First of all I know there is a thread on Mount & Blade, but the author is no longer active, and the information is long out of date and so useless to anyone who reads it.
Mount & Blade began life as a small project between a Turkish man - Armagan, and his wife Ipek. It has been in beta for a number of years, and has grown exponentially into it's final release.
Mount & Blade is a third person medieval fighter with a unique combat system. You can wield a range of weapons, from swords, to polearms, to bows. In melee the player controls the direction of the hit, to best break a unit's guard and take them down. In ranged the game plays sort of like a shooter, you have a reticle (optional) and the arrows/bolts/thrown weapons drop realistically, all of these can also be done by horseback, so your character has a variety of ways to take out his foes.
As an adventurer in the fictional land of Calradia you are free to take whatever path you wish, ally with one of the five factions and crush your enemies, carve your own empire into Calradia, or even lead a life of pacifism, merely knocking out raiders when necessary and trading goods between towns. It is completely up to you and you are not pushed to do anything. However, the most fun part of the game is of course combat, and you can build up, and personalise your own army to suit your tastes, the only limits to how large it is, is your skills, there is no hard limit in the game. It's very possible to have battles between thousands of troops.
However, as any fan of
Mount & Blade will tell you, there is only so much about the game that can be put into text, it is something you really need to experience, fortunately there is a demo, the only restriction in the demo is you can't go past level 6.
Download the demo today! <--- demo dl
Even when you have bought the full game, you have not seen the full potential of
Mount & Blade. The vanilla game is immensely enjoyable, however, the thing that gives the game it's most replayability and addictiveness are the user created mods. Mods are incredibly easy to make for
Mount & Blade and the community has wasted no time in creating many mods for the game, ranging from high fantasy, to Roman Europe, to extensions of the vanilla game.
Mods are largely a subjective choice, so it is best to look through what is available
Here.
However there are a few that really help.
Graphical Enhancement - Making the game look up to scratch.
Battle Size Changer - Allowing the battle size to be increased to up to 1000 men fighting at once, anything more than 200 can make the game prone to crashing however.
There's really no excuse for not trying out the demo of the game, and if you wish to buy it there are two ways to go about it. You can buy it directly from the
Mount & Blade store. Or you can buy it via steam, it is cheaper to buy it from the store, at $29.99 or £20.99.
If you're still not convinced about downloading it and try it out, and wish to see some media, here are some screens that I shamelessly found and robbed from the screenshot thread on the taleworlds forum.
Mods make this game what its worth also.
Subject: Mount & Blade 
Thu Oct 15, 2009 10:44 pm