Sid Meier didn’t care too much for RPGs. In High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, he complained the genre promised excitement, adventure and plot yet often failed to deliver. As he put it, “… kill this monster, get five exp, kill that monster …”

(Bear in mind, these were RPGs circa 1986. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar set a new high-water mark when it was released in 1985 but other RPGs of the era were mainly content catering to AD&D munchkins.)

He set out to remedy that with Pirates! in 1987 and in the process did away with some RPG conventions. Instead of a rigidly defined plot, the player was free to weave a personal storyline through the many choices the game offered. In lieu of XP and levelling up, players raised their reputation with the ultimate goal being to attain a respectable position in society when their pirate career ended.

Taleworlds, on the other hand, wholeheartedly embraced RPG traditions when designing Mount&Blade and its sequel, Mount&Blade: Warband. The series’ RPG elements are both overt and conventional: there’s stats-driven character development, a party to manage and even NPC allies with distinctive personalities.
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There was nothing quite like Sid Meier’s Pirates! when it was released in 1987. It was a true sandbox in that it was not only nonlinear and open but more importantly, there were multiple roles that were viable within its game space. The player could choose to be a pirate or a pirate hunter, a trader or a plunderer, loyal to a flag or self-serving, motivated by profit or familial obligations. There were numerous choices to be made throughout the course of a campaign, and those choices had enough payoffs, tradeoffs and drawbacks to require deliberation before making a decision. All of that meant each Pirates! playthrough could be a unique adventure.

While Mount&Blade and its sequel, Mount&Blade: Warband, are set in the fictitious Calradia rather than the Caribbean, set on land rather than seas, Turkish developers Talesworlds has done a great job of capturing the Pirates! spirit without slavishly reproducing Sid Meier’s design.

The biggest difference between Mount&Blade and its inspiration is the way combat is handled. Sid Meier didn’t want the Pirates! action sequences to distract from the main flow of the game so combat was simplified and abstracted. The player could command of a fleet of ships in Pirates! but sea battles were resolved through one-on-one battles. Similarly, boarding an enemy ship might see hundreds of sailors do battle yet the outcome hinged on a duel between the individual captains. As a result, battles in Pirates! were quickly concluded, letting the player get back to making interesting choices to craft unique storylines.
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Mount&Blade may have been a 2008 game but in play, it was reminiscent of a two-decade-old design. Since the design in question was the classic Sid Meier’s Pirates!, a design so timeless it’s been ported to multiple platforms over the years with only minor changes since its debut on the Commodore 64 in 1987, this was by no means a bad thing. As far as its development was concerned, however, Mount&Blade was a modern game since it would not have seen the light of day without the Internet.

Designed by Taleworlds, which was originally a husband-and-wife team from Turkey, the game was rejected by publisher after publisher before Taleworlds opted to let gamers themselves fund development by trying a downloadable beta and purchasing a licence for the finished product. This was very much a gamble for all concerned since Taleworlds could not be certain of getting sufficient funds to continue development while gamers who purchased a licence weren’t guaranteed of getting a finished product, good or otherwise.

Fortunately for everyone, the gamble paid off because gamers responded favourably to Mount&Blade’s outstanding mounted combat — no other game does a cavalry charge as  well — and strong word-of-mouth eventually led Paradox Interactive to publish the title. Sales must have been sufficiently impressive to warrant a sequel.
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At a time when game developers seem intent on handling players with kid gloves and are quick to laud trivial accomplishments as achievements (“You took 10 whole steps in the right direction! Go you!”), it scarcely seems conceivable a complex time-consuming game with no victory condition could possibly exist. Yet that’s precisely how Dwarf Fortress is designed. Players are simply expected to lose and the Dwarf Fortress experience is fundamentally about how you lose. To lessen the sting, the game’s creators promise losing is fun.

It is not.

To play Dwarf Fortress in its primary Fortress Mode is to attempt to build something in a hostile environment. It’s an extraordinarily–detailed simulation requiring huge amounts of micromanagement in the beginning, lulling the unwary into believing they have full control over proceedings before viciously disabusing them of that notion. The endgame is always about witnessing that creation succumb to disaster. The stones may still stand, the constructions may remain intact yet the intrepid community that is the heartbeat of every fortress will be destroyed.

The grim final days of a dwarven colony are always a desperate struggle to stave off an unavoidable tragedy. Will the player’s avaricious dwarves, blinded by the promise of subterranean riches, be overrun by hordes of vile goblins or massacred by some ancient behemoth? Or will they instead suffer a less bloody if no less horrifying end, slowly dying of thirst and hunger as their stockpiles run out? It matters little how they meet their final doom, watching it unfold is never fun in the “whee” sense of the word.
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