Re: Mount And Blade Warband Play
Lora Ceasor
In a land torn asunder by incessant warfare, it is time to assemble your own band of hardened warriors and enter the fray. Lead your men into battle, expand your realm, and claim the ultimate prize: the throne of Calradia.
Mount & Blade Warband sports vicious never before seen 64 player online-play across a multitude of exciting modes. Warband's six gripping modes will test your wits, reactions, and skill like no other multiplayer experience.
The original 'every man for himself' multiplayer mode now with full medieval flavor. Earn gold with every kill to spend on heavier and heftier equipment. In deathmatch you have only yourself to rely on, so keep your wits about you.
Show the power of your glorious faction by competing in Team Deathmatch mode, coordinate strategies to keep your faction wealthy and powerful. If you are in a clan, then consider this the mode for you.
Easily the most difficult and competitive mode in Warband, Siege mode challenges one side to capture the inside of a keep/castle while the other faction fights besiegers off until the count-down expires.
Another excellent objective based mode for teams to prove their coordination, 'Fight & Destroy' will have one faction defend valuable targets against the raiding side. Teams will need to stay focused to have any chance of success.
The ultimate test of team tactics, 'Conquest' mode requires your side to capture and hold key areas on the map over a period of time. Communication and coordination are the key to winning in 'Conquest'.
Trading, carrying out quests, becoming a mercenary, raiding caravans and peasant parties, stealing cattle from villages, capturing prisoners and ransoming them or selling them into slavery, and many more...
Yes, there are many ways to raise your own army. You may recruit basic warriors from villages for a low price. However, these will usually be poorly trained novices. Another option is visiting taverns within the towns, and hiring seasoned mercenaries. These hired soldiers will be well trained, but offer their services at a higher price. Also located in the taverns are heroes who may be convinced to join your party after you talk to them. Heroes are very useful since they do not die in battles, and keep accumulating experience, just like your own in-game character. They also add their skills like engineering and first aid to your warband.
Nobles, guild-masters, and village elders offer quests. You may visit nobles (lords, ladies, and kings) in their prestigious castle halls or find them roaming the countryside with their war parties. You may meet guild-masters in towns, and elders in villages.
The items themselves won't get stronger. So if you're packing a tempered heavy bastard sword and full plate at level 10, their stats won't change when you're at level 40. However, your level bonuses will make you stronger progressively. For example, when you allocate more points to your power strike, your swing will become more effective.
Yes. You will need some amount of 'Renown' points and a good relation with the king, before a king may accept you as his vassal. The easiest way to earn renown points is by winning tournaments or battles. Check your renown points at any time by clicking on the "Reports" button. Once a king takes you on as his vassal, he may grant you villages, castles and towns that you conquered in combat.
Training Grounds help you practice your own skills. Additionally, you may also train your troops at Training Grounds. If you are short on training points and/or are having trouble keeping your men alive, pay a few visits to Training Grounds. However as you and your troops grow in skill, Training Grounds will become less effective
The AI level setting has no effect on experience points. However, the AI level setting does determine how good your enemies are at conducting combat. Higher AI levels will result in smarter opponents.
Dedicated server files are for people interested in hosting the game on a dedicated server. These files are not required to join/play in multiplayer mode nor are they required for hosting the game on your own computer.
*We are offering Mount&Blade through a try before you buy model. You can download the game and start playing right away. The downloaded file is a trial version that lets you play the game up until you reach level 7. You can then purchase a license online to upgrade your game to full mode and continue playing with your character. As soon as you buy a license you will obtain a serial key which will remove the level limit and let you play on the multi-player servers. You will not need to download the game again.
Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by John Nejady, technical producer at Coconut Lizard and veteran of Sumo Digital, Ubisoft, and CCP Games.
Mount & Blade: Warband found me at an odd time of my life. I was around 25 years old, working as crunchy functionality QA on a driving game in a medium-large team. I came across it how I suppose lots of us discovered games back then: Steam popup notifications. "*Friend who normally plays really difficult games* has started playing Mount & Blade: Warband." Many times, over and over, for weeks.
