Ok now I can give my opinion on this, since I've actually played now:
First off, there seems to be an issue with wonkified graphics with ATI cards. Easily solved by updating my drivers though.
Once I did that, I got into a game where you were attacking a castle. Was pretty fun, but would've been nice had it rotated between attacking/defending every round.
Essentially you run up the castle (with shields held high), dodging between cover, and when you get the walls you have to raise the siege equipment (in this case, a ladder) by holding F til a bar fills up. Fills faster the more people work on it. Once that's up you can get on the walls.
Ideally, you should all rush in at once, as going in solo is suicide. But people are afraid of death in this game same as any other game, so you just gotta kinda hide behind someone who's going in and try to support them since they think they can wtframbo everything on their own (people will literally back down if they see you going in, they want to do it solo I guess).
Once you get on the walls, you quickly find out that shields are about 2 or 3 hits at best. Then they break. You can, however, pick up a fallen person's shield and use that instead.
Oh, also, the defenders can knock your ladder down too if no one is on it.
After that we went to a ruins type of map. It was the Vaegirs vs the Khergit. If you know anything about the game, you know what happened. The Vaegirs were stuck with their shitty spears while the Khergit got bows, bows, and more bows. Frustrating to say the least.
Archery needs serious nerfing in this game. I've always said archery would be king in Warband and wasn't wrong. Bows shoot entirely too fast and you only get about a 60 degree shield arc to defend against them on horse back. Doesn't work too well.
But if you can get through the arrow hail, you'll find that you've probably been destroying them all this time, but didn't realize it. Why? Because whenever you swipe, and hit someone, there's no feed back. So all those misses I'd been getting were actually hits, just there's no way to tell you actually hit someone. Luckily their is feedback when YOU get hit, else it'd be infinitely frustrating.
Oh and speaking of cavalry: you get on your horse, switch to sword, run at an infantry....and swing right over his head. Currently swords don't hit infantry very well except for the downward slash. So no lopping off heads until this is changed.
What else? Oh gear. You start off with a bunch of free gear. Enough to get you going, but maybe not keep you going. As you and your team get kills, you get more gold. Every time you respawn, you rebuy your equipment (if you changed from the Free default items) but it does this automatically every round, so you just have to buy new equipment whenever you want to change your load out. No current 'favorites' saving options, though.
Let's see....infantry vs archers is worthless at the moment. No way to counter them without cavalry to run them down. Also they don't only get 30 arrows like in the game; they instead get 100 arrows, so no chance of bleeding them dry. Shields are worthless as a defense as they break too easily and they don't cover your head and feet, so they just aim around your shield.
Any equipment/horses your enemies drop is usable by you. In fact, one of the archers I was chasing down shot out my mount from under me, then got off his mount so he could kite me. I just grabbed his mount at that point and ran him down.
Lances do couched damage when stabbed (vs actually being couched). Not sure if this was intended or not, but either way they're easy to avoid.
I think that's it. Other than that it was M&B as you'd expect. Pretty fun, through all the current flaws. Has real potential IMO.
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