I have been playing a computer game called ‘Mount & Blade’ quite a bit recently. It’s a medieval era game set in a fictional world (but not fantasy - no magic, mythical creatures etc). There are mods already available to play British or European medieval era versions if you want to.
It’s available as a free download (381MB) as a full version but you have to pay if you want your player character to develop beyond a certain point. It’s fairly undemanding resource wise and would run on most PCs (afaik it’s only available on Windows)
It’s quite addictive (for me at least) I think because it combines quite a few different gameplay elements with a fair amount of success.
It’s got the trading aspect of games like Elite/EVE online, has the selling loot style of text based games like Moria/Angband, the interaction (admittedly a bit basic) and improving experience levels of RPG games and the combat style of beat ‘em ups/shooters (again, some limitations with the combat but enjoyable overall).
There’s a lot of variety for your character – I’m currently signed on as a mercenary for one of the kingdoms and have been taking part in one of the wars going on – you’re not expected to fight 100% of the time, you get a call every now and then. My troops are slowly training up, I’ve now got a band of 47, 14 of which are mounted.
You can capture enemies after combat and ransom them later – grunts you just ‘sell’ to a ransom broker, named Lords you hold until you get a request for ransom (these pay a lot more).
Quests undertaken have included hunting down murderers, cleaning bandits out of villages (one style of this quest has you training the villagers to fight, Magnificent Seven stylee). There’s also tax gathering and making fleeing peasants return to their village but that’s probably less fun unless you really enjoy oppressing the masses. I’ve been in one siege and a few big battles and have won two tournaments. After my renown was high enough I was able to take on a quest to challenge a lord to single combat, in order to defend the honour of a lady – unfortunately I failed (so he must have been right about her – actually the game does a good thing here when you fail but I won’t spoil it for you in case you give it a go).
There are also pretenders to the thrones of various countries in the court of each Kingdom and you can undertake to ‘restore’ one of these to the throne – I haven’t tried this yet as I suspect you need to be quite high powered to take this on.
You could probably be successful just pursuing one career aspect of the game (i.e. solely being a trader, mercenary or tournament fighter – if you got good at tournaments and bet as heavily on yourself as the game allows then you could probably make a lot of money this way – it’s also a good way to get experience and bring up your weapon skills, not unlike the original purpose of tournaments – winning tournaments also increases your renown).
The mounted combat is a lot more fun than I realised at first – I’ve got a long spear usable as a lance when riding at speed – it’s probably more fun that it should be running down foot soldiers. It’s harder going up against mounted opponents but it was immensely satisfying last night to get it right for once and take out a mounted enemy lord in the first pass of a charge.
The companion non player characters (NPCs) that you might sign on at taverns develop the same way your character does, and you get to choose where their points go as they level up. The advantage of companions is that they don’t encumber you, you get to fit them out and they don’t die in combat afaik (just get wounded). The disadvantage is that they start off fairly low powered (unlike NPC soldiers) and don’t always get on with each other. One of my lot is a sort of nomad ex-raider and his tales of raiding caravans and his prayers of slaughter aren’t going down well with some of the others. There’s a bit of bickering and low morale between some of them because of this. Your companions also tell you if they think an action was dishonourable.
There’s a lot going on in the game and I like that the game doesn’t revolve around you – wars go on without your interaction and even if you do take part it may not tip the balance.
I recommend it, lots of fun and quite good background music too
(I paid for the game on Saturday, having reached level seven which is the maximum free level, played a bit since then and am now level 13. You can keep restarting the game with a new character as you reach L7 but I was having too much fun to stop).
