Jarmo: I'd strongly suggest moving to Warband as soon as you know you like the game.
It's not
that different actually, when you've played the original to boredom, warband doesn't offer much new. Just the same old thing with better graphics, some welcome adjustments and a new Sarranid faction. THe same companions saying the same things, lords giving mostly the same quests. Swadian knights running down everything else.
Or to put it in another way. The original doesn't do
anything Warband doesn't do better.
From what I understand Warband is an improved version of the original game like a standalone expansion pack et al. I played the original game for probably 300-400 hours since it was given away free a few months ago here, and I played Warband for maybe 3-4 days. I agree overall that Warband is basically an improved version of the game however it is not without flaws either.
One thing that wouldn't really matter to new players, but which I found to be disorienting is the map of the land was completely rewritten with all the locations jumbled around. Even though everything is still named the same names, they're completely on a different planet essentially as far as the map topography is concerned. Not a big deal, but it takes some adjusting to for people coming from the first game.
Aside from that I am disappointed with Warband's graphic performance. I have a pretty powerful modern machine with gobs of RAM, etc. and the original game ran with all graphics settings maxed out completely at 2560x1600 resolution no problem whatsoever with full frame rate. With Warband, the game frequently crawls like snails in molasses even if I drop the resolution down and disable most of the settings to the point where the game's graphics look worse than the original game. On top of that, the game frequently displays all kinds of graphic corruption both on the map and in battles with 3D textures in the wrong places, wrong colours and other random problems that don't go away without a game restart. Playing around extensively with the graphics options doesn't seem to help. While one would normally suspect the video driver in such a case, I have zero problems with any other 3D games in 2 years including right now with many dozens of games including the original Mount & Blade, so I have to assume it is a bug in Warband itself and if everyone doesn't experience it then it might be Warband+Radeon related. Either way the combination of graphic screwups and sluggishness makes Warband almost impossible to play for very long without frustration.
It is an awesome game though and if someone is able to play it without graphic problems or performance issues then I'd definitely recommend it. Hopefully they fix problems with the graphics and performance in a future patch.
(4GHz AMD 8350FX w/32GB, Radeon 7850 2GB)