The game I was working on at the time was to launch mainly on console, and as with most pre-launch console games with simultaneous multiplayer, various different teams and individuals were working tirelessly to allow us to support a higher number of players when we shipped. Was it going to be six, eight, maybe 12?!? Don't be ridiculous. Anything above 10 was a pipedream.
The first thing that struck me when I first joined a Warband server -- other than how woefully unequipped my peasant seemed to be compared to other players -- was the sheer volume of people fighting in the same battle. Was it 50 people? 70, maybe?
All were in unique outfits and equipment, some in clans holding shields all adorned with beautiful (player-created) heraldry, some operating silently with crossbows from bushes, some riding sleek destriers and plated coursers past lines of archers whilst shouting voice commands in order to draw fire from the main body of their forces infantry.
Some longbowmen opted to carry two full quivers of bodkin arrows to pierce armour at the expense of mobility, knowing the skilled pikeman by their side was one of the best in the game, and would never let them be charged down by cavalry, or outflanked by crossbow-carrying monks coming through the undergrowth. Others opted for a more lightweight option; a short bow and single quiver of simple barbed arrows would aid mobility, but you'd run out of arrows sooner. But that's OK; in Warband, arrows that didn't find their mark would stick into the ground, or rocks, or trees, or shields. Take fire from that longbowman with Bodkins, and you could pull his own arrow out of a tree and fire it back at him, hopefully ending his future contributions to this battle.
150 peasants on foot, heraldic mounted knights, byzantine halberdiers, nordic axe-throwers, mongol horse archers, and monkish daggermen all firing, collecting, slicing, stabbing, blocking, kicking, bashing, and bludgeoning their way through a battlefield in various degrees of coordinated and chaotic reverie combined to make Warband cRPG mod battles the most absurd, technically impressive and wonderful sights I have ever beheld in a video game.
On top of this, damage is dealt with physics calculations taken into mind. If you are riding towards a target and hit it with a bow shot, you will do more damage than if you were riding away from it. If you slash a person whilst side-stepped and rotating to make your blade move faster, you will do more damage than just facing them and swinging.
The original Mount & Blade that started all of this was made as a hobby project by a married Turkish couple under the studio name TaleWorlds. They released Mount & Blade which was a hit, and used that success and money to grow a small team to make Warband and from the success of Warband are developing the next game in the series Bannerlord, for which I have high hopes.
The mod I played was the cRPG mod, which added a wide range of features like online character persistence, an online economy which you could use to equip your character in a web-browser, UGC and clan features, unique items for clans to use, and a longer term strategy MMO element named 'Strategus' in which very organised clans could fight over a continent sized map over a series of months. The team who made that mod, Donkey Crew, went on to run a failed Kickstarter for their own game (Melee: Battlegrounds) which didn't go well, but are now developing another game (Last Oasis) for which I wish them well.
At the time I knew these teams were achieving technical greatness, but now that years have gone by and I've shipped more games, gained more and more experience with more and more teams, I'm even more astonished at what they achieved.
There was a reason, it turned out, that *Friend who normally plays really difficult games* was playing a lot of Warband, and not most others. In most prominent third-person games with melee combat, the player can mash buttons in whichever way they choose and take a back seat while the code and animation teams at whichever AAA studio made the game step in to show us their magnum opus. A wild flurry of Player 1's uninformed fingers can become a poetic and deadly dance of blades and limbs befitting the era, location, and creative direction of the game, while the AI stands back, waiting for their moment to strike. Not so in Warband.
When you press the swing button in Warband, you do so in the direction that you are moving your mouse; Mouse left and left-click and you will charge a left swing, forward and you will ready an overhead slash with a blade, or a bonk over the head with a bludgeoning weapon. In order to not be hit by any of these, those without shields must ready a block in the appropriate direction in order to not be stabbed, sliced or bludgeoned. Those with shields had better find a way out of the threat, as they'd eventually be broken, more quickly by those with axes. This level of accuracy in combat -- compounded by the multiplayer setting -- demands a high level of skill and cool-headedness from players.
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