Mount & Blade

2026-08-12
The unwashed masses clogging the muddy road will tell you Mount & Blade only got good with Warband. They're wrong. That's why me and my Swadian knights are about to put couched lances through their sternums, that they might go and greet whatever flavor of heathen god they worship.

Whatever pre-1.0 version illegally downloaded onto my family computer circa 2008 had everything I could have ever dreamed. The first time I realized how to couch my lance at a gallop, the first time that same couched lance fucking ended a cunt unfortunate enough to be in its path, and every time I landed that same blow after that are indelible memories. There's a feel here that, like all good games, cannot be explained but can only be learned through practice. Every weapon has a proper angle and point at which it will devastate your NPC foes.

And devastate them you shall. We don't need Warband's multiplayer. No, I am a simple man sated by simple pleasures. Like a farmer enjoys taking a scythe to amber waves of grain. And grain there is aplenty to reap in Mount & Blade.

First little skirmishes. On foot and gaining my footing. Little more than a farmer myself. I stay in the back because without armor a single stray arrow can end the whole battle for us instantly. Flashes of fear but also foretelling of the future: terrifying armored men on horseback. These kill us. These we run from.

The band grows. The faces of those who give us orders change. A lord here, a lord there, they're all the same. I'm uninterested in politics or what flag I carry. I'm interested in battle and I'm interested in winning. Each victory is more money in the pocket, more men to join the band. Now I skewer the men who ran me down hours ago. The thrill is palpable. A taste: blood. I want more. Those same plate-armored demons, the Swadian knights, who killed me and my men? I grow them now. Recruits off the same farms I came from, fed and paid and bled until the plate fits. Now not even castle walls can stop us.

A siege is an incomprehensible thing for the modern mind, and it's incomprehensible as rendered in Mount & Blade. Where did all these ladders come from; where are all those arrows coming from? But soon I'm scaling a wall and I'm doing what I love: covering myself in the blood of my enemies. Castle after castle falls, kingdom after kingdom. With the spoils I coat myself in a full regalia of black plate armor replete with a massive battle axe. I become so powerful I can solo an entire castle if I find a chokepoint. Enemy attacks miss or bounce off me harmlessly. I have taken hundreds, thousands of lives and can no longer miss. Every swing sends some unfortunate soul to hell. Bodies pile up and the blood flows freely. This is what it means to live.

So don't listen to the people saying Mount & Blade needed Warband. It was all there. Who needs kingdom management or diplomacy or marriage or whatever piss-poor 4X, Paradox-lite shit they added on later? If you're a real one all you need is that delightful physics-based combat. Learning just the right angle to take a Mongol's head off with an axe from horseback. Building up your company from a band of farmers into a ruthless kingdom-toppling machine. Can't you just smell the blood and glory?