Thank you GOG, seriously. I've never heard of this game until now, and just after 15 minutes of playing it i love it already!
It's unique, it looks like Skyrim (albeit with much simpler graphics, some textures, like for the walls and such are just fantastic!), it's "sandbox" and it is really fun!

If you're talking about the first Mount & Blade you'll also want to check out Warband which expands on the original with more factions, content and features (such as running your own faction or getting married).

I would recommend starting with the first one anyway, just to see where the series got started, and then moving on to the others. That way you do not have to experience any downgrade, besides I found the first one more than sufficient until today. Oh, and the price is right.

Yeah, me too: I never heard about this game before, but man it's such a great game!

I was also conquered (pun intended) in about 10 minutes. I'm playing the first one (got it when it was free, so lucky), then almost bought the rest. But nahh, the first one is already so good, better milk it for some time before moving to the next ones, perhaps for Christmas :)

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)

Well... ok. I don't remember what kind of performance I got from original M&B, there was a no-play time gap between the two and I definitely didn't have Full-HD screen back then.

I think I last played Warband with no performance issues at 1280x800 or somesuch resolution.
3 Ghz AMD Phenom2 X4, 8 GB, Radeon 7770 1GB.

Guess no issues is relative. :)

Anyway, I wouldn't hold my breat expecting any more performance patches to Warband.
Except maybe as regards to the Vikings DLC.

So how do you feel about the controls now?

I played the demo for a while and upon reading your observations found our first impressions to be much alike so naturally I'm curious to know whether your opinion has changed. :)

I'm currently addicted to Skyrim and haven't played M&B since just prior to the winter holidays. Not sure when I'll get back to it but I did have a lot of fun with M&B. I'll probably surf the web to see if I can find solutions to the graphics problems and sluggishness on Warband before playing it again but I do look forward to playing it and all of its DLC if I can get it working well enough to be playable. For the foreseeable future though I've got Skyrim tunnel vision. ;oP