Mount & Blade video interview

[Dementia Praecox]

Nothing new, but kind of interesting to see Armagan and Ipek in front of the camera. Don't worry if you don't understand Swedish, the narrator is talking out of his ass. Oh, and fucking motion capture? Glad to see they've got their priorities right.

http://kuzgunspor.blogspot.com/2008/06/ ... rk_20.html

 

[Fez]

I hope they aren't wasting money on more motion capture or eye candy when the game is sorely lacking in content.

 

[MisterStone]

You think it is still lacking in content? Have you played the recent versions? Maybe it is kind of sparse on content but most of the gameplay is based on procedural stuff. It's easily good enough for couple hundred hours of fun for someone who has never played M&B before, and at least dozens for someone who has played the older versions...

 

[Fez]

The world feels empty and unfinished. It's like an unfurnished home. The last version still had tweaks to the basics. I'm still surprised that they have suddenly decided to ship it on the next version. It seems too soon for their pace of development, but I suppose they wanted the money.

 

[DefJam101]

Yeah the game felt like Elite with swords at first, then I realized you only had the illusion of freedom.

Needs more content, and you need to be able to actually do more than just ride around on a horse and slash people with your sword. More politics/freedom/ownership/tactics is needed.

 

[covr]

...and moar quests. There are 10 or 12 in this game, it's fucking pathetic.

 

[DefJam101]

Yeah I never did the quests... I tried to claim my own little piece of land to fortify and then launch raiding attacks on the surrounding countryside, slaughtering caravans for supplies and slowly forming my own empire.

I was pissed when I found out I couldn't do that, or any other gameplay path besides being a king's lap dog.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Yeah I never did the quests... I tried to claim my own little piece of land to fortify and then launch raiding attacks on the surrounding countryside, slaughtering caravans for supplies and slowly forming my own empire.

I was pissed when I found out I couldn't do that, or any other gameplay path besides being a king's lap dog.

Uh, you can do that. Piss off a faction enough (raid their caravans being the easiest method) and you can then lay siege to their castles, and when you take one over you become your own rebel faction. Work from there.

 

[MisterStone]

There are, in fact, also diplomat tasks now... for instance, there is the one where you need to collect a debt from a lord for another lord... you can do this either by succeeding with your diplomacy skill (needs to be high), by sacrificing your standing with the person who needs to pay up (you can earn relation points by helping the lord in question), or by offering the pay part of the loan yourself.

There is also a task where the merchants ask you to stop a war- this is done by stopping two lords, one on either side of the war, from actively promoting the war in their king's court. You can accomplish this either by capturing both of them (this is pretty hard and largely up to chance, also it would wreck your standing with both factions), by capturing one of them and then persuading the other, or by persuading both. It is a pretty hard to pull off, I think.

Anyways, I can agree that the game could use more quests... but I can say that there is a lot more to the game now than just riding around and hacking people, although you can focus primarily on that if that is your preferred activity.

 

[Fez]

It's all very cookie-cutter though. Like Fed-EX quests in RPGs. [LORD X] owes me [X] gold, please give it to me and you'll get [50% of x gold]. That's it. Changing the lord's name to Arthur instead of Lancelot or the money from 535 gold to 1243 gold doesn't make it a whole new and exciting experience. It's the same conversation each and every time and the same responses. It gets old fast. Same with all the other missions with no variety.

 

[udm]

I really wish they'd implement a better campaign to the game. If anyone's been following the game since the mod boom a year plus back, there've been so many interesting mods that add so much more functionality.

Storymod - you follow a background story that lets you engage in diplomacy among 2 warring nations, do a dungeon crawl and some other crazy things

The Last days - one of the best mods, offers more than what 0.960 vanilla does, nuff said

That being said, the main group of developers aren't earning much from this, though. I can understand the lack of motivation on their part, but really, I'm getting more disillusioned with the later releases

Let's hope they spring a good surprise with v1, though I highly doubt it

PS. motion capture is all good. Infantry combat looks and feels crappy right now, compared to mounted combat. It's been something that should have been done long ago

@Fez: As I understand it, the whole point of the game is not to complete quests, but to eventually conquer the kingdom. With later releases, this endgame content is possible already

But again, if it was possible in Storymod to do both, I don't see why the final release shouldn't feature exciting quests and a good endgame anyway

 

[elander_]

So the goal of this game is to conquer a kingdom for yourself? Sounds good.

If M&B was announced as a RT strategy game i don't think nobody would complain about the lack of quests and interesting chars.

 

[udm]

Yeah there are 4 nations - Rhodoks, Vaegirs, Swadians and Khergits. You can either play as a neutral party, or join a faction and take over the other nations

M&B wasn't announced as a single-genre game. When it started becoming more popular, people were thinking of it more as an action game with strategy elements and a little bit of roleplaying. I think some people have mistaken it for an RPG with action elements

I've seen a preview before saying M&B is an RPG at its core. From my 1+ year of playing it, it's 20% RPG, 30% strategy, 50% action. It's as far as Call of Duty 4 goes, in terms of its "RPG" aspect

 

[flabbyjack]

They announced a release date as March, a while back. Yet it is STILL not out -- they've been using this time to implement more features and content, no doubt. This is really quite an awesome game and a epic win for these two people.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

You think it is still lacking in content? Have you played the recent versions? Maybe it is kind of sparse on content but most of the gameplay is based on procedural stuff. It's easily good enough for couple hundred hours of fun for someone who has never played M&B before, and at least dozens for someone who has played the older versions...

