[Game] Mount & Blade
Posted: 16 Aug 2006, 06:26
A while ago I had heard someone talking about a game they had been trying out, called Mount & Blade. I did a quick search, which pointed me to here, http://taleworlds.net/index.html, the website for Mount & Blade.
I read the little description they had, and then I had a look at the screenshots, which gave me doubts. It seemed that they had a single plain texture each for stonework, for woodwork, for grass, dirt, etc... and This screenshot was a particularly unflattering view of the horses, and I forgot about the game. Almost.
The bit that they wrote about Combat, "Battles in Mount&Blade require a high degree of concentration and user involvement. A few powerful blows can take you down, and there is no such thing as a "healing potion", therefore you must stay alert and parry or dodge each and every blow...." would not leave me, and in the end curiosity got the better of me. I downloaded the game, and tried it out.
I'll spare the details, but some of my assumptions are correct. Yes, the world of Calradia is woefully plain, the graphics and character appearances are a notch below Morrowind currently, and role-playing-wise, almost the only thing you can do right now is level up, but that is not the end of the story.
I found the combat in Mount & Blade to be absolutely delightful, I loved it. It is nothing like the dice-driven combat that you would find in a DnD-based game, an Elder Scrolls game, WoW or any other normal RPG. I liked two things in particular. Firstly, the damage you deal with a weapon depends much more on how well you swung it and made contact with your enemy (and the game engine is accurate in this area) than on statistics, and secondly, high level players are not demi-gods like in other games, but are still very, very mortal. How good of a fighter you are is driven much more by your own skill than anything else. I also like how well horses have been integrated into the gameplay.
There are two important things I must add though. The game is still being developed, and is really in a beta state right now. It is also shareware, which means that you can download it and play it until your character gets to level 6, but when you reach that, your character becomes unusable unless you pay to register your copy. Although I can't go any further in the game than I already gone, I consider my time playing it well spent. If I were to treat this as a demo, I'd give it 5 stars.
I read the little description they had, and then I had a look at the screenshots, which gave me doubts. It seemed that they had a single plain texture each for stonework, for woodwork, for grass, dirt, etc... and This screenshot was a particularly unflattering view of the horses, and I forgot about the game. Almost.
The bit that they wrote about Combat, "Battles in Mount&Blade require a high degree of concentration and user involvement. A few powerful blows can take you down, and there is no such thing as a "healing potion", therefore you must stay alert and parry or dodge each and every blow...." would not leave me, and in the end curiosity got the better of me. I downloaded the game, and tried it out.
I'll spare the details, but some of my assumptions are correct. Yes, the world of Calradia is woefully plain, the graphics and character appearances are a notch below Morrowind currently, and role-playing-wise, almost the only thing you can do right now is level up, but that is not the end of the story.
I found the combat in Mount & Blade to be absolutely delightful, I loved it. It is nothing like the dice-driven combat that you would find in a DnD-based game, an Elder Scrolls game, WoW or any other normal RPG. I liked two things in particular. Firstly, the damage you deal with a weapon depends much more on how well you swung it and made contact with your enemy (and the game engine is accurate in this area) than on statistics, and secondly, high level players are not demi-gods like in other games, but are still very, very mortal. How good of a fighter you are is driven much more by your own skill than anything else. I also like how well horses have been integrated into the gameplay.
There are two important things I must add though. The game is still being developed, and is really in a beta state right now. It is also shareware, which means that you can download it and play it until your character gets to level 6, but when you reach that, your character becomes unusable unless you pay to register your copy. Although I can't go any further in the game than I already gone, I consider my time playing it well spent. If I were to treat this as a demo, I'd give it 5 stars.
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