Mount & Blade

Choosing the best thing out of a pile of really good things is always a tough decision, but hey, we're used to it. You too can participate in the careful choicemaking by voting for your favorite mod and indie game of the year over at Mod DB and Indie DB, where the top 100 nominations were just plucked from a gargantuan pool of over 9,000 mods and 5,500 indies.

With friendly vote buttons large and in charge until December 21, each database's 100 selections are sorted by genre and game for easy perusal. Numerous strong contenders vie for your mouse-click's thumbs-up, including noteworthy entries DayZ, The Dark Mod, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, and Natural Selection 2.

Current favorites leading the pack are Half-Life 2's powerful mod lineup—among which Black Mesa and our own 2011 Mod of the Year No More Room in Hell count themselves among the ranks—and role-playing indie games. You'll find Legend of Grimrock, Dear Esther, Mount & Blade: Warband, and others in the latter category. But like everyone's slowly expanding backlog of shame, plenty of other potentials yearn for your attention. Head to both award pages for the full lists.

You might remember developers Flying Squirrel from their work on the multiplayer Mount & Blade expansion Napoleonic Wars, but one look at their first standalone project, the brilliantly ambitious Battle Cry of Freedom, and that short sulky Frenchman will be forever banished from your mind. Like Assassin's Creed 3, it's set during the American Civil War, but not the American Civil War as imagined by a grumpy bartender lying in a sci-fi sunbed. Read on for details, including mention of the 500-player(!) battles.

Here it is: whoa, there's going to be 500-player battles. Actually, there's a '+' in there too, so the game may be capable of supporting even more. Other things we can expect: historically accurate maps, uniforms and weapons, a "completely destructible environment", 3D voice chat, 5X5 km big maps and, perhaps best of all, "special musician units with drums, fifes, fiddles or trumpets, able to play historically accurate tunes." It appears as if combat will be largely similar to that seen in Mount & Blade, but with a bigger focus on muskets, obviously.

Flying Squirrel are taking donations on their homepage via their own form of Kickstarter, and at the time of writing they've raised just over a grand of their surprisingly low 60,000 Euros goal. 20 Euros is the minimum donation needed to bag a digital copy on release (plus early beta access), though if you have a spare million, the developers promise to "personally fly over to you and host the most awesome party you have ever had in your life". Hey now - I've been to a roller disco. I'm not sure anything will ever compete with that.

Snowbird Games, creators of Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword, have announced their upcoming project, Caribbean, that brings many of the mechanics of M&B to a 16th-century swashbuckling setting. The Mount and Blade series is definitely in that "high investment, high reward" category that only really works on the PC (with the likes of EVE, Dwarf Fortress, and Day Z). It's also about as close as you can get to a full-blown Game of Thrones RTS.

If commanding hundreds of scallywags in real-time boarding missions interests you, read on.

Snowbird's announcement cites a trove of ambitious features, including:

Sea battles with intuitive and easy control system;
The real-time boarding fights that throw player in the centre of the action;
Detailed management and customization of both the fleet and the crew;
Complex siege system allowing the players to storm forts, harbors or entire cities;
Different kinds of artillery: shipboard cannons, mortars and howitzers;
Random events system that keeps players question their decisions during their voyage;
True ‘Carribean’ atmosphere of the vast and dangerous world;
Unique NPCs whose design based on the real historical figures;
Various multiplayer modes featuring the sea and land battles, boarding and sieges.

 
The devs say you should be able to get your hands on the buccaneering goodness this September.