Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword Preview
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But while battles have changed, the game seems to recycle quite a lot otherwise. The basic setup of factions, towns and villages is unchanged from Mount & Blade. More quests have been added to increase variety, but the system is still the same, with functionally identical majors, lords and village elders picking a random quest from a set list, including rescuing a hostage by paying the ransom, delivering an expensive horse to the king, driving a cattle herd to another city, and so on and so forth. The new quests do seem to be of an interesting type, as I took on a "more risky" quest - lords offer both safe and risky quests, the latter defined by more liking from them and their faction but loss of reputation with an opposing faction. It saw me delivering materials to a lord to aid him in battle, only to find him unsatisfied with the delivery. The lord then coerced me into ambushing an enemy caravan to deliver him actual weapons he could use rather than just materials for weapons. The game also features a short tutorial, which consists of a quick explanation of melee, gun and horseback combat as well as getting to try all three out on weak opponents, followed by an explanation of the game's world, factions and your place in it as a skilled mercenary leader. This tutorial is an improvement over just throwing you into the game's world as Mount & Blade did, but it feels a bit mechanical and forced, and could use some more work.
With Fire & Sword utilizes the same engine as Mount & Blade, and does not look much more impressive graphically than its predecessor. Playing on version 1.137, one oddity I encountered was that the game has really long loading times, even for such simple tasks as popping into a dialog screen. Considering its predecessor did not suffer from this, I can only assume it will be polished away before release, and it was the only technical flaw I encountered in my playthrough.
Other than new clothes and buildings, the game further adopts a new atmosphere by expanding the game's soundtrack with music appropriate to the 17th century. I mostly found these new tunes to be on the intrusive and grating side compared to the more atmospheric soundtrack of Mount & Blade, much to the game's detriment. The sparse voicing includes taunts to open dialog and some in combat remarks, some seemingly voiced in the native language, though I could not understand much of the English voice work in M&B and can not understand much of the voicework here.
Noting that my experience with the game was limited due to multiplayer being inaccessible and the level capping off - locking me off of the additions to siege works and multiplayer - my main concern about With Fire & Sword lies in the question of how much it actually adds to the experience. Mount & Blade has an active and creative modding community, who have long since added firearms to the game and have provided an assortment of alternate total conversions and multiplayer gameplay mode mods for Mount & Blade and Mount & Blade: Warband. Warband had the advantage of adding multiplayer, but With Fire & Sword doesn't shoot for any such game-changing alterations. It will no doubt be worth it for hardcore fans - such as your humble author. For others, just adding guns and grenades is a bit underwhelming considering the potential of the setting's era. This is a bit constrained because of the region, but when I think of transporting Mount & Blade into the 17th century, I think of opening up political machinations on the story side and massive ship battles on the battle side. Considering the potential, I can't help but feel that With Fire & Sword just might underwhelm.
