On the saddle again.
It is the year of our lord 2022 and we're moving onto 2023; and here I am coming back, once again, to a game from 2010. Why? All it takes it a little push for me. Today that push was seeing that Mount and Blade Bannerlord has just released itself out of beta, so I might as well play through the original! It's like a chronic disease that flares up when I least suspect it; everytime that I, a man who loves story based narrative adventure RPG games with oodles of depth and character driven plotthreads and set-piece confrontations and challenging encounters; ends up rocking up to a game with no real story, paper thin characters, and a world you really are tasked with making your own way within. It's the prototypical simulator medieval game, but I can never get enough of the bugger. And to this day, I cannot rightly explain what hooks me so often.
Mount and Blade is a game where you take on the role of a mercenary captain operational in a smorgasbord of medieval kingdoms that are haphazardly stuck together. You'll find desert empires and snow-drenched kingdoms about two days ride from one another; and an ecosystem of lords and ladies all trading routes and starting wars and calling truces all around the player with no input from them whatsoever. This is something of a rare style of game, probably because it's difficult to really sell what the end goal is to developing a game with an ecosystem that runs independently of player interaction, and even more difficult to design the sort of ecosystem that reacts with an sort of coherent dynamism to the machinations of an unknowable player. The original Freeloader proposed a space world with a similar play style, and Kenshi presents an unendingly fascinating post apocalyptic alien world within this genre. And yet here I am, playing the medieval equivalent.
I suppose a part of that appeal for me comes from that innate fascination with medieval kings and kingdoms that all us Europeans are inflicted with, often causing us to romanticise an era where a simple infection could kill a man dead. There's a grit and grime associated with the medieval period, or perhaps more a layer of thick muck splattered over the gills; and more than any of the courtly dramas and period piece BBC romances; that is the side of European history I like to see represented. That's the reason I love The Witcher, because it's fantasy setting is grounded by it's grimy European cynicism. And I suppose that's why I love the struggle to become someone of note which is the core gameplay loop of the Mount and Blade franchise. That and fighting tactically in a system that seems to really hold tactical gameplay in low regard.
Seriously; I'm no tactical expert myself to any stretch of the imagination, but I've always found it grimly laughable that tactical combat is the key to Mount and Blade's progression, and yet all those tactics have to be pulled off within a battle and whilst leading that same battle. I do what I can, put my forces at the top of a hill, position the infantry infront of the archers, lead the Calvary around for a pincer once my forces are engaged; but it always feels like your struggling against a game that doesn't want to listen to you, rather than a game with tactical cohesion at it's soul. Perhaps I'm just used to full blown tactics games and 4x's, such that the more realistic, in the moment, tactical decisions irks me to no end. But still I play it. In fact, maybe I play it even more because the frustration seems fitting for the period?
A certain allure of the underdog tale certainly starts with the prospect of 'starting from the bottom' as it were. Being that lowly nobody who rises to become a huge figure of the land, slaying armies and commanding hundreds; whilst once being nothing more than a spit-on peasant. Who doesn't love the rise of the belittled? Of course, Mount and Blade is very particular with how lowly you can start. You can't quite be a mercenary for someone else, you always are the merc captain, but the idea of rising in skill, fame and competence persists through the handy RPG systems and the growing rooster of companions you can slowly facilitate and the fiefdoms you'll end up earning to the armies you'll end up raising and overthrowing. That's a commonality in all of these styles of open world sandbox RPG games; you are a self made hero or villain my the merits of hardwork. Typically that means a crap ton of grinding too; and a scaling element of risk the further you go on because the more you gain the more you have to lose. And all that heightens the elation of being the one who conquers in the end.
There is an undeniable lack of variety in what you can do in Mount and Blade in order to improve, which is where I think this particular sandbox RPG wavers a bit. In most of it's kind, every skill you choose to divest in is deep with a progression element to it; but in Mount and Blade there's only really trading and fighting. And you trade in order to afford better tools for fighting. Renown is the currency of value across the medieval Mount and Blade land and being really good at flogging stuff to strangers is not the best way to earn a name for yourself. But maybe that is also a drawing element for a brutalist like me. At the end of the day succession is earned in blood; what could be more fitting for a medieval simulator game than that?
The one thing that Mount and Blade doesn't have, is any sort of overaching story or narrative to contextualise the world you're living in; which is both liberating and limiting. Liberating in that you can craft the story you want in a world just flexible enough to allow for that, and limiting in that it's really hard to find a reason to care about this world. I usually spend my time as a factionless mercenary jumping from nation to nation, because none of the nations have enough of a personality or grounding contextual narrative to make me care about them. It's a shame because I could really see a very special little medieval universe brewing in this game, but when it comes to the gameplay I'm just seeing names I can't be bothered to remember constantly being captured and released and wars being started and ending and none of it meaning much of anything. At least the game is fun regardless.
Mount and Blade is as much a platform as a game. A platform for living your very own medieval fantasy story in a fictionalised world that glorifies all the storybook aspects of the age, 'fighting in huge battles', 'finagling royal dynasties', 'turning over villages for cattle to sell to other villages' and sidelines a lot of the other stuff. (Dying of a scrapped need, poverty, starvation, etc.) It's rough, rudimentary in a lot of places, and ugly in a manner that is, strangely, typically the case for this style of game. But it's also functional, robust and malleable to the fancies of an active imagination.
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