Mount & Blade Preview
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While combat might sound incredibly complicated, there is a solid balance between the battle elements being regulated by the engine behind the scenes and those you control directly on the battlefield. Your character's attributes and skills unobtrusively dictate how effective you are with certain weapons and while riding, but there is more to Mount and Blade than riding around on a horse and defeating your enemies. Unless something goes seriously wrong, you should never be fighting alone on the battlefield. Skills such as leadership, tactics, prisoner management and training help your character lead his rag-tag band of troops to victory and profit.
With all this talk of combat and characters, it's important to mention that the role-playing elements are not just window dressing. There are a variety of people with whom to interact, including some of your own companions. For example, after pillaging and burning down a village owned by the opposition in a war in which I was fighting, one of my companions stopped our party in the middle of marching to a new objective and complained that he didn't join up with me to slaughter commoners and loot like a bandit. His satisfaction with being a part of my group dropped, and I had to assure him we wouldn't be doing it very often, but at the end of a later battle in which we withdrew in the face of a vastly superior force, another companion indicated that, while others may view our retreat as cowardice, he thought living to fight another day was a good idea. Your decisions not only affect you and the world around you, but also your companions, who are under no obligation to be loyal if they don't like how things are going, no matter how much you pay them.
