When it comes to people who played any of the previous Mount & Blade versions, you can probably put most of them into one of two categories: Those that gave up on it after a couple of hours, maybe even multiple times, and those that completely lost themselves in it.

I was in the former one for many years, ever since discovering the beta for the very first entry.

The games, while somewhat deep and certainly complex in their nature, left too many gaps to fill in my mind. This is not a bad thing necessarily, but a couple of design decisions, like having traversable 3D cities & fiefdoms void of life and meaningful interaction, actively hampered my imagination to take lead. How can I role play, when all I see is a world that is as dynamic as glued together Lego bricks, filled with people whose only purpose in life is to stand in a corner or walk aimlessly around town?

Mount & Blade was a project full of passion. Passion that lead to ambition. Ambitions too large for ressourceless indie developers releasing their first game, especially in the year 2008. It was a project destined to fail ...but it never did.