

Warband rates my system between 25%-45% no matter what I do. Original Mount & Blade with all graphics options completely maxed out rates my system as 87% performance and it actually runs great. I can pretty much run any game on this machine with the graphics effects maxed out at 2560x1600 resolution including on Mount & Blade - but with Warband the game chokes into a slide show even if I disable various effects and reduce the graphics burden. My PC is a 4GHz 8-core CPU with 32GB of 1866MHz RAM and a 2GB Radeon 7850 video card. The graphics are slightly better in Warband which is a nice improvement but sadly the game runs incredibly slow for me even on the lowest settings. If someone started with Warband and had no prior frame of reference then they probably wouldn't know the difference and would just get used to the controls in the game, but when you have probably 200-300 hours of gameplay in the first game and try Warband out I find it quite awkward. I don't care for that at all, I can't get the level of control I had in the first game now. The lance control has 3 configurable options: Automatic, manual (easy) and manual (hard), I've tried all 3 and the latter one is the closest to how it works in the original game but it's still not quite right. completely free form, but in Warband it seems like the game forces a scripted swipe of the sword in a specific direction, and forces the lance to jump from the left to middle to the right. The first game feels like you're in complete control of the swordplay, polearm, joust lance etc. The melee combat is very very different than the first game. There's a lot of cool new stuff in the game but it's not quite all a bouquet of roses IMHO.

After playing the original game now for a month straight I just tried out Warband last night for several hours. Still getting used to the new feel for melee. Yeah, I sometimes wonder what the game would be like if more than fire could be friendly, but I have a hard enough time getting near enough on horseback to cream some guy nearby that I'd not be a fan of cutting through my friends to get at the bad guy.
