Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Good news! Better news! BEST NEWS. TaleWorlds is finally pregnant with another Mount-&-Blade-shaped baby, and your hopes and dreams are the father. This is no With Fire and Sword-style spin-off, either. Or at least, that’s what the number two (and in Roman numerals, no less – making it the two-est two of them all) suggests. Unfortunately, I say “suggests” because there’s really not much else to say. All we have right now is a full title – Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – a brief description, and a trailer that seems determined to abandon its family lineage and become a Powerpoint Presentation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Games about pirates sometimes feel the need to exclaim their titles, as if rushing into a room and excitedly waving their arms, jumping up and down, screaming in your face. ‘Pirates’, they yell, spittle flecking your bewildered visage, ‘piiiiirates’! Or, in this case, they’re bellowing ‘Caribbean’, which makes it really hard for me to work out which vowel to elongate. I guess it would be ‘Caribbeaaaaaan’!. Anyway, Caaaaaribbean! is a newly announced game from Snowbird Game Studios of Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, and it uses the same engine for a piratical game, with naval combat, boarding operations and sieges. More screenshots below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Edit: added details on the Mount and Musket mod!

Napoleon was most likely of average height rather than being the tiniest man in the world and I’m sure that’s been taken into consideration during the making of this expansion for Mount and Blade: Warband. Weapons, uniforms and even military musicians playing authentic songs of the period are all in place, as the hooves and hacking are somewhat eclipsed by boots and mortars. Taking in the final years of Napoleon’s conquest, it’s a multiplayer only affair, developed by the team behind this mod, that will be out later this spring. I’ve rounded up some documentary footage of the early 19th century below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hooray! Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword has been released, and everyone can get a taste of it via the demo. This era-shifting expandalone for the warmongering ancient combat sandbox – which introduces firearms to horses to create crude tanks – is available to buy, too. I’m playing it right now! Well not right now, but it’s alt-tabbed so I can write this. More on that soon.

Trailer belooooow.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword has gone gold. There’s a statement of fact. Another: there’s a trailer of the game’s sieges below. Today I am ALL BUSINESS.

Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s one thing that horses are good for, it’s glue. But before glue had been invented people used them as cars. You might be surprised to learn that they are superior to cars in a number of ways, and the best of those is that they’re perfect for swinging a sword from back of as you attempt to trample your enemies. Videogames have seldom managed to portrayed this positive and healthy activity in a useful way, so we are glad that one game manages to do that: Mount & Blade. This horsey melee game series has been been around for a while now, and is about to ride again with a third title: Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword. I decided to have a quick chat with TaleWorlds’ producer Mikail Yazbeck about what this new game means, and where it came from.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mount & Blade expandalone With Fire and Sword hits this summer, adding explosives, a new economic model and heightened political intrigue to the quasi-realistic indie action RPG. Below you’ll find a couple of new trailers entitled Ambience and Action, and the RPS supercomputer informs me that they’re both precisely as awesome as one another, right down to the molecular level. Remarkable!
Read the rest of this entry »

Hrm, we somehow missed Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword getting announced yesterday. It’s a new Mount and Blade game! Yes it is. This time it’s set in a “new century of warfare that brings pistols, muskets, grenades, and other advanced weaponry to the battlefield.” There will also be weapon and armour customization, new economic systems, new quest types, and “ferocious” new multiplayer elements. We do not use the word “ferocious” enough. Please make a note to use it more in the future.

Hey look, I even found some footage of this game. (Cheers to Kad for heads up on this one, who also points to this… is this game already out in Eastern Europe or something? What gives?)

Here is the footage>>

Lookit! Despite RPS selling out buying in, things Carry On As Before. Like our Mount & Blade: Warband warband, complete with our own server, voice comms and everything! It was the second of our ‘proper’ Training Knights last night and once again our 64 player server was impressively full. EG may have taken our ads responsibilities, but they’ll never take our freeee-dooom!

Once again a huge thanks to everyone who showed up. It’s one thing to get a bunch of chaps to show up to an event, another to get them to come back again. Ta awfully. Report below.
Read the rest of this entry »