Why assasinate a corpse? Why garnish chicken cordon-bleu with more chicken cordon-bleu? Why review a game I've already reviewed? Because, like Skyrim, I've sunk an embarrasingly long amount of time into this game and I need an excuse for doing so.
Mount and Blade: Warband is such a vast game that when I reviewed it almost six months ago, I'd only managed to become a lord. The game feels like a grind at the start when you have to spend lots of time doing fetch-quests, building up your character, building up your army, and trying to win the kings favour in the hope he'll give you some land. But once you're a lord then the fun truly begins. Yes, you still need to build up your character and forces, but you're doing this whilst fighting wars and resolving inner conflicts. Quests become more than delivering messages and bounty-hunting. You now rescue kidnapped lords and raid bandit camps. The most fun is when you challenge lords to duels.
The most stunning aspect of the game isn't its depth, but just how the Mount and Blade series as a whole doesn't fit into any genre. The game has a tutorial, which teaches you all about the combat. You start the game and suddenly you're faced with all these stats you don't really understand - like an old school roleplaying game. You ignore these and prepare yourself for manly sword-combat. Then all of a sudden you're dumped into an overworld map straight out of a real time strategy game. You click around trying to act like you know what you're doing, then you get into a fight and things go back to combat.
Call me mad, but I kind of like real time strategy games. Perhaps it's because, whilst I'm terrible at it, I really like playing chess. There is a PC game (which I still have somewhere) called LEGO Chess that wasn't very good, but it taught me how to play chess and I spent most of my childhood sucking at it. Which is funny because the battles in this game are like that moment in the first Harry Potter where they play a life-size chess game. You still command an entire army, but you also run around partaking in the battle yourself. Though, I find the best tactic is to use archery just so you can keep your distance.
When you're in the overworld map, there is a sense that you're just an ant stuck in a vast ever-changing world. If you talk to each noble, they all have their own agenda and are astonishingly well coded. Thankfully, you can change how intelligent they are, which is good because when you're at war sometimes the AI can be devious in their overworld tactics. Your gain in power and status is mirrored in the overworld map as you slowly begin to feel less like a rat scurrying around and more like a conquerer.
For the sake of making this review more than a footnote, I would like to offer a few improvements for the Mount and Blade 2 team to contemplate:
1) More than one tutorial is needed.
The tutorial teaching you all about the combat is welcome, but combat only makes up about 50% of the overall game. The more you progress, the more the game turns into an RTS as you manage your forces and make precise movements to amass your empire.
All of this, you have to learn by yourself. There are a few brief text tutorials, but these are almost non-existent and the game just expects you to know some things.
2) PLEASE LET THE BATTLE CARRY ON AFTER I'M DEAD.
If you die in battle (which can happen very easily earlier on in the game) then the battle stops and you're given the option to either retreat or let your men carry on unaided, which always results in you taking heavy losses regardless of who you're fighting. I once faced an army of 60 bandits with my force of 70 highly skilled troops. The battle was going fine when all of a sudden I was unhorsed and quickly overwhelmed by enemies. Thinking that my troops should carry on fine without me, I let the battle resume.
I was defeated. Despite outmatching the enemy in both skill-level and army-size, my army was crushed - and this was all because the whole battle stops when you fall down, like we're in a Disney film or something.
3) Let me go rougue from the start.
To become king you need to build up your 'Right to Rule' stat. However, this is done by doing conventional things such as gathering followers, earning land, and marriage. It has nothing to do with your 'Renown' stat, which is built up by conquering armies and winning tournaments. You can go rogue once you're allied with a faction, have enough land, and enough followers. It's odd that the game is extremely open in what you can and cannot do in this world, but if you specifically want to rule your own faction then you need to go through a process that at points feels like filling in a tax form.
A king does not earn qualifications like a graduate! A king conquers! A king storms castles, lays waste to his enemies - a king earns his crown. I like how the game gives you the option to suck up to lords before stabbing them in the back, but this shouldn't be the only option. Think Conan, not Littlefinger.
4) Make it more obvious what my allies are like.
Warband is one of those games where you're clearly supposed to pay attention to every scrap of infomation given to you, even if it seems like flavour-text. This being said, sometimes it just doesn't tell you things. The Kingdom of Swadia has a complete nut-head who does nothing but dispense quests that involve aggravating other factions so they declare war on you. He's extremely un-co-operative and I really wish there was an option to either banish or murder him because he's just impossible.
There are some vague stats in the 'notes' menu, but there's nothing really to suggest that this man is a complete asshole until you start trying to make friends. Props for making the game more like real life, but I want there to be a simple bar that determines just how much of an asshole each character is.
5) Make the tactics menu easier to access.
You have no idea how surprised I was when I discovered that this game is compatible with an XBONE controller, and was even more surprised when I found out that melee combat was actually far better with it (I still keep to mouse and keyboard because riding and archery are smoother with it). Another surprise was how much easiser it was to acess troop commands and the map-screen. In fact, I didn't know there was an in-battle map-screen until I used a controller.
Also, I've seen mods that let you set a pre-battle strategy which is useful because in the normal game enemies automatically charge. When dealing with enemies on horseback, the best strategy is to form a tight wall of infantry. With archers, you're best to charge them on horseback before they can get too many shots in, and you should use archers against infantry because they're slow (thus easy targets).
6) Give factions the option to surrender.
The game is called 'Warband.' As such, the majority of the game is about war. If you want to rule the whole continent then you'll need to completely invade each faction. This will obviously take centuries to do, so the best goal is to just become the king of a sizeable and stable empire (an ambition everyone in the world should harbor). To do this, you will need to capture land fron other factions. To capture land you need to declare war. Wars last until either the whole of one side is wiped out or, more likely, a peace treaty is declared. What's odd is that at one point I had almost taken over a whole faction, but there was just one solitary castle left. The faction was happy to reach a peace agreement, but peace agreements don't work like real-life agreements where both sides must make sacrifices. Here, a peace agreement means: "OK, we'll stop invading you." It's a cross between a surrender and ceasefire.
Factions need to be given the option to just yeild everything to you, sort of like how you can take a castle without storming it if you wait for them to run out of supplies then kindly ask if they'd like to surrender.
7) Make lords and kings mortal.
No matter how much you batter a lord or king in combat, they cannot die. They'll either manage to flee the battlefield or else yeild and give you to option to either hold ransom or let go (which is the quickest way to gain honor).
How amazing would it be if the king was killed? All of a sudden, your faction is thrown into chaos and people begin topping over each-other to declare themselves their sucessor. And what if they picked you? That would be another way to become king, and it would make all that sucking up you have to do at the start of the game more worth it.
Also, whenever I get given a fief it's always one that used to belong to some jaded lord from our rival faction who keeps trying to recapture it. It would've saved so much trouble if I could kill him to permenantly resolve the problem.
If it wasn't clear enough, when I play the game of thrones, I play to win or die. I'm one of those people who are perfectly sound in reality, but give them a bit of power and it'll go completely to their heads. And that's why Mount and Blade: Warband is now one of my favourite games of all time - because it's gone completely to my head. I strongly reccomend it if you're a politician and want to find out if your party leader is mad or not.
