The villagers much more present in Viking Conquest's town are an almost entirely aesthetic addition, and yet they do so much to make the game seem much more real and immersive in that fashion, to say nothing of the towns themselves being much larger, and featuring many more buildings than just the services. For example, whenever you enter a town now, instead of a dry list of options, you now get a dry list of options and a picture of the town, complete with villagers simulating their daily lives.
It's funny though, because while the higher-resolution textures are what many might consider the visual upgrade to the game, I actually found the interface improvements much more compelling. There are however quite a few ratherĮxemplary visual upgrades to Mount & Blade I had a lot of time to think about that when I was crashing to desktop every 10 minutes or examining another texture that flat-out refused to load.
It's quite a shame really, and to me, as I've stated, it really seems indicative of a lacking QA regimen. There's a lot of just rough edges that show a lack of attention to detail as well - ferries show you getting across the river on a horse rather than a boat, there are several dialogue options that can put you in an endless loop, and some textures are noticeably much lower-resolution than others.
There's not really any pattern to the frame drops, with some of them happening on a mostly empty field fighting five enemies as often as it does in the large town scenes where it might at least be somewhat understandable. Considering that I get well over 200 frames per second on the most rigorous settings of Mount & Blade: Warband, it seems rather obvious that there are optimisation issues with the expansion module from top to tail, so to speak. Speaking of optimisation, the game has frequent frame drops, oftentimes sometimes well below 30 frames per second.
Load times in particular are something indicative of poor organisation and optimisation on the mod end, and it seems like there's a big tradeoff in the texture load/cache time to have the higher res textures that, while they really do add to the game, don't make up for the load time enough, or the low-poly models they're being slathered over. To a certain degree, it's excusable - the mod is making the engine do a lot of things that it quite frankly was not designed to do - but only to a point. This is a game where the QA department was obviously either asleep at the wheel, or non-existent. Crashes to desktop are constant, load times are obscene even if I put it on my modest SSD (sometimes into several minutes), textures often do not load, and the game suffers from less a case of rough edges and more just being rough all around. Let's get that out of the way first, because while there's other criticisms of Viking Conquest this is by and large the main one and the largest one: Viking Conquest is a bug-ridden mess, to the point that for this reason alone I am loathe to recommend the game in its current state.
The technical aspects of the game are extremely lacking Even my Australian readers have not seen this many bugs, let me assure you. Fans of the titular Brytenwalda mod first designed by this team are no doubt wondering: is it as good as Brytenwalda? No, not even close, to speak frankly, but it's not all bad. It has a kind of strange and oftentimes questionable dedication to historical accuracy that offers a Britain, France, and Denmark of old to explore and conquer as you see fit.
Mount & Blade: Viking Conquest is an expansion pack DLC for Mount & Blade: Warband designed by Brytenwalda and published by Mount & Blade's original developer, Taleworlds Interactive.
Editor's Note: Maiyannah's copy of this expansion was provided free of charge by a friend.