The Bannerlord

 They pulled me back in!

I am a sucker for a fantastic story. Aren't we all? The stakes of a well crafted narrative that unfurls gradually before snapping up and capturing you in it's web, spinning endless tales of daring exploits, twisted relationships and heart wrenching pathos! It's one of the reasons why Baldur's Gate 3 did so well, it had such a robust and malleable narrative that anyone could play around with empowered by the special video game sauce of having the potential to do literally anything with those beats and make the narrative all your own. That's all we ask for in our games. (That isn't too much, is it?) But sometimes I don't have the brain space to dedicate to a whole other universe with characters and stakes and narratives and finales. Sometimes I just want to kick up my feet, slap on some noise on the screen and live in a world that is as in depth or as vapid as I want it to be at that given time. It's at these points I would love to spend my time playing Destiny, but given how Bungie are so revolted by the idea of new-players joining the ecosystem that they actively design their games to sabotage them- guess I'll stick with Sandbox RPGs.

Sandbox RPGs are great in the way that they combine the ultimate freedom of a story-free adventure game where you can travel the game world, do anything and be anyone; with the somewhat structured progression inherent in a solid RPG game system. Do you want to be a trader who goes from town to town pawning off goods here and buying some to take over there? You sure can, but you'll slowly get better at doing it as you go, telling the naturally evolving story of a gifted tradesman learning their craft and dealing with the troubles of the road in the journey. Simply bliss, right? Of course, most Sandbox RPGs have some idea of how they want you to experience their game and world, but the beauty of the subgenre is the ability to spit in the face of the architects and play however the heck you want to. That is why I come back to the Mount and Blade games again and again.

Not just Mount and Blade, I hasten to add. Space Sims have their place in my mind as well, as long as those space sims don't cost several thousand pounds in order to 'buy in': Star Citizen. (Squadron 42 does look sick though, very surprised with what they've put together over there.) But something about the Mount and Blade formula is just that right level of janky, unwieldy mess and thoughtful medieval simulation that tickles my jimmies. Originally released back in 2008 by the Turkish Developer TaleWorlds, the game was conceived to simulate the trade, management and tactical warfare of the swords and steel era of man, set within a fictional continent that at one point was going to have zombies and necromancers before clarity struck the development team and a semi-realistic direction was settled on instead. (Damn, this game was so ahead of it's time they both almost fell into the 'Survival zombie' niche of the 2010's and managed to mature past it into our current age- innovators I tell you.)

But at the end of the day Mount and Blade is really just a game about first person Medieval battles where you smash through a shield wall of fleshy humans with your giant armoured horse and gleefully chuckle in the crunching of bones and flying of heads! Actually there is no decapitation. Or bone crunching SFX. (Missed opportunity, I tell you!) But the immersion is certainly there in those moments when you're charging at a giant rolling cloud of approaching cavalry, Warhammer primed for a preliminary swing! Or staring up at the parapets of the fortress you are scaling watching arrows rain back and forth. The game ain't the prettiest in the world but damn if it doesn't nail all the right vibes that you would be looking for an experience like this. Just goes to show that graphics aren't the whole cake, they ain't even the icing sometimes.

Where Mount and Blade really impressed was with it's melee combat, which remains one of the best systems ever invented for medieval battles both for it's simplicity and it's engagement. Basically, it's just a four directional system where a weapon can be swung overhead, underarm or to either side, with the type of weapon (blunt or sharp) and the locational damage calculating up how much damage is being done. But the elegance is in the movement. By default the player just needs to push their mouse in the direction before swinging and the attack will come from that direction. Look up to do an overhead, look down to go underarm. Blocking just means matching those directional strikes with a well timed block. It's intuitive, it works. In fact it works so well that Mount and Blade has been recycling it time and time again ever since they originated the system- and there's plenty of Medieval fighting games since that owe something of the Mount and Blade framework for what they'd make of themselves. (Even Ubisoft's For Honor owes some blood to TaleWorlds.)

The latest iteration of Mount and Blade, entitled Bannerlord, utilises many of what made the original games so endlessly replayable and brings them into a slightly more stable and pretty package. Bannerlord still isn't anyone's idea of a 'good looker' when it comes to raw graphical prowess, but their is a rugged beauty in the musty fog drifting above a battlefield swamp or the glittering light settled on a lake moments before a dozen cavalry crack that perfect mirror. And the character models look less like unevolved primal apes, so that at least is a step in something of the right direction. Aside from that Bannerlord is functionally the exact same sort of game as the 2008 predecessor. Which really goes to show the staying power of the little cult classic that could, no?

My favourite memoires are the game at it's most hectic, caught in the middle of giant city siege in a moshpit of swords and hammer where everyone is cutting at everyone else with reckless abandon. But there's something to said about the tactical moments too, when you're in a huge battle, two hundred men weaker than your opponent, and take command of a cavalry strike force- cutting away at the enemy force one formation at a time until you turn those heavy tides. There's very few games that can propose 30 minute long battles whilst keeping the tension taut, and Bannerlord can count itself amidst the few! Whether the cycle of fighting an endless war in which the micromanagement is more likely to overwhelm you before the difficulty does is your cup of tea comes down to the amount of patience you have, I suppose.

Mount and Blade really has longer legs than most to still be somewhat relevant, if within it's niche, in the modern day after all these years- and for a game originally conceived and constructed by a husband and wife duo that is a legacy worth hanging up on the wall as a trophy. There's a timeless appeal to a game like that, one you'll find in Minecraft or Stardew, that worms into your mind and stays there totally naturally, without needing to hook you in the desperate and predatory way that Live Services fall over themselves to do. So if you ever find yourself wondering what it would be like to be part of a castle siege, and balk at all the intimidating looking 'total simulation' medieval games out there with their sweaty online leaderboards and mile-tall barrier to entry, then you could do a lot worse than slapping down a few bucks on a classic in it's own right. Grab a mount and don that blade.

