So I played the Warband Beta last night until 1 *edited*ing AM cause I am *edited*er than the average bear, but I enjoyed every minute of it. The multiplayer basically pits two factions against each other in different types of gameplay the only type that I got to play was I guess siege or Team Deathmatch. For each Faction there are three classes, depending on the map and the faction you have those classes may change, but pretty standard there was an archer, infantry, and cavalry. Before you even start your game you can create your own custom character and how he OR SHE looks. That’s right you can be female now, so ladies and *edited*s no complaining. After you get into a game and join a faction and pick your class you get to choose how you want your equipment to be laid out, basically anything you could equip in the previous game you can equip in this one, but depending on the class you choose and the faction will decide the equipment available to you. Alot like Counter Strike you use money or denars to purchase your equipment, as far as I can tell you gain denars in a combination of ways one of the obvious ones being getting kills, I think just staying alive is another one. Anyways after you get your load out the battle starts and it is pretty much identical to a regular battle in the original Mount and blade except all of your allies are actual other players. It is funny that even though they are actual players the game still plays similar to the original mount and blade in how a battle looks.
The combat system got a nice upgrade, attacks look a little cleaner and crisper and you snap your shield in position a lot faster, you can cancel swings now by holding up your shield, so you can feint an attack, it is kind of nice to have. They also took down the actual blocking radius of the shields so it is a little easier to get around it now. In the current system armor is broken for whatever reason so you can wear it but right now it doesn’t actually increase your armor, so I am not sure how that will play in yet, I am sure it will be similar to original though.
One neat little thing they did is change the way pikeman hold their pikes, now when you hold a pike on foot without a shield you take a more defensive stance a little crouched and you wield the pike with both hands, it is more realistic to how a pikeman would hold it and stand, which is well done on their part.
So far I am loving most of the maps, some of them encourage cavalry, some encourage infantry, but you can also pick the archer class and have fun. You will go from taking long shots across a vast plain at one point in time to duck and cover behind buildings and trees in a small town. It makes for some pretty interesting gameplay.
The community from what I am seeing so far is great, I would highly recommend us getting our own server for this game if it is popular enough this would make a fantastic PC game to play if people were into it, you can do 64 man servers which is great!
That is all that I can think of on the game for now but if I think of more I will keep posting.