T w e n t y S i d e d

In Mount and Blade, you play an upwardly mobile and clinically indestructible side of medieval beefsteak. It’s a power trip of a game; through determination and self-actualization alone, you swizzle armies around you like cotton candy and personally slay the population of a modest kingdom. If you desire it, and play for long enough, it is an absolute guarantee that you can become the king of the world. Obviously, it was only a matter of time before someone adapted this franchise around celebrated works of Polish-language historical literature. Enter Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword.

Very little has mechanically changed, but these changes have insidious effects on the greater experience. For example, there’s bullets. There’s rows of guys firing bullets. There’s rows of guys on horsebacks firing bullets at you. And the important thing, the crucial thing, is that you can’t duel the bullets.

Fans of the franchise who were used to exterminating entire castles of pseudovikings with nothing more than a caffeinated blocking reflex and a good fast battleaxe were quickly discovering just what 17th century Poland thinks of heroes. And many of them, it must be said, questioned the appeal of a mass combat game where you often die immediately and unavoidably. From a strategic viewpoint, it’s not unlike playing regular Mount and Blade during a thunderstorm.

Or so they think! Join me now as I relate to you my secret to success as an Eastern European warrior-poet: a terrible fear of being shot.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Master of Firin’ Sword CH1: The Art of Powerdice”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

Roger Hà¥gensen

How scared shitless were you that you'd run into a game breaking bug that either hosed your save game (and would you take the time to replay it all again?), or worse the game just hate your PC and refuse to go further (which you'd realize on your 2nd playthrough with new savegames). Did you have a backup plan? (like get saves from the net that where hopefully past that point? Or just throw up your hands and give up?

Up until the halfway mark, any serious showstopping glitch I ran into would have meant the end of the series. No hesitation. That’s an explicit decision I came to in the setup phase. That said, when I came to the elevator glitch on level one, I already had enough investment in the series to spend an hour or two goofing around trying to cheese my way down.

At the halfway mark, once I really started committing to the game, I started making save backups. If necessary, I was prepared to install the game on a roommate’s machine and play it there, or start over again from the beginning. After that, I was out of ideas.

Da Mage

Is it possible to point to one, just one, design flaw that caused the most grief in your playthrough, and explain why you think it was that way (aka broken), and how you would have designed it differently.

Obviously looking for game design problems, not technical ones.

Nope. I just don’t think they made a very fun game. The combat’s too industrial and the loot is too opaque to be rewarding, there’s not a lot of interesting leveling options, the puzzles never really connect, and the plot’s too amorphous and distant to provide a meaningful context. I’m not sure the bulk of this game can be redeemed; if you stripped all the bugs out and communicated the player’s goals better, I’d rate it a solid six or seven.

That said, this game does have a cult following. I’m not part of it, but I acknowledge it without rancor. I think it comes down to the idea that back when this game came out, there weren’t a lot of first-person survival-based dungeon crawlers, particularly not with this unique a setting.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire: …and Your Questions”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.