Outside the Box

Mod & Blade

Those mods which overhaul the entire game are even more impressive in highlighting this flexibility. Settings from the Old West (complete with six-shooters) to Ancient Greece (Hoplites) have been visited, each with their own modified maps and troop types. Some aim rigorously for realism, attempting to implement conflicts like the Hundred Years War in near obsessive levels of detail, right down to sculpting armour and coats of arms to precise historical specifications. In rare cases, the mods have shown such ingenuity of design that they've been ahead of the main game itself. As well as being one of the best full conversions, the Lord of the Rings mod The Last Days allowed players to join multiple factions before this feature was included within the native game itself (which ultimately expanded to five warring kingdoms).

Inevitably, some of these projects will never be finished, or will remain incompatible with the latest version of M&B. Yet such is the volume on offer that plenty will make it to completion. Wait long enough and almost every imaginable setting or alteration should come to fruition, be it pirates or all-female armies in skimpy chainmail bikinis. Personally, I'm waiting for a terrific Wars of the Roses conversion, or a proper Song of Ice and Fire mod stuffed with political intrigue.

Final Furlong
Many games are fortunate enough to have close-knit modding communities, but M&B feels different; perhaps due to the unique way that game and mods have developed side by side. The solidarity and output of the community testifies to what can be achieved when a developer engages directly with players in a way which is far harder for commercial releases with larger teams and orthodox design processes. Armagan made his feelings clear in an October interview with RockPaperShotgun: "[I'm most proud about] the mods and the mod community. Mount & Blade has arguably some of the best mods developed for a computer game." This is quite a contrast to the more familiar model for PC releases, where a bug-ridden version is rushed out, followed by sporadic updates and poor communication from the developer. An oft-written phrase on support forums is that players have paid full price to be beta testers. M&B turned this weary comment on its head by involving people throughout the entire design process for a fair price, and it's still reaping the rewards.

M&B's great strength, aside from being the best damn horse-to-horse combat simulator around, is an engine which tacitly passes the creative baton to others to do with as they please. Story expansion, inclusion of new characters or texture re-skins, a complete change of setting - almost anything is possible with enough skill. This, surely, is what the next wave of "sandbox" titles should be aiming for: games which not only seek to free players from the linear restrictions of core gameplay elements, but also let them entirely reshape the game world as they see fit.

Peter Parrish is a freelance writer. He would like to mount and blade you.