Mount & Blade Preview
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Mount & Blade's combat systems is leaps beyond any we've seen in RPGs like Gothic 3 or Oblivion. It is intuitive and easy to use, but it also requires concentration and intelligence from the player. You will soon notice in smaller tournament fights that you need to adapt your tactics very specifically to how your armed and how your opponents are armed. Mounted fighting with a lance against someone on a horse requires vastly different tactics than facing two guys with sword and shield while you're alone and holding a two-handed blade. With the battles being so varied in nature, you also have to adapt your open-field tactics to whether you're in a field, or in a forest, or in the mountains. Mount & Blade offers all this, and does it a lot better than any RPG I can remember playing. That doesn't mean battles are perfect. Sieges can be a pain, as faulty collision detection and AI means all of your troops trying to move up on a single ladder tend to get stuck, ripe for slaughter. Also, sieges don't happen in pitched battles with pauses in between them, meaning there's a respawn that just goes on and on at one point in the middle of the castle. A bit unconvincing (as are the spawn points in the open-field pitched battles) and occasionally unfortunate (ever had 6 warriors spawn around you? Not fun).
The... Uh... Corrective Surgery
One last thing I hate to mention but really should is the modding community. Considering that this is an independent game in beta testing, Mount & Blade has a surprisingly active modding community already working on adaptations and additions for the game, which is pretty accessible to modding.
I think it's nonsense to defend a game based on its mods - you're paying for the game and not for its fan-made mods, after all - but with such an active community there's a lot of promise of added content to follow soon on the game's commercial release. And since Mount & Blade is almost more of an effective combat simulator than it is an effective game, there is a lot of potential for adding to this solid groundwork.
As of this writing, Mount & Blade is at version 0.951 and available from the forums over at Taleworlds' official website. The last stable release available on the frontpage is version 0.903. The beta is open but without a purchased key can not be played beyond level 8. The game is slated for commercial release in Q2 2008 by Paradox Interactive.
