Your interaction with Calradia’s residents will also provide a feeling of progress. It’s up to you to make yourself known by conversing with citizens or nobles for information, accepting various quests, trading goods or equipment and recruiting additional troops. Some characters give out mundane tasks while others offer interesting challenges. The more engrossing activities include quests to start wars between nations, capturing spies, winning regional arena tournaments and restoring the questionable honor of ladies. Some can even be completed in more ways than one. As an example, two rival warlords can be bribed or captured for a peace treaty to become possible.
Your relations with the various parties and factions can be altered by your choice of skills, your renown, and past interaction with them. You can make friends who will follow you to war and enemies who hate you enough to traverse half the world just to attack your fiefs. Under special circumstances, you can even attempt to recruit some of your enemies and their response will realistically depend on a number of factors, mainly their personality and how it matches your past actions. Eventually, you will become a well-known figure, loved and hated by an equal amount of men, lords and kings. As your renown increases, you will come across unexpected rewards or consequences.
Sadly, Mount & Blade is mired by several flaws which may be critical for some. Content, quests and possible courses of action eventually start repeating too much, leaving only the fun of the combat system and your personal goals of grandeur as the driving forces behind playing. The combat AI can also be problematic, especially in sieges, as troops occasionaly don’t know how to proceed, though the thrilling combat and rewards make these missions worth the trouble. Moreover, the visuals are nowhere near modern standards, excluding the often impressive scenes of larger skirmishes. Finally, the game suffers from technical issues with ATI graphics cards currently unable to display its full graphical offerings due to driver incompatibilities. This will be patched eventually but ATI owners should first download the trial version. (UPDATE: A patch has now been released - Ed.)
Another aspect worth mentioning is the very active community which helps remedy some of the game’s faults. Fans have created tweaks and modifications to enhance the gameplay in meaningful ways. Some of these add more commanding options, improve the AI behavior, fix the occasional bug and even vastly improve the visuals with texture packs and HDR lighting applications. The selection is limited for the latest version of the game, but this will be remedied once the tools required for their creation are updated.
Despite its flaws, Mount & Blade comes together to form one of the most engrossing sandbox experiences this side of PC gaming. Any gamer intrigued by the idea of leading a medieval, conflict-ridden life will look past the negatives and view this game as the rare independent gem it is.
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