Mount & Blade - Download on the 19th

…or maybe Monday. Armagan has announced existing owners of Mount & Blade will be able to download v1.0 on Monday the 19th. Since the 19th is actually Friday, that sounds even better:

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to announce that we'll make the final release ready for download tomorrow Monday 19th. We will also release the first bug-fix patch which not only fixes some minor bugs, but also has improved performance and optimizations.

My deepest thanks to you all for supporting us all this way and making M&B possible.

See you tomorrow,

More information.

I've already been playing it (my original purchase was via GamersGate, so all I had to do was redownload).

Not much new from what I can tell, but it's a lot more polished than the last beta.

I was contemplating buying it last night on Direct2Drive, but as I was watching the preview video I noticed that the combat animations looked horrible.

I thought I read/heard that they planned to include a variety of animations, but it just seemed like the same one over and over again. Maybe it was a beta video, who knows.

It was *only* $30, so I might pick it up anyway, but the visuals in the preview vid didn't stir any breeze around the hem of my kilt (how's that for bastardizing a metaphor?)

A word of warning folks (not sure if you are aware). Still red texture bug with ATI on 48** cards. Purely ATI drivers problem, but makes game unplayable in Dx9. Dx7 looks very bad so i don't think it is a solution really.

The great thing about this game is its gameplay. Best sword game I have ever played, it feels much more realistic than games such as Oblivion without being overcomplicated. It's the only game I have been playing basically non stop for the last few years.

Hopefully, we will have some great mods like we did with the version .808.

The Red Texture issue is NOT a driver issue. The drivers were made before the game. It is the job of the creators to make sure that their software works on the platform that it is targeted at.

Originally Posted by Wonkthesane
The Red Texture issue is NOT a driver issue. The drivers were made before the game. It is the job of the creators to make sure that their software works on the platform that it is targeted at.

Then the testing possibly wasn't good enough.

The argument of "the drivers were made before the game" doesn't count for me because of that.

Cultures, for example, always had a "pink touch" because of the driver, I read, but it was never fixed - not on ATIs side, and not from the developers' side, of which I heard that they didn't see a way to fix it, because it was ATI related only.

Originally Posted by Wonkthesane
The Red Texture issue is NOT a driver issue. The drivers were made before the game. It is the job of the creators to make sure that their software works on the platform that it is targeted at.

From what I've gathered, it used to work and was broken by a particular ATI driver release, obviously one made AFTER the game. The latest ATI driver release candidate fixes the problem and seems to work for several players who have tried it, but leads to frequent crashes during load screens for me, so I'm going back to DX7 which is rock solid. I didn't notice a huge difference with DX9, to be honest, mainly things like water being more realistic, but most of the objects in the world looked just the same.

Originally Posted by rbtroj
I was contemplating buying it last night on Direct2Drive, but as I was watching the preview video I noticed that the combat animations looked horrible.

There's no need to make the decision based on just a preview video. You can download the game from the devs and play for a few levels (until level 6?) in order to determine whether the animations bother you or not.