Mount and Blade: Warband Should be Bad, but is Actually Pretty Good

It’s the box art

I have played Mount and Blade: Warband for over 70 hours now. I haven’t experienced nearly everything the game has to offer, but I’ve been riding around Calradia for literal days now, which is actually a bit unexpected for me.

What I find kind of strange about this game is that it receives large amounts of praise, has an active community and holds people’s attention for hours, but I don’t think it does anything extremely well. I’m not saying the game is bad, I’ve enjoyed it for hours and plan on playing it more, but let’s be honest, it has a few problems. Most map travel is boring and slow, the combat is clunky and unresponsive, the character animations make everyone look constipated most of the time, the diplomacy is bare bones, and so much more.

I mean, sure, you can improve some of this stuff with mods, but a lot of the problems come from the core of the game itself and changing them would drastically change the end product.

So why, then, is Mount and Blade such a beloved game? Why is it so much fun?

The thing about this game is that while nothing it does is spectacular, everything it does is good, or good enough. The combat isn’t perfect, but it can be pretty fun. The diplomacy is pretty simple, but it gets the job done and can easily be improved through mods. The character animations are, well, not great, but they get the point across and are just fine during a full battle. They all do what they’re intended to even if they’re not perfect, and none of them need to be perfect for the game to be enjoyable in the way that it is.

Most games will focus on very specific things to do well. Take Mario for example. Yes, the music is fun and the graphics are decent, but people play it because it’s a good platformer and they wouldn’t if it was well made in that very specific respect. A Mario game without good jumping just isn’t a good Mario game. Most other games are built in similar ways with one central idea making it worth playing. Call of Duty has its shooting, Sonic has its speed, and so on and so forth. Of course, the same is true for Mount and Blade, but I’d argue what makes makes it different is that its focus is broader and less directly mechanical.

If you go look at the steam page for Mount and Blade, you’ll see the game being advertised as having “brought medieval battlefields to life with its realistic mounted combat and detailed fighting system,” but that’s not exactly what I play the game for. The description they give there kind of implies that that the game is enjoyable because of its realism, but I think when you actually get into the game, what you see is that it’s more about immersion and the experience. What I play it for is the more general experience it gives me of crushing my enemies, storming heavily guarded fortresses, parading my army through the field, courting ladies (hell yeah), and so forth. It’s a medieval lord simulator, and while it’s not necessarily accurate or incredibly detailed, it gets the job done. The game can get away with doing a bunch of stuff only adequately because it all serves this greater whole. Where most games would suffer much more from these inadequacies Mount and Blade manages to survive because the game is aiming for an entirely different target.

There are a lot of different ways you can play this game, a lot of different ways you can go about it, but I’ve spent most of my time with it as a vassal to another King. What happened for me was that I started in the Kingdom of Swadia, rode around the kingdom for a few hours figuring out the mechanics, and then the game crashed and I lost all my progress. Woohoo! So, I returned to when I had last saved with one goal, one mission in mind. Destroy Swadia. Wipe them off the face of the earth, remove them entirely from Calradia, get my revenge for having wasted my time.

So I joined the Kingdom of the Rhodoks, who were at war with them at the time. And now, despite numerous setbacks for various reasons (most of them being that I’m bad at the game), Swadia is down to their last castle, and I will soon have my sweet, sweet revenge.

What this shows is that for a game like Mount and Blade, what’s important is for the mechanics to have room for the goal you have in mind, even if they’re not perfect. I don’t really care that most of the mechanics are quite as polished or fleshed out as they could be because they all have some meaning in what I’m trying to do. I have to employ all the mechanics to make myself or my faction stronger, make my relations with them stronger and try and keep us from losing all our stuff to invading factions, all so that I can achieve a goal I’ve set out for myself. Something strange happens in this game where roleplaying, or at least having a goal in mind, makes the mechanics enjoyable despite being less than perfect. Once a player is invested in the world of the game they’re experiencing something beyond the basic systems of it as long as they’re good enough to make it work. And of course you don’t have to have the game crash on you to make this happen, you just have to have a goal in mind (although if you’re looking for one, Swadia could always use a few more beatings).

There are, of course, other games that achieve similar things to this, but I find Mount and Blade interesting because it really didn’t seem all that good when I was first playing it, before getting to the real meat of the game. For most games you can at least have some kind of idea when you first turn it on. There is the argument to be made that since the game does everything well enough, that makes it a good game, but I don’t think we’d see the game receiving quite so much praise if it didn’t have that experience to go alongside it. It’s interesting to see how a game might not do anything amazing with its mechanics but still turn out really well.