It isn’t concerned with finely, painstakingly recreating one particular brand of industrial or civic construction or management. It isn’t a strategy sim, a castle or city building sim, or any kind of sim, really. It’s really Sid Meier’s Pirates! set in the Middle Ages. The thing that most people don’t realize, or say, is that Mount and Blade: Warband (the new M&B game that offers a host of new options to this experience) is nothing like all of the medieval RPGs out there. If it sounds a bit complicated, that’s because it is. The game throws you right into the world, sets you up with a simple quest, and then lets you figure out how to fight on horseback, command armies, deal with diplomats and lords, and marry into royalty, all on your own. You can be a noble, poacher, steppe hunter, or any other number of vaguely defined classes. You start out as some kind of ambitious warrior or adventurer. Knights, lords, ladies, peasants, and bandits all scuttle around the various kingdoms of the land of Calradia. It’s a grand exploration, expansion, and combat sim that takes place at some unspecified point in a medieval time, in a fictitious medieval land. Mount and Blade can be an incredibly frightening franchise to get involved in.
