Mount & Blade - Retrospective

Mount & Blade retrospective from PC Gamer

"I took some fencing lessons, but I’m not an athletic guy," says Armağan Yavuz, founder and CEO of TaleWorlds. "I was just more interested in the idea of fencing." A fascination with melee combat—how it feels, how it works, how it plays—drove the development of Mount and Blade, the game developed by Yavuz and his wife, İpek Yavuz, and released in 2008.

"My initial idea was to get the swordfighting element right," Yavuz says from his home in Ankara, Turkey. "I tried to make the combat part of the game more involved and more interesting. If all you had to do was clicking, there wasn't enough to keep a hardcore gamer interested… I wanted a mechanic that gave you more decisions and relied on reflexes and combined elements like horse riding and blocking… You really had to hit a good sweet spot to be intuitive, immersive, and easy to grasp, but complicated enough that you don’t get bored with it after a few hours."

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