I've captured 2 castles and yalen and there's now fuck all to do. I'm riding around with a pretty much invincible rape squad of swadian knighs and footmen. There's no point in upgrading your villages, i broke my allegiance with the king and i'm pinging off his armies one by one...the whole war dynamic of the game sucks. The sieges are terrible, large pitched battles are few and far between. (have to use a mod to even get decent fights)

 

[sabishii]

What difficulty (damage settings, I guess) do you guys play at? Because with everything at 100% my 60-man "rape squad" can't really siege crap, and I can't take on those 100-man warbands, unless they're all infantry so that I can do an anvil+hammer with them. Well, without losing half my men at least. And I don't think any amount of skill on my part can help the AI of my men.

 

[udm]

I've captured 2 castles and yalen and there's now fuck all to do. I'm riding around with a pretty much invincible rape squad of swadian knighs and footmen. There's no point in upgrading your villages, i broke my allegiance with the king and i'm pinging off his armies one by one...the whole war dynamic of the game sucks. The sieges are terrible, large pitched battles are few and far between. (have to use a mod to even get decent fights)

I'm with ya. I'm not a huge fan of vanilla M&B. In fact, I'd go as far to say that I actually had more fun with previous versions of M&B, since I can use more mods with them

I'd recommend trying out the following mods:

- Bandit King (not compatible)
- The Last Days (not compatible)
- Storymod (not compatible)
- Fantasy mod)
- Craftmod (compatible)

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I hope they aren't wasting money on more motion capture or eye candy when the game is sorely lacking in content.

It's a bit of a piss take to be honest if mocap is the best thing they can spend our beta money on.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

New content doesn't translate as well in a promo video as pretty animations do.

 

[LCJr.]

I bought my key right after .711 came out for a whopping $14. I truly feel I've got my money's worth out of this game.

Do I want them to do more? Absolutely. I feel content took a back seat to graphics way back. But that seems to be what it takes to sell these days. The new content that is being added isn't from Armagan but from Nijis(Steve) Battle for Sicily mod. But then again prior to that the game had pretty much stagnated to be honest.

One of my biggest bitches is the battle AI hasn't seen much improvement and Armagan's refusal to add formations. The last version of the Highlander>Mirathei>NCrawler formation scripts I tried worked quite well. I've written a few tactics scripts myself that worked well and provided a little change from enemy charges blindly forward or follows the leader. Actually I've just started playing this again over the last few days and so far haven't seen any tactics besides the default charge???

In it's current state I'd say it's good game and a lot of fun for awhile. Of course most people are going to get bored with it sooner or later. Armagan made right decision in making this game modder friendly. Hardly predicting the future to say it'll be the mods that keep this game selling and people interested.

And I can speak from personal experience modding this game isn't that difficult.
>shameless plug for a dormant project<
http://www.moddb.com/mods/earlier-days
All it took to get the 3d meshes and textures for the new items was a PM asking for permission. I spent some of my free time over a few months staring at scripts, reading header operations and Winter's guide until I had a basic understand of what a script did when I looked at it. I still only have a very minimal understanding of Python but that was enough to be able to right a few scripts from scratch and modify a lot more.

 

[Shoelip]

That mocap video... The animations look exactly the same...

 

[udm]

That mocap video... The animations look exactly the same...

That's because they haven't implemented them yet. The in-game video was taken as a contrast I think

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Do I want them to do more? Absolutely. I feel content took a back seat to graphics way back. But that seems to be what it takes to sell these days.

That's just it, the graphics are still pretty bad, it's the modders texture packs that make the game look decent. (some of the sound packs are nice also)

 

[Shoelip]

That mocap video... The animations look exactly the same...

That's because they haven't implemented them yet. The in-game video was taken as a contrast I think

Oh, thank goodness... Though I hope the new animations don't screw anything up.

 

[sabishii]

Shit, I'm glad the graphics are bad. I turn everything down so I can run 300vs300 battles.

 

[udm]

I feel the graphics for the terrain textures are actually really very good for an indie game. Sadly, the models are where it's lacking

 

[Dementia Praecox]

How could I miss this:

PS. motion capture is all good.

Kill yourself.

 

[denizsi]

I love Armagan's accent. It's like sucky Chinese English. It's lovely though, developing a game as a couple.

Did the Swedish narrator say something about multiplayer?

Also, the guy used for MoCap looks like a pretentious farce. According to the text, he's some historical swordplay trainer for some private sport club, but he looks more like a stunt acrobat who watched too much Star Wars.