No matter which path is chosen, any success will involve gathering a titular warband, as very little can be accomplished alone. There’s an intimidating level of freedom available to players of Warband, and while the randomized, procedurally-generated quests and relationships never quite rise to the level of authored RPG narratives, there’s nothing quite like knowing that one’s fate is genuinely up to one’s own will and decisions. They can even become bandits, raiding towns for fun and profit while dodging time in the stockades. They can buy and sell goods, eventually founding businesses in towns and building up a trade empire. They can join a local tourney to win big, and perhaps catch the eye of a noble patron or marriage prospect. They can prostrate themselves before a local bigwig and attach themselves to his coattails.

Players can become bounty hunters, tracking down bandits for local villagers. Seeing NPCs and towns on the map opens up a world of medieval role-play possibilities. Time passes only as players move from place to place, vaguely similar to Heroes of Might & Magic or Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. The meat of long-term play, however, takes place on a larger overworld, where players and their parties are shown as mounted figures on a zoomed-out continental map. Players are quickly taught to navigate towns and speak to NPCs similar to many modern RPGs. Indeed, almost any course of action is open for the taking, limited only by the resources at hand and a character’s stats.Ī brief, optional tutorial takes place to set the mood, starting in the third-person combat mode. With no larger narrative to shuffle players onto some pre-planned ‘epic’ quest and no other goal than to make one’s way in the world, one of the biggest risks to a new Warband player is paralysis of choice. That makes it all the more impressive today, considering so few titles on any modern platform have managed to match it in terms of depth.įollowing an involved character creation process and a brief, text-based Choose Your Own Adventure affair designed to gauge a preferred style of play, Warband throws gamers into the deep end.

WTF When do I get to start my own Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune?įor PC gamers, Mount and Blade: Warband is the better part of a decade old by now. LOW Too bad it looks like a PS2 game, though. HIGH Elegantly awkward combat in a deep open-world RPG. Come see the violence inherent in the system!

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