introduction
When we talk about the Middle Ages, this image often pops up in our minds: In order to compete for power, the nobles who intrigue each other bully the people under their rule, the church that hides darkness and conspiracy recklessly harvests the people’s fat, and has both legs amputated due to poor medical standards. The poor people, who were lying on the hospital bed and moaning all day long, begged the lord not to deprive him of the last foot of arable land.
The real Middle Ages are so bloody and cruel, but fortunately we are in the modern age. If you want to experience the game between nobles and the battle on the battlefield, you can try sitting in an air-conditioned room in summer, open “Mount and Blade”, and come to the last medieval adventure.
Start the game, choose the origin and background story of the protagonist, and pass the novice level that only teaches basic operations. When the player comes to the big map, the first time they stand in the capital of a certain country and look at the map, they will inevitably have doubts in their hearts.
Who am I, where am I, and what should I do? ——
degrees of freedom
The game of riding and cutting does not actually have a very clear main line. In most cases, players do not play by completing various tasks assigned by the system, but find the goal of playing for themselves.
In short: everything in the game is optional, for example you can choose to be a pirate who plunders a village, a local lord who is rich in business, a lone knight wandering on the edge of a kingdom, or is the route for most players.
From starting alone to pulling up a team of dozens of people, wandering among various kings and nobles, and gradually expanding the team, when you are strong enough, you will receive an invitation letter from a king and be appointed as a vassal .
Acquire a small piece of territory and continue to expand based on it. When your strength and fiefs expand to a certain level, the king begins to fear your strength. From then on, even if you capture the castle yourself, the king will reward it to others , so you no longer endure this injustice, and led your men to raise the flag of treason against the king.
In addition to the player’s choice of the route to play, the choice of route can also be subverted or paralleled. For example, you can become a merchant at the beginning of the game, accumulate financial resources to recruit more soldiers, and then become a vassal, Or become a rogue robber after you become the king of a unified continent.
Self-determinism is a theory about human personality and motivation. It divides human motivation into three parts: Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy.
Plug it into the game:
Competency requirements are reflected in the ability of players to adapt to the capabilities required by the game, that is, players can complete various tasks assigned by the game. Specifically, the design of the game should make players feel challenging as much as possible. Players can improve their level and familiarity with this difficulty by challenging the levels and BOSS that they could not overcome before, and through continuous trial and error, until they defeat the BOSS. , and this state of being forced to concentrate under high pressure is commonly referred to as flow.
In most games, no matter how difficult the boss is, we only need to defeat it once, and then we will become less interested when we challenge it again. After all, the previously accumulated experience has made the BOSS difficult enough to pose a threat to us. The BOSS itself symbolizes that the goal that is difficult to overcome no longer exists, and naturally it cannot arouse our emotions.
However, in riding and cutting, the high degree of freedom and the random actions of NPCs lead to different difficulties encountered by players in the process of the game: when you set out from the king city alone, send the commander of the front line to the king’s will , Passing through a village, the villagers are suffering from bandits every once in a while, asking you to help train the militia to resist bandits, and the letter on the front line is also tight.
The choice made by the player at this time is the autonomy in self-determination – whether to choose to help the dozens of villagers in front of you, or continue your mission. Also competent – leading a group of villagers to overthrow dozens of bandits is a very challenging task.
In addition, there are immeasurable choices in the game: a lone lord is approaching, whether to capture him, surrender to his enemy, or notify his family to send a ransom? When the enemy army is approaching the city, is it waiting for reinforcements or defending the lonely city?
Countless such choices are laid on the way forward, until the player makes a choice, and each choice forms an ever-extending tree map, which is finally intertwined into each player’s unique experience. Each character is an image created by the player himself. In other words, it is the spiritual incarnation of the player in the game.
When players make choices one by one, they feel as if they are in the game world and have the freedom to dominate the characters in the game. This is also one of the reasons why strategy simulation games are addictive, satisfying the desire of human beings that “the objective world changes with their own subjective will”.
Collision of cold weapons
The above talked about immersion, substitution, and flow, but what does the player actually look like when playing?
In cavalry and slashing, the simplest melee combat methods are divided into attack and block. For example: the enemy is slashing to the left, and in your view, it is attacking from the right. At this time, you need to drag the mouse to the right, and press the right button to put on a blocking stance, and then take the enemy’s knife:
On the contrary, if you want to attack the enemy, you need to observe the enemy’s posture and take advantage of it to attack the weak point:
That’s what melee combat is all about: a combat system with a high lower limit, where novices can usually master all the tricks in a few minutes, and a very deep upper limit, such as confusing the enemy by constantly changing the direction of the attack, and swinging a real punch when the enemy is spinning. You can also rely on movement to grasp the distance between you and the enemy, avoid the enemy’s attack, and then take a step forward to swing a sword.
The expert calculated the distance from the tip of the sword and avoided the attack slightly.
So the body is not injured,
Only the clothes were torn.
Then there is horseback riding. Players can use most of the weapons on horseback. Unlike foot combat, horse combat needs to grasp the distance between the enemy and the enemy. Take the lance, which is preferred by most players, as an example: use the horse to charge the enemy, use the inertia of the horse to run, and pierce the enemy’s body with the spear
As you can see, the protagonist in Ride and Cut has no special abilities. AI and NPC can perform operations that players can do, but it is precisely because of this that players can experience being on the battlefield as a medieval commander. , the unique experience of personally commanding soldiers.
Swing a long sword in person, charge with the enemy, and finally slash it under the horse, and command the cavalry to charge the enemy’s weak point. Every battle makes our blood boil, as if to make up for our growing up in a peaceful land. The desire to fight this primal need.
Scalability
Here we need to briefly introduce the production company of Qi and Chopping – TaleWorlds.
Qician was originally just a DEMO developed by the husband and wife for fun in 2004, but when they uploaded the game to the online forum, they gained a large number of fans. After getting the support from the players, Qician started from a simple model. , and gradually turn to commercial games with mature systems.
At the same time, the history from the player community also makes Qijian extremely inclusive to players.
In Steam’s creative workshop, there are 333 independent mods (4400+ on Nexus), and there are dozens of completely independent scripts, that is, players have deleted most of the systems on the basis of the original version. , making it a brand new game, and it can be said that every script in it is a brand new game.
The close connection with the player community has made the Qician community active for ten years.
Epilogue
“Mount and Blade” was launched in 2004, and “Warband”, which is well known to players, was released in 2010. In 2022, TaleWorlds set the release date of the official version of “Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord” on October 25th. After 18 years of research and development, Mount and Blade 2 has finally ushered in a look that can be proudly displayed to the public.
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