I downloaded (legally damnit) Mount and Blade on the recommendation of a friend and I was actually quite pleased with it. Certainly a game I would have reviewed had there been a website back in September.

Unlike most games that take place in medieval England, there are zero fantasy elements to this game, meaning there aren't other races contesting your keep (there are humans to do that) and no items with made up names to risk life and limb for. In the game you get to control a riders of Rohan type posse, starting with small time jobs until eventually you can take kingdoms and try to control a region and eventually the entire map.

I quite enjoyed the game, nothing to write home about but a solid experience that I was glad to have been a part of. There is also a decent mod community surrounding the game, though i never delved deep enough to check out what the community had to offer. Besides the fact that the game may as well have been from 2003 considering the graphics, it was an enjoyable experience.

One of the things that has been promised to be patched into the game since as long as I have been playing was some kind of a multiplayer mode. At the GDC, ars technica sat down with Armagan Yavuz of TaleWorlds to discuss the new multiplayer trappings.

As it stands, it seems as though the multiplayer is going to be a completely separate entity to the main game, probably due to the fact that any given player could be very very powerful, a recent thief victim, or anywhere in between. You start with a basic footman and earn experience through battling, and you can then allocate these points into specific skills that suit your play style, turning your character into a ranger or a cavalry melee unit for sake of example.

I am not clear on if there will be any real point to the multiplayer mode besides the fact that you can talk to other humans in battle, the mechanics look wholly the same and there doesn't seem to be any sort of unlockable content for the single player game by competing in the multiplayer skirmishes, though obviously nothing about this seems to be certain. Personally i hope that the points you earn by winning in the multiplayer can be somehow carried over to use on your attributes for your character in the main game.

TaleWorlds maintains that they have no projected release window for this patch, however a closed multiplayer beta will be beginning in the near future.