When Mount & Blade: Warband‘s [official site] pillaging add-on Viking Conquest launched in December, it was low on content and high on bugs. Developers Brytenwalda (named after the famous Warband Viking mod they made first) have been fixing it up since then, and today it’s deemed done enough for a relaunch.
A big update has brought great gobs of new content, along with a new name: Viking Conquest Reforged Edition. It’s a free update for folks who already own it, of course.
Roughly a week ago, the lads behind the Brytenwalda mod released the Viking Conquest DLC for Mount & Blade Warband. Replete with hundreds of cities to burn down and hundreds more people to bother, Viking Conquest promised a Dark Age Britain that is supposed to contain authentic scenes, scheming companions, bickering religious people, and… stuff.
The Mount & Blade games offer more freedom than your average RPG, allowing players to live all kinds of different lives within their sprawling open worlds. The price for that freedom, and those densely populated siege battles, is that the games are more clumsy and basic in terms of animation, physics and model detail. While watching this impressive trailer for Viking Conquest, a new expansion for M&B: Warband, it occurred to me that the lack of polish has the effect of also making the game seem more believable.
Watch.
Mount & Blade II is looking awfully fancy, but don’t expect to play it any time soon. If you want more armies and more lands to conquer now, now now now, now now now now now now now, stop stamping your feet and pouting as more are coming “soon”. While creators TaleWorlds are focused on the sequel, they’ve drafted another mod team to create another add-on for M&B: Warband.
Today they announced Viking Conquest, a Norse expansion coming from the folks behind Warband’s Brytenwalda mod.
Our last post about Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord was one year and four days ago. That won’t do at all. Oh look, here’s a new video from developers TaleWorlds showing off some of the game’s engine and its level editor. That’s the level editor we hoi polloi will get to use too, creating our own huge landscapes and castles for sandbox feudal fun. It supports that pleasant MS Paint-style sweepy-draggy landscaping creation style, among other techniques, so even my crack at making a majestic forest might not end up looking like a foolish child’s paint-splattered macaroni art.
Mount & Blade: Warband is so very PC Gaming. Whatever that term means, whichever disparate games it tries to bind together, M&B is It. Or That. Or one of Them. You know what I mean. An action-RPG where you also control and equip an army and ride horses and swing swords and it’s sort of an RTS too and mods add everything from Skaven to Glaswegian gangs, oh, that’s definitely a PC Game. It’s a cracking game t’boot.
You can see for yourself, as a free weekend on Steam means all and sundry can play the full game until Sunday, and Warband’s on sale too if you want to keep it afterwards.
In this crazy-busy, senses-overwhelming world of ours, it’s sometimes all-too-easy to lose track of the important things in life. For instance, my mother’s birthday is coming up and I have obscured my monitor with a forest of “DON’T FORGET TO CALL” post-it notes. (I will still somehow find a way to forget. Just watch me.) Also, it totally slipped my mind that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is a thing. I am, of course, entirely ashamed of myself and plan to amass a heroic army and die horribly at the hands of a noble in penance. But before my bitter, inevitable end, let me just say one thing: OooooooOOOoooOOoo. Because these Mount & Blade II screenshots? They’re making me wail (in happiness!) like the ghost I’ll soon be.
