Mount & Blade With Fire And Sword Preview - This is my Boomstick!

Mount & Blade With Fire And Sword doesn’t mess around. You start off the game right in the thick of action. Well a minor skirmish. Some bandits have attacked a village and you need to defend yourself. Upon taking care of this lone bandit(what was he thinking? A club would do well against someone with a sword?), a bunch of his friends appeared. I retreat, frantically trying to fend off their wild mob attacks. But I have something they don’t. I have gun! But no no avail since they are right at my face. Luckily, a bunch of friendly men arrive on the scene to take care of the bandits.

"You aren’t going to be blowing stuff up like a bald space marine with quad damage"

Mount & Blade With Fire And Sword is still very much Mount & Blade. With its denizens with all manner of weaponry, from sticks to sword. Yes, this is the Mount & Blade I remember. Men running at you screaming their lungs out. But what’s this? A matchlock pistol? Holy jeebers! You mean I can now shoot guys in the face! Like in every other Call of Duty shooty shooty bang bang game? Yes you can. But you aren’t going to be blowing stuff up like a bald space marine with quad damage. Matchlock pistols and muskets are…erm… less effective than you regular modern shooter weaponry and super high tech BFG. It’s in keeping with historical reality really.

Your avatar is still an ugly bastard

Combat with firearms also hasn't evolved into the regimented Napoleonic warfare with sides exchanging musket fire. Firearms is handled very much like archers and other ranged units. They still stay back and fire away at the enemy but without proper cohesion like a Napoleonic unit. It does not have that much drop or a firing arc like an arrow though, but don't expect to become a grizzled sniper here(which makes assaulting fortress with musket men a tricky affair). As I said, guns are incredibly inaccurate. I had to get really close up for my matchlock pistol to be of any effect.

All new look to the towns. This one has clear Russian influence

With Fire And Sword brings Mount & Blade to a more modern era(that’s not to say people shake hands and try to settle disputes over tea with scones). Out from the medieval and into the 17th century. The setting of the game world has been given a visual overhaul. Gone are the representation of medieval factions like the Vikings, Arabs, and so on. This time the game is centred around Eastern European factions like the Polish, the Russians, Swedes, the Crimean Khanate and Ukraine. All the locations and maps have a Eastern European look to them, right down to the clothing of the soldiers, nobles and peasants.  

Like the previous Mount & Blade games, this expansion is no different in terms of the single player campaign. You design your own character and pick his history to set his base stats(son of a noble, grew up in the street etc). You then get the option to personalise the stats more in the end of the character creation process. With Fire and Sword introduces some new skill such as grenade throwing(yeah there are grenades, very crude dangerous ones), and a new proficiency called ‘firearms’ which you have to expect with the new setting(proficiencies improve as you use them more, like the Elder Scrolls RPG games).

Gunther has a long way to go to become a famous gun slinger

Mount & Blade has a lot of RPG influences such as these. From inventory systems to experience points and leveling up. It adds to the story telling element of a players game. Like Gunther, the unlucky noblemen's son who escaped his fathers constant nagging for a live of killing bandits. Only to be captured and made a prisoner. It’s a great game for recounting your experiences in an after action report. It's the type of world that can suck you in with the breadth of stuff to be done in game. Save a mayors daughter, help defend villagers from bandits, bring much needed cattle to a village, or go the outlaw route. It's also quite unforgiving, as you wont get you hand held with this game.

A whole new campaign map which is HUGE! This is just part of it

The single player campaign still retains the campaign map with countless number of cities, forts, and villages. You can accept quests, trade items, recruits mercenaries to join your army from them just like in previous Mount & Blade games. Very similar to Mount & Blade Warband. What has me excited however is the possibilities of a new multiplayer mode called the captain mode.

This is my BOOMSTICK! You can even see the bullet escaping the barrel if you use shift to zoom in. And yes there is bullet drop

In captain mode, each player commands a squad of AI units(in the past Mount & Blade games all human player control their one single unit). This essentially means each player has their own squad of units to lead and you could have some pretty interesting strategy and tactics being played out on the battle field. Imagine keeping your pikemen squad just behind your musket men of archers to fend of cavalry. Of course, I couldn't try this mode out since the preview build was only single player.

Mount & Blade With Fire And Sword still looks to be as awesome as Warband. It's a new setting with new weapons and while in the preview, I didn't get to see anything more new, Talewords promises they will be adding a lot of the new in With Fire And Sword. New endings,new multiplayer mode, and enhanced siege mechanics(do stuff to make the siege just a little easier) round what was already a game that had a lot of content in it. Mount & Blade With Fire And Sword will be out in Q2 2011 and I'll certainly be looking out for this one.

Note: I've just received some clarification from Paradox that With Fire And Sword will be a USD$19.99 product and the feature set will reflect that. It's more of a stand alone expansion with some new features to go with the new theme. So don't expect that huge of a difference from Warband(mechanic wise).