Mount & Blade

At its center, Mount & Blade isn’t so much a structured RPG as an exploration of being stranded in a medieval world. Even though the game gets underway with a detailed character creation process loaded with a D&D level of rigmarole regarding the stats, skills, and personality-establishing questions about your childhood last heard from your shrink, there is no shape to the game beyond that. You roll up as a hero, then head off adventuring in the realistic (meaning no magic or monsters) medieval land of Calradia. There is no story arc whatsoever, so the game begins without a strong sense of purpose to help get you immersed.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t anything to do in Calradia. There is, but you have to do a great deal of wandering around to find it. Removing any sort of story hook from Mount & Blade makes it only appropriate for the hardcore role-playing gamer who plays RPGs just to explore a fantasy land, not to accomplish anything or become an epic-level druid or whatever. When the game starts you’re plopped down on the back of a horse in the middle of a vast medieval realm dotted by towns, castles, and the odd river and mountain range. Traveling across this land is easily accomplished on a tactical map of sorts, where you click on the location you want to visit to gallop off toward it. There isn’t any guidance provided as to which place you should visit first, so you’re left cruising around on a piebald nag with no particular place to go.
A lot of background details are present in the game, as Calradia is divided up between four kingdoms and a Middle Eastern-style khanate (a region under the jurisdiction of a khan), and every lord and king has a listing in an encyclopedia that you can bring up on demand. But these entries aren’t entirely thorough, giving you only a brief rundown of the major players in the land. The backdrop is always busy with various wars, villages being looted, and castles being besieged, although you feel more like a hapless spectator than a wannabe hero with anything at stake during all of this conflict. You tend to have to research your possible destinations through bland text write-ups, or to search around in the documentation in the menus to find out why the king of Swadia is attacking the khanate of Kergit. Even then, you generally don’t receive a lot of solid answers

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