By ALEXANDER PECHA
Arts Editor
Gaming is a fantastic hobby. It lets you go to new worlds and experience fantastic things, and if you want to enjoy gaming at its best you need a computer. And yes, that is a deliberate stab at consoles. As much as I love consoles, they just don’t have the sheer number of games that the PC does, unless you’re talking about the Playstation 2.
However, as any PC gamer will tell you, computers are expensive, especially ones that can play the newest games. Recently, my laptop has been afflicted with a condition I like to call “computer cancer” that has killed my high-end graphics card, effectively making my $1,400 laptop as powerful as a $500 Dell. This has resulted in me having to woefully avoid new games I want to try- I’m looking at you, “Total War: Attila.” Instead, I’m stuck playing low end games.
Thanks to all of this, I have realized that there have to be other college students out there who read this paper and want to play games on their laptop but can’t afford a high-end PC; it’s an admittedly niche audience. So without further ado, welcome to “Games for the Weak,” a column suggesting games for those who can’t afford the $1,600 desktop build.
With all that out of the way, let’s talk about “Mount and Blade: Warband.” (We’ll call it “Warband” for brevity.)
“Warband” is an open-world RPG released in March of 2010 by TaleWorlds Entertainment. Taking place in the fake medieval land of Caldaria, “Warband” has you creating your own character based on choosing various past living situations; for example, you could have been raised by an impoverished noble, but then taken up thievery to get by when you got older.
What choices you make while creating your character directly impact what stats your character has once created. Then you shape your character’s face like any RPG, and boom, character created.
Once your character is ready, you go through a brief tutorial quest, and then you… do whatever you really want. That’s one of the greatest strengths of “Warband;” you can do pretty much anything. You might be used to a phrase like that when talking about games like “Skyrim,” but it’s not just a marketing phrase here.
Want to journey from town to town and win grand tournaments? Go do that. Want to join a particular lord’s army and rise through the ranks? Sure. Want to raid and pillage towns with a cut-throat band of Vikings? You can do that. Want to capture a castle and either pledge loyalty to a particular king or just found your own kingdom? Both are actual options. There is a staggeringly huge amount of things to do.
This amount of choice is wrapped in a rather ingenious combat system that includes melee, archery, and mounted systems, often all intertwined through the game. Your ability to use those mechanics depends on a mix of stats and skill. Sometimes the melee combat system can feel a little wonky, but overall it’s very solid.
As previously mentioned, this all takes place in the fictional world, or more correctly, continent, of Caldaria, which is both a strength and weakness of the game. Unlike most games based on a medieval period, there is no magic. No wizards, mages, dragons, ghosts, or anything. It’s a completely real-world grounded medieval setting.
Each faction in the game is based off of one from the real world, or a combination of real world cultures. The Swadian faction is medieval Western Europe, the Rhodoks are Italians around the Renaissance, the Nords are, well, Nordic, etc.
However, besides the outwards appearance, the worldbuilding can probably be considered somewhat thin. Unlike other RPGs of today like “Dragon Age” or “Skyrim” or even the real world we live in, Caldaria doesn’t really have a deep mythology or history. There are six nations, they used to be part of an empire that fell, and they should probably stop making war and unite; that’s the entire history.
However, the game is less about the over-arching story and more about the individual stories you’ll inevitably make once you get into it. My favorite story is how I helped the bastard son take his rightful place on the throne only to betray him and help a neighboring kingdom roll in and take over.
A friend of mine has a story about how, through patience and careful planning, he spent weeks in-game slowly getting certain lords to like him and for the people to support him so that when he finally revealed himself and took a capital city, the lords and people of Caldaria practically opened their arms for him to be king, leading to an epic war of unification. This is the kind of game “Warband” is.
On top of this, there’s also a multiplayer system. You can go online and fight other players in castle sieges, open-field battles, and more. It’s a pretty robust system and you can certainly have fun with it. But if fighting online swordfights isn’t your thing, you can also try the multiplayer-only DLC for “Warband” titled “Napoleonic Wars.”
Taking place during the titular Napoleonic Wars, you can fight in massive line battles with musket fire and bayonet charges or take part in intense sieges where you can have 100 v. 100 battles. It’s a rarely explored era of history in games and it’s a ton of fun, especially if you’re like me and you grew up watching movies like “Gettysburg” or “The Patriot” and have a love for history.
If I had to point out the biggest flaw of “Warband,” it’d be the same complaint that a lot of games featured in this column will have: it really doesn’t look good, at all. I personally don’t really care, as long as the game is fun, but I can see that being an issue for some people.
Overall, if you can deal with dated graphics and a somewhat thinly-created world you’ll be rewarded with a fantastic open-world RPG where you can do pretty much whatever you’d want to do in a medieval setting. It’s a game where by playing the game you’ll wind up accidentally crafting an epic tale of conquest, war and betrayal; or maybe you’ll craft an epic story about a man named Fred who traded ale between the great cities of Caldaria and runs away any time there’s a battle; to each their own story.
You can pick up “Mount and Blade: Warband” for $19.99 on Steam, as well as “Napoleonic Wars” for an extra $9.99 on the same platform. They both go on sale fairly often if you’re patient, so keep an eye out.
