Mount and Blade

by **Wotan** » January 30th, 2011, 4:42 pm

I found this preview on IGN:
Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword Preview
The historical hack and plan game gets another expansion.
January 24, 2011 January 24, 2011 January 24, 2011 By Michael Thomsen
I think calling video games "hardcore" is generally useless and dishonest, but I suddenly felt a little uncertain about this belief when considering Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword. The game is the next expansion for the medieval warfare game that mixes high-level strategy, tactical planning, and third person melee action in one continuous experience. Fire and Sword also happens to be based on a Polish historical novel from the late 19th Century—actually the first of a trilogy—about war, intrigue and aristocracy.

While Fire and Sword is based on a novel, it's structured like an open world game so players will still be able to make their way through the world as they see fit. Those familiar with the novel will be able to recreate some its famous conflicts, but if you'd rather create your own empire and story you'll be able to. At the highest level the game shows you a map of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean that stretches from Sweden to the Ottoman Empire. All the major cities in the area are shown on the map and you can zoom in and out of each to learn more about the people that live there. If you decide to visit a town you can load into it and play as a traditional third person perspective controlling your character.

As the game begins you'll be a villager in Poland. You'll have to accept quests from locals, doing favors, earning trust, and slowly building a band of soldiers to help you in combat. Choosing who to help will determine which kinds of soldiers will join you and the bigger your group becomes the more turf you'll be able to compete for on the map. As you grow from a local hero to an international force you'll be able to choose whether to align with some of the other countries in the game or whether to fight everyone for your own enrichment.

As you begin to fold towns into your control you can play with some sim elements for each one. You'll be able to build universities to train more recruits, build blacksmiths to get access to particular kinds of weapons and so forth. Each nationality will have its own unique combat characteristics. Ottomans tend to fight from horseback and use archers while Swedes are typically heavily armored and can use grenades.

Fire and Sword's combat has been expanded to now include guns as well. There'll be a variety of firearms, including pistols, rifles, and muskets. You'll be able to use these guns in coordination with melee weapons to add a new layer of tactical complexity to combat. In the demo I saw the attacker approached a cluster of enemies from afar firing shots from rifle before getting in close, dismounting and finishing the enemies off with sword attacks. You won't be able to blindly rely on guns however, as each comes with a small number of bullets and a lengthy reloading time.

Sword combat is basically the same as in the original. You'll click the mouse button and then pull the mouse back to simulate winding up for a swing. Your character's swing will correspond with the angle of your mouse gesture. When you release the mouse button you'll swing forward. Timing and a wide variety of different sword and spear lengths give melee combat a sense of nuance. There is a physics system that accompanies the melee combat to give extra boosts if the angle of your swing would naturally have more force when swinging from above or hitting an enemy from the right angle. And as always you'll be giving tactical commands to all of your different units in battle while going through the fight yourself.

As you progress you'll be able to upgrade your character and the units you've recruited. After each battle you'll be able to assign points to attributes like strength and agility, special skills that give you buffs in battle, and weapon upgrades. There's also a flexible trading system that's been rebalanced from the original to make sure that players won't have to grind quite as much to get good equipment in the early portions of the game. As you begin to recruit new units to your army you might not be able to afford to arm them all but the trading system will ensure you can give them decently effective gear. Multiplayer will also return in Fire and Sword, offering chances for cooperative and competitive play in massive battles.

The scale of Mount and Blade is impressive and, while it doesn't look like Fire and Sword will make any dramatic changes in the formula, it's still satisfying to go from the zoomed out strategic map and jump all the way down to ground level in the heat of battle. It's both more strategic than most RTS games and more immediately gratifying because of its direct melee controls.

Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword will be out sometime in Spring 2011.

by **Wotan** » January 30th, 2011, 4:46 pm

An old Polish trailer of the game -- shows some good cavalry action.

http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/ ... and/329413

by **Martian** » February 7th, 2011, 6:16 pm

Wow this looks awesome!!
I accidently deleted all my old saved games from Warband and am looking forward to starting a new character and doing things differently!
But i am eagerly awaiting this!!