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| Re: I unlocked the beta for 11 dollars in May of 2005, it's still the same game. by Bananadine 03/13/2011, 8:38pm PDT | ||||
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Worm wrote: I finally bought the full version of this game and played it some. It costs $20 at Steam right now but I think I bought it for $5 in a sale or something. It was worth $5, I guess. It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, in that it's got a lot of systems in it that feel like a first-draft implementation of somebody's good idea, sadly never to be returned to and properly finished. The quest system and the faction system, especially. There are dozens of castles to visit, each with its little group of nobles, and every noble can give you a quest--but 90% of the time they won't, not even a boring one. And the quests are horribly unbalanced. On starting out, you can get a letter delivery quest that'll run you halfway across the world in exchange for thirty denars, or you can get a debt-collection quest that'll give you several hundred denars... or several thousand, if you decide to run off with the payment yourself. The crappier quests are just noise to distract you from the good ones and make you waste your time watching your character sloooowly cross an empty map. Why work so hard to make a framework for quests and a lot of cool castle and village models that serve solely as places for you to seek out quests, and then refrain from actually writing a lot of quests?? Isn't the writing the easy part? Maybe not, when your development team only has two people in it. You can do cool stuff with armies, besieging enemy castles for your faction and stuff, but it doesn't seem to amount to anything other than a sequence of cool battles. At the inter-faction level, there seems to be little room for strategy. You can seek out smaller armies to destroy, and you can run from bigger armies. It's a simulation of being a fish in a pond. I guess you can eventually own villages and stuff but I can't imagine that it would affect the rest of the game much. You build yourself up to be able to fight, and then you fight, over and over. And the fights are mostly pretty similar to one another. Even the cool combat engine was outdone by Lugaru's. It's still cool, but... it doesn't feel finished. The core of it seems to be running down people on your horse (awesome) or walking up to somebody and repeatedly picking the correct one of three directions in which to strike or block, according to what your opponent is doing. I got good enough at the hand-to-hand fighting to win a few tournaments and arena melees, and yet I never found a good reason to pay attention to the three crucial directions. It's so much easier to just wait until the opponent swings and then run in and strike at them in whatever direction you like--the same way against every opponent, no matter who they are or how they're equipped or how you're equipped. It's sad that the thing this game seems to be most acclaimed for is still that badly lacking in polish. But it really is fun, for a while. I actually like Mount & Blade better than the entirety of the remake of Sid Meier's Pirates!, which it seems to want very much to be, solely because of the melee combat. It only takes one pretty good minigame to beat a lot of less-good minigames! Also I paid a LOT more than $5 for Pirates!. :( ADDENDUM: I would have thought that a review of an old game that was already reviewed on the same website, in the same thread even, in roughly the same way would only be appropriate if said site were badly in need of posts. But no, here's vibrant online magazine PC Gamer declaring Mount & Blade to be the 91st best PC game ever released. For some reason. |
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Oblivion bested by two people in Turkey? by 10/09/2007, 3:39pm PDT  I unlocked the beta for 11 dollars in May of 2005, it's still the same game. by 10/09/2007, 7:35pm PDT Worm came down pretty hard on Mount & Blade. NT by 10/09/2007, 9:04pm PDT Re: I unlocked the beta for 11 dollars in May of 2005, it's still the same game. by 03/13/2011, 8:38pm PDT |
