The pace of Viking Conquest is now much slower than the original Mount & Blade Warband. Having your own refuge is also a cool addition as a pseudo-castle and place where you can keep extra troops for those of you who don’t wish to become a vassal of any old king, but still want to reap the benefits of having a steady place to call home (and for storing items and the like). There are also the additions of being able see troop trees in-game, so it was easier to plan out how you wanted to upgrade your troops to get the desirable troop make-up. Representations of parties on the map increase in number of men to help give a visual indication of how large it is. The world map is textured well and pretty detailed with better water graphics. Seeing past the seemingly random jumble of vowels and consonants, you will find that Viking Conquest looks really nice, or at least a lot nicer than the vanilla version. Or perhaps you can and I’m just dyslexic with historical names and sometimes history is just silly like that anyway. The following screen is the opening screen you see when you start a new adventure, explaining to you the setting in perfectly legible English.īut perhaps you aren’t fazed with being a vassal, or lord, of people whose names you cannot remember or pronounce, and watching over lands and towns whose names you also can’t pronounce. In fact if you were just reading about the new features, you would probably think it’s all pretty swell. A whole new world, one that is historical and real, with a whole new story aspect to play through that helps you learn and explore the admittedly less diverse, but interesting world. Gameplay has been further expanded to allow ship travel and all the goodies that come off of that. The visuals are heads and shoulders better. If the original Warband’s jump was equal to your highschool varsity champion’s long jump, Viking Conquest is Mike Powell’s. The new features that the Viking Conquest DLC brings just completely blows it out of the water. It was a very impressive jump with a lot of new features that made the game all that much more fun and enjoyable. Then came Warband in 2010 where all the RPG-esque stuff got expanded to the point where you could marry ladies and create your very own kingdom. Some fun, extra side RPG-esque stuff was the cherry on the top.

The Mount & Blade series first hit the scene back in 2008 and while it wasn’t particularly visually appealing, the kind of gameplay it brought to the table wowed the critics with its open-world sandbox that allowed you to head your own group of men, which could number up to the hundreds, and fight together with them on the battlefields as your own playable character.

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