Mount & Blade Preview
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As your character advances, you can opt to take a mercenary contract and work for a faction for a set time. You will not gain any fiefs, but your band will advance strongly, as simple mercenary guards advance to elite hired blades. Once you're ready, you can join a faction (or you can support a pretender to a throne and start a rebellion), and as you push forward you will gain villages, castles and even towns, heavily stocking them with garrisons of hundreds of soldiers.
So, for example, my character started out mostly by fighting in lucrative tournaments and helping guild masters by guarding caravans. Then he went for a mercenary contract with the Khergit Khanate, helping them deal defeat after defeat to the Kingdom of Rhodoks. After this, he decided to help Lethwin Far-Seeker in his resistance to the Kingdom of Nords, convincing lords to join the rebellion and taking over towns in Lethwin's name. And finally, after the rebellion succeeded, wars with the Kingdom of Rhodoks and Kingdom of Swadia ended in disaster for them, the Kingdom of Nords having taken over nearly all their towns, castles and villages. At the end of this ride, my character was level 33, held 1 town, 3 castles and 9 villages (having refused ownership of another town) stocked with garrisons of over 600 men.
Doesn't sound like a lot of gameplay when you put it like that, does it? I didn't clock my gametime, but I'd wager it to have been well over 40 hours and I didn't even feel like I was finished not until the frustrating battles with Khergit armies turned me somewhat sour to this game. The game is very addictive, and even though quests go in an endless loop there are enough of them for you to never get tired. Because there are different situations and match-ups you get into in different battles, combat also does not really get tiring.
The Skin
I could mention a lot of smaller things that still do not quite work in the game here, but there's no real point. The development of Mount & Blade works with very active community feedback, and the version I played was 0.950. Any version number that read 0.*50 is bound to have a lot of bugs and to need some polish, so no surprise there.
One thing that's probably good to mention is that the graphic level is, unsurprisingly, not extremely high. It's pretty damned good for an indie, but that doesn't mean it can match up with current AAA titles.
I mentioned the game is empty and this is to be expected. The game offers enough to enjoy yourself for quite some time, but I personally feel that while .950 was a leap forward in content, in personalizing hero RPGs and offering more quests, It could still do with some more. In particular, the rulers of the 5 factions and the 5 individuals pretending to their thrones could use more personalizing, as could the factions in general (faction-specific quests?). Moreover, while you can work on and customize your fiefs (villages, castles and towns), this is very limited for castles and towns, and I would like to see more personalizing of your own locations - particularly their defenses.
But all this is somewhat swamped under by the great combat. When we're talking RPGs people often mention that the reason to prefer first person or over-the-shoulder and real-time combat to bird's eye view and turn-based is because it is more fun and intuitive. And sure, the real-time combat in a game like Gothic works fine, but it's also pretty damned flawed and limited. Rather than being a lot more fun than turn-based combat, RtwP combat like in Baldur's Gate is mostly just a lot quicker, so you can get combat out of the way sooner. That's not particularly (better) in any sense of the word.
