer the organic product you could return to as it was updated. The game has a great modding community to keep you busy, but that doesn’t mean it feels fleshed out enough by itself. If it were still in beta, there’d be many updates I’d be hoping for in the next edition: faction and liege-specific quests so that they don’t feel so identical and bland. Expanded siege mechanics and more siege weaponry, such as arbalests or boiling oil for defense, and battering rams or catapults for offense. More advanced options to surrender or retreat for the enemy rather than always fighting to the death. And perhaps most importantly: finally fixing the (order troops to charge without you) calculations so they accurately present what would happen if you pick charge and then just not get involved, rather than the battle option randomly killing off troops more often than not.
Conclusion
Mount & Blade is a hard game to judge. It does what it sets out to do and it does it very well – the swordplay action alone would keep many gamers occupied for hours on end. The sandbox gameplay may not be fleshed out and most likely you’ll eventually find the game feels pretty empty, but odds are that before you get to that point you’ll have easily sunk 30-40 hours into the game.
But we’re an RPG site, so I have to ask one specific question: is it a good RPG? By any measure, the answer is simple: no. However you define RPGs, the game does not measure up. It lacks a storyline, its NPCs are shallow, it utilizes player skill over character skills pretty heavily, it has no choice and consequence, no meaningful dialogue, and only repetitive quest-lines. Essentially, Mount & Blade is a sandbox game with stats. which makes it fairly unique, aside from maybe a far-stretched comparison to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
I’m not saying this just to get technical, but Mount & Blade’s lack of RPG-style gameplay does have a simple conclusion tied to it: I can’t recommend this blindly to someone simply because said person (likes RPGs). If you like The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights 2, Jade Empire, or Oblivion, that is no guarantee or even an indication that you’ll like Mount & Blade (though it shares quite a few elements with Oblivion). Instead, if you’re a big fan of Elite or Pirates!, this game warrants a look. Just don’t be surprised if you find the variety of quests and environments a little wanting, and, equally, don’t be shocked if you find the combat a little addicting. I personally find it an easy game to leave after a week of intense play, and equally easy to return to a few months later.
Don’t just take my word for it, give the game a try yourself. And please ignore the cover art, it’s not much to look at.
