Mount and Blade: My Kingdom for a Sand Castle! An inadvertant Eve Online comparison!

Yes, my horse is castle trained...

Bought the game Mount and Blade recently for $20 at a store. I'd played the demo ages ago and was always heart broken when play would stop because I'd reached the max demo level.

But no more! And I think the game deserves a few posts, the first being an observation it reminds me of eve online. Except it actually has a point. Harsh to eve online? Well, is there an actual king position in even online? There is in mount and blade and you can eventually take it and become king.


But beneath that, doing trade runs, fearful of some bad guy popping out of the blue with far superior force - going deep into danger territory for high gains. It does remind me of eve, except since it has the king condition (or even helping NPC's become king of a land), it doesn't feel like I'm just pissing about.

I suppose I'm comparing the two games alot, but how else do you gain perspective except through comparison?

The thing is, in eve it seems all you do is work on building a sandcastle and then...you fret about someone coming and kicking it over, so you build on more to try and stop that (and so have even more to fret over). Eve seems to just be building sandcastles, for no point, but getting 'immersed' simply from the fear of having the pointless sandcastle being knocked over. Not that I'm against making a sandcastle every so often, but generally it's a five minute affair, not months long, and eventually you leave it for the tide to take, not obsess over it like a dragon on it's hord or Golum over the one ring.

I guess some might say not everyone can be king in Eve, or that being the head of a guild (sorry, corporation) is the best you can have. Well, in terms of king forever, granted, and sure the single player game I mentioned would leave you as perma king. But in a mmorpg, a set time of kingship before it becomes up for grabs again would fit what I'm talking about just fine. Essentially the ability to finish the game, because just like you can win monopoly, there will be another game after - that doesn't mean you unwin that other game. Same with a mmorpg - you win the mmorpg. Then it restarts, maintaining the bulk of it's set up, but it's a restart.

Well, this devolved into mmorpg theory. Mount and Blade is to blame because it's fun as a single player game. If a mmorpg wouldn't be fun (for a certain demographic) as a single player game, it's basically just a scam. If that sounds harsh, consider whether your prepared to consider it a fact, or if you've pigeon holed it as insult, then used that pigeon hole as justification to pigeon hole it again as 'simply can't be true'.