not really worth it imo - even for $20.

I don't know. I still haven't tried it. And it looks like i won't be able to for a while. Not at €49,99 :)
On a strange note, after updating my ATI drivers i noticed a 10 day WoW free trial icon on my desktop. What the hell ?
I'm actually considering taking a look at it to see what all the fuss is about. What's wrong with me ?

nothing, i did the trial to see what it was like and it really is just a great mmo. im not going to pay $15 a month for it while guild wars exists though.

I picked it up when it was $7.50 on Steam a few months ago. It is very much worth the price. Other people say it has room for improvement, and you can download mods to fix those things up. Relatively large modding community from what I understand.
There isn't much of a story to the game at all, but you can easily slip and find you've put 30 hours into the game in the span of a week, and be nowhere near being done with it.
Speaking of Direct2Drive...man...that Cryostasis deal is driving me nuts. I want it. So bad. But Direct 2 Drive? No thanks. I need more after getting done with my Penumbra games this week.

Ok then. I'll try it as soon as i'm done with Sacred.
I'm just worried i'll get lost in there like so many others :)
Meh, RL is overrated anyway, right?

It's pretty fun, though I find it utterly baffling that so many people call the combat 'deep' and 'realistic' and other such words. The combat feels like a videogame. No more, no less. It's absolutely generic, with not a single feature to make it stand out from the crowd.
This doesn't mean it's not fun to play, but it does mean people are going to come into the game with wildly unrealistic expectations.

What people are trying to convey is that the combat requires attention to timing and a significant amount of skill, unlike in far too many games where mastery of combat simply requires clicking the left mouse button rapidly when close enough to an opponent until one of you falls over. You also never reach a point where after a certain number of levels and/or sufficient equipment acquisition you become a godlike, untouchable hero who can take on a dozen previously dangerous enemies at once without receiving any significant injury; in Mount&Blade, even the lowliest of all foes can quickly kill a powerful enemy if they get the chance, so being a one-man army is only remotely possible if you turn down the damage settings, and even then it requires a good amount of player skill and attention to timing and tactics.
There is also the significance of the focus on horseback combat. After playing Mount&Blade any other implementation of horses feels awkward and unrealistic or even borders on being unusable. Some games (like Oblivion) don't even allow horseback combat, meaning horses have no tactical significance whatsoever and are just a way of moving about the map a bit faster.
Mount&Blade was never meant to be a serious medieval combat simulation (unlike how a flight simulator is meant to be a reasonably accurate representation of flying a plane), but compared to the generally shallow combat of the competition it is indeed "realistic".

I suppose that is true. The combat is entirely skill-based. This is a plus.

I may be mistaken, but I'm fairly sure you get a normal Mount&Blade key when you buy from Direct2Drive (this is certainly the case with the Steam version). All Mount&Blade keys work with all versions, so you can just download and unlock the latest trial version (which doubles as the full game) and not have to worry about downloading or activating it through whatever source you bought it from.

That would make things much more bearable. I have mine through Steam, which has worked out well so far. So long as their Offline mode doesn't break. :P

I have been playing mount&blade since the 0.7xxx series. I pre-ordered it via their website to stimulate such an developer.
So I have been playing the game for about 2 years now of and on and it remains fun every single time i play it.
It takes some skill and timing but after you figured that out the game is just more awesome.
And on the plus there is a huge modding community present wich have produced mods varying from lord of the rings to starwars and everything in between.
Its impossible to regret this purchase.

You can use the Steam serial with the normal trial version if you run into any problems; in fact I think the Steam release might not even have a wrapper in the EXE, meaning you can run it outside Steam anyway (as long as you use a shortcut pointing directly to the EXE and not one that launches Steam and then runs the game).

Yeah, I bought it on Steam and then activated the version from the Taleworlds website. Not because I dislike Steam, but because I dislike Steam's cluttered, unmodifiable games list.

Just bumping this to let people know that for today only (ie, the next 22 hours or so) Mount and Blade is 50% off at GamersGate.
http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-TWMB/mount-and-blade