Running a Warband

Into the ground.

I've been slowly whittling away at Watch Dogs Legion in order to get up my review on it which, if you've ever played Legion, you'll know means I need to have other games in order to keep me from growing bored with gaming altogether as a hobby. Without getting into that whole cake before it's cooked, let's just say 'diversity and excitement' runs out pretty quickly, requiring to me seek out much more dynamic and exciting video games such as, perhaps, the 2010 re-release of a 2008 sandbox MMO about Medieval combat. Yeah, there's definitely a lot more gameplay variety there! But seriously, Mount and Blade: Warband has been an actual treat to come back to and play with some degree of seriousness (as opposed to the fumbling I usually do) and though Bannerlord (the sequel) has just hit it's official big release, I think there's something special and worth coming back to even in that battered old version of this long running franchise.

As I've mentioned before, the start of Mount and Blade will pit your custom-built player as a mercenary in a fictional medieval land on the constant brink of total warfare between six very unhappy factions. Which is why the start of game is pretty much spent avoiding all the major conflicts, hiring up local mercenaries from villages and plundering bandits and looters. It is astonishing how many people in the Mount and Blade universe decided to take up a career in mugging the 'innocents 'of the world; so astonishing that I slightly wonder who it is exactly they're sticking up. Surely each other, at this point; they outnumber the villages 10 to 1 so... where else are they getting their supplies? Luckily the cycle of life dictates that their reigns of terror is always short lived by the blade of some upcoming so-and-so who's looking to cut his men's collective teeth on the bones of fodder enemies.

Being a free-agent makes it easy to shop around for opportunities worth profiting from, whether it be from accepting missions at Villages (In my recent playthrough I can't find any mission which isn't 'please bring us cattle we can't possibly pay you for'!) or from the various nobles that can't be bothered to so much as ride to the next castle over to deliver a letter, or, the most sure-fire source of employment, local guild leaders in big towns. And opportunity is the driving force of the slow rise which is this game's loop. You do jobs that get you enough money to keep running your warband and build up your 'renown' which in turn opens you up to more opportunity. The more renown you own the easier it is to prove you're someone of worth that should be taken seriously and given access to becoming a noble, or maybe even starting your own kingdom to define what 'noblehood' even is!

Of course, starting your own fledgling rebellion is pretty much 'endgame' stuff when it comes to Mount and Blade; which is why most players are stuck running errands back and forth for lazy nobles just to make ends meet. That was how I endured playing Mount and Blade for ages back when I was young, which is why it's so surprising to me to learn now that I could have completely subsidized the cost of paying my mercenaries and soldiers through the businesses system! The game did nothing to alert me to the fact that this system existed! Essentially, the player can roll up to a Guild leader that likes them just a little bit (as long as the lord of that town doesn't hate your guts for doing something crazy like eloping with his pre-betrothed daughter or something...) and pay for the land to build a business that is largely self perpetuating and will provide a consistent revenue stream that can offset troop costs pretty darn easily. Would have been nice to see that in the tutorial, and not find it randomly in a Youtube video!

Becoming more famous isn't the only means of progression in Mount and Blade, and in fact the game enjoys some decently robust RPG mechanisms within it's skin that blossoms the proficiency of the player during their playtime. (So that in the times when you make a raw judgement call and lose everything, you're never starting totally from square one.) There's plenty to level up from the bare basics stuff, like hitting harder to blocking more, to the inventory you can carry, the level of weaponry you can use, how fast you travel on the world map and how many people you can recruit to your Warband. Some skills are explained less clearly than others, however, and 'party' skills don't necessarily stack like one might expect.

Stick at it long enough and you may earn enough credentials to make it as a noble for one of the warring factions. And then it's slap bang into 'responsibilities-ville' for you because, lo and behold, now you have to manage fiefdoms, and castles, and worry about places you own being pillaged. And you'll get calls to war from the faction marshal. The more you move up in the Mount and Blade pecking order, the more plates you'll end up spinning. Personally I liked the prestige of the title but the freedom of being that 'free agent' just appealed to my style of play so-much more. Still, having friends in noble places can be helpful in the right circumstances, such as whenever you need to convince wars to be started to stopped to your benefit. Geopolitical manipulation has it's draws.

But for my money the most fun part of the Mount and Blade gameplay cycle is raiding, and what's more than that; raiding castles. Taleworlds did a great job creating the sense of blind chaos when raiding a fortification, even whilst shackled to a decently strapped engine. The AI will always bundle into the exact same kill box, and there's very little tactical options in the game to alleviate any of that mad AI dash, but being in the middle of that crush, swinging wildly whilst arrows cut down everyone around you, and bodies get thrown off the gang-planks into the courtyard, is exciting despite the hangups. Of course, Bannerlord made great strides to improve this system immensely, but even with the dated tools I've got, I can squeeze a great time out of it.

Mount and Blade is one of those games that fully realises exactly what it wants to be and hyperspecializes to fit the mould of the medieval war simulator. Is it a little crude and slapdash? In the fabric-threads perhaps, but the whole weave together is robust enough to springboard a campaign in the heart of the player, and that is the special sort of sauce that brings me back to sandbox RPGs and hungry for more. Mount and Blade is also a lot quicker to get into and start progressing in than, say, Kenshi; I genuinely would call this game largely friendly to the randomly uniformed sandbox RPG adopter or curious starter. So whilst this isn't a review, it is a recommendation to give Mount and Blade a look-in at some point, if for nothing more than to set up a custom battle in castle siege because that craziness is worth experiencing at least once.

Why do I keep coming back to Mount and Blade?

 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.