For the last week I've been on vacation in a place called Calradia. If you don't know where that is, don't bother with a world map. http://forums.ubi.com/images/smilies...ley-tongue.gif
Calradia is the world map of Mount&Blade. There is a free download of the newest M&B, Warband 1.131, that lets you play to level 7. 600 MB download, the whole game. Without serial key you can play limited but just the training grounds of the tutorial are worth the download and yes you really-really-really should spend time there learning how to move, shoot, fight and ride then hit things from horseback. Control is intuitive but still needs learning and practice.
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Yes, horse mounted and on foot medieval combat done very well. Fast, hard and ramming done right pays off well.
It's a vanilla medieval RPG. The offline game is what they call a sandbox being there is no main story line. You set your own goals which can include taking the whole map over. People do that. The game world is complex yet you deal with what you want. There are other Heroes (AI) you can get to join your party. Your party can number in the 100's but 20 can run around pretty safely if you don't pick the wrong fights. You can do all kinds of things, take over or be given fiefs as in village, town, castle, kingdom. You can prop up a 'pretender' and work that way too. Or just run around killing bandits of different kinds while building up a rep. You can hold feasts, get hitched, be a big wheel and that's just offline.
Yup, there's multiplayer. Good luck there. I'm too old to twitch that fast. Online games have goals AFAICT and don't run forever. Want to wake up from sleep and find your place has been over run hours ago? OTOH the Heroes you deal with online are real people.
There's MODS. I haven't touched those, just got my activation key yesterday as it is. Many mods. Want magic? There is at least one well developed mod with 17+ kinds of magic. Mods are supported.
Need cheat codes even if it's just to get started? You will learn more quicker. Yes, they have them. It is your game, play how you want.
There is community. Here is the main site. Publisher Paradox has another.
There is a good Wiki here. It went down for a day and when it came back up I 'save as' the pages since nowhere else did I find so good!
One thing though. I ran into trouble after a while with BSOD crashes. The fix for me was to change the config. I switched pixel shaders off (might switch em back on) and changed from DX9 to DX7 and only once in hours do I get the game quitting back to desktop, not the BSOD. In a future patch I might try DX9 again, it does look better.
Also I am finding that not terribly big battles bring my Sempron 2600 with 2G RAM down to low framerates and pauses. There's a battle size slider I have set at 60 which is too high for my PC and I can cut the number of ragdolls used (they are used to make the dead fall more realistically) in config to remedy that. I won't see the best on my PC but I still have a playable game.

