#Mount and blade warband fast forward full#

That might be realistic, but if I wanted to wait around forever for things to happen, I'd play most of my adult life.

Which means just waiting until you're not crap at it anymore. Want to be better at leading an army? You have to lead an army. Want to get better with spears? You'll have to fight dozens and dozens of fights at a disadvantage against looters, the dudes whose most effective weapon is throwing stones. Which means you're terrible at everything for several real-life days. Doing so raises the cap on that skill, and the rate at which it increases, but to become good at anything you still have to grind away at it. Instead, with each level you gain a 'focus point', which you can apply, up to a maximum of five times, to one of your skills. The main problem is that you can't directly increase your skills through levelling. In Bannerlord, looters feel like half the game.Д¬harging with some allies. It was one thing to beat up looters for an hour in Warband, then take your now-competent small army off to war. Except that the skills and levelling system are a shambles and getting anywhere is a slow and repetitive slog. There are non-combat skills that level up along with these, too.ДЄll that is true of Bannerlord. Outside of fights, you flit from town to town trading, or raiding farmers and besieging castles, and chasing down groups of bandits or whatever fancy lords have taken exception to your antics. Victory makes you more famous, gives you money and weapons and stuff to sell, and sometimes prisoners and recruits.

#Mount and blade warband fast forward full#

When you cross a hostile force you enter a full 3D battle in which you run about stabbing, spearing, and shooting foes, or sitting back and yelling at your dudes, or both.ДЄs you hit people with particular weapons, your combat skills will go up, making you hit faster and harder, and, most crucially, making your ranged attacks more accurate (it absolutely clenched my brain that so many of the last decade's games with bows in made them 100% accurate even when you had no skill with them. You create a character, giving them a variety of martial or mental skills depending on what sort of playstyle you're going for, and then wander a huge world map looking for people to recruit to your army, and other people to shove into the mud and jump up and down on. That's absolutely fine, and exactly what TaleWorlds said it would be. There's not often time to appreciate it, but the battlefields make the scale even more impressive.ДЇundamentally, Bannerlord is the same as Warband, the spruced-up and expanded 2010 reissue of Mount & Blade most people refer to. But I still feel like I've barely touched most of that, because getting to the stage where you can do what you actually want to takes forever. There are so many troop types I've still not even seen lots of them, much less hired them. There are, particularly since a patch, acres of weapons and impressively varied, attractive pieces of clothing and armour to play with. The battles can be as good as ever (and far prettier). Given the choice, I skipped most of it.ДЄfter a week of Bannerlord, I've realised I'm doing more or less the opposite. The rest of the world stuff - the new factions, the banners, the conquest, the villages, and the sucking up to 300 tedious lords - that came later, and it was fine, mostly. There was other stuff to do out in the world, but the core of it, that fantastic, exciting, chaotic combat, was there very early on. Buying it then was inevitable, even though it was openly unfinished, a novel concept several years before Minecraft and then the rest of the industry gave the process an offical name. I've surely regaled some of you in the comments over the years about how I played its 6-level demo all night, over and over, just fighting endlessly in the Zendar arena. Mount & Blade was terrific fun immediately. You can muck in if you've signed up to either side. Rival kingdoms besiege one another's camps. Bannerlord has been in the works for most of that time, and the weird thing is, it's kind of done its own trick backwards. 'Why are other stabby games still rubbish?' I asked for years afterwards. 'Making combat with swords, axes, spears, and bows fun? Why is this novel?' I asked. I spent years absolutely baffled that barely anyone learned the lessons the original Mount & Blade taught on its release in 2008 (or indeed, several years earlier for a lot of us).

I don't enjoy having to qualify my praise for this one. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, for all its teething problems, will probably be brilliant when it's finished. I have played exactly four million games, a number which is only possible when you learn to drop something you're playing without hesitation. The best thing I can say about this, the most eagerly awaited medieval ARPG of all time, is that I want to keep playing it.