The Prison Break Quest, and the Town Designs of Mount&Blade:Warband

Did you know that Mount and Blade has 55 quests?

I’ve been playing Mount and Blade: Warband, on and off since it came out. In my latest playthroughs, i’ve been fascinated with the cities themselves. They are all unique, and specifically designed, which is something i never cared about as a child playing this game.

All the towns in this game are intricately designed. Just take the villages for example, some are mountainous, the houses are located on top of hills. Some are flat, with trees around. As an example, here are two villages:

The Chelez village is in the mountainous areas to the southwest, which is the homeland of the Rhodoks. The Odasan village is in the homeland of the Nords.

Turns out Odasan has ruins before you come to the village center. The Wiki article reads:

“It has a total of six structures, one of which is a windmill, while stone ruins around the perimeter seem to imply it had at one time been a much bigger or more important location.”

There is so much intricate beauty to be found in these villages, and in the castles and cities. So, what are the ways we can interact with them?

Why would you even walk around?

What would make you even walk around these locations? There are some ways we can interact with them:

You can visit the town square. This option is available for all castles, cities and villages. What will you find inside is different for each.

The game offers you characters to interact with, who in turn give you quests and trade with you. In the single-player game, they are the only things you can interact with in the cities, besides doors and gates. So the only reason we would explore a city, is to go talk to one. So, we are looking for people to interact with.

• In cities, You can find merchants. They are scattered around the town, and you can walk around to find them. However, you can access all of them through the in-game menus, so there is no point in looking for them yourself. Interacting with them doesn’t offer anything but what you can already access through the in-game menus, so you just end up doing the trade without walking around in the cities.

• There are buildings you can go into. These are: inns, jailhouses, the arena, and the castle (of the city). The only one you can’t go into from the in-game menus, is the jailhouse. You can access all others on the menus, so you don’t really have to do any walking.

Infront of the jailhouse there is a guard, who you can talk to about the people inside. There are some quests that require you to steal keys from the guard or persuade him to let you go inside. There are captive lords inside. If you are given a quest, you can help them escape. But, there’s no point visiting this building unless you have the quest.

You visit the other buildings all the time. You visit the inn for your prisoners, and the castle to talk with the other ladies and lords. These are the two indoor spaces you visit the most. But.. you don’t have to walk around the city to get to them. You can just access them from the in-game menus.

• Then there is the guild master, the only quest giver in a city you can’t access from the in-game menus.

The guild master can give you some quests that are very fun to do, so it’s nice to visit this NPC from tiem to time. They can also give quests that make you visit indoor locations, like confronting criminals inside the city.

• In villages, you can find the village elder. You have to enter the town to find this person. This is the only person you can have business with in a village. They are the merchant and the quest giver.

For villages, the village elder is like the person who combines the merchant and the guild master into one. You can ask them for quests and buy things from them.

• The castles don’t have any merchants or guild masters. They only have a jailhouse and the castle, where the lords and ladies are. So there isn’t anyone at a castle you have to walk around to talk to.

I went to a town and a village to take screenshots of the village elder and the guild master.

Now that we know the different options we have available, let’s see what kind of quests we have.

Which quests make you visit towns?

Our main question here is, “How we can interact with the towns in MBW?” So here is a list of quests i picked out, which force you to enter towns, villages, or castles in order to accomplish their tasks:

• Hunt down fugitive: you must enter a village to locate and defeat a fugitive.
• Meet spy: you must enter a city to talk to townspeople, and find the spy.
• Assassinate local merchant: enter the city to fight a local merchant to clear debt.
• Rescue prisoner: sneak into the castle’s jail, and break out a prisoner.
• Deal with night bandits: enter a city at night, to fight some bandits.
• Deliver wine to inn: you must enter the inn to deliver wine to the inkeep.

This is a worrisomely short list. There are only a few quests that require you to go into a town. Besides the jail quest, none fully interacts with the environment.

You have to go in to the inn and talk to the inkeep for the wine delivery quest, but you can access inns through the in-game menu, and there’s nothing to do besides talk to the innkeep to complete the quest.

For the spy meeting quest, you do have to go into a town square. You have to interact with the townspeople and find the spy, but the only way things play out is by you finding the NPC that’s the spy, and ending the quest.

On the other hand, the jail quest can have different outcomes. You can fail to sneak in, you might get captured on the way out, and even become a prisoner yourself. There are also multiple phases to the quest: you have to enter a town square, find the jail, interact with the guard, enter the building, and interact with the prisoners inside, and you can even have them join you. At the end, if you fail to protect your prisoner on the way out, they will be recaptured and you’ll fail the quest.

Longing for the immense potential

I feel like there’s a lot of room to improve here. The jail quest seems so detailed compared to all the others. What are the specific things that make it more interactive?

the jail quest design

In the jail quest, you are asked to break a prisoner out of jail. You are told to go to a castle, and sneak in, to get them out.

When you arrive at your destination and successfully sneak into the castle, you enter the castle grounds. Remember, there aren’t many quests that require you to enter town squares, so the jail quest does that too. You must then locate the jail building, and talk to the guard in front of the door. You ask them about the prisoners inside. You can bribe them to go in. But you must defeat them to get their keys.

This is also unique, because you have something to do with a specific building. Not all quests do this. As far as i know, the wine quest is the only one that makes you enter a specific building—which is the inn!

You also interact with the jail guard. So few quests actually have auxillary characters you can interact with, and help you get the job done. I actually can’t think of any. In all of them, you talk to an NPC to accomplish a task, but you never really have anyone around that can offer you other interaction options related to your quest. You just talk to the NPC you need, and that’s it.

For the imprisoned lord situation, you can even talk with the elder of a nearby village to get them to create a distraction for you while you try to sneak into the city. I’ve never done this myself, and learned about it from reading online. One quest, so many options.

Next, is the breaking out part.There might be multiple prisoners inside. You can talk to each one, not just the one who you’re supposed to rescue, and ask them to fight alongside you on your way out.

This is also very very unique. The game gives you the option to talk to NPCs and get them to follow you, which is kind of like the caravan guarding quests, or the escort quests, but you don’t really make them follow you inside the game in those. Instead, you talk to them on the in-game menus, and they just trail behind you on the world map, or join your party. In this quest, on the other hand, you actually talk to them in-game and they join your party in the next phase. It’s like a mechanics trick, they don’t actually change NPC behavior real-time, but it’s really close.

You then break out of jail, and fight the guards who surround you. If you and the lord you’re rescuing make it out without getting stopped, you will have finished the quest.

Now there’s so much functionality implemented here! You can talk to NPCs and your interactions can trigger in-game events, so that’s coded in. (For example, you can bribe the guard to enter the jail.) You can enter buildings and interact with things, so that’s also coded in. You can talk to NPCs and make decisions affecting the flow of the game. (You can ask the prisoners to either join you, or stay back while you fight off the alerted guards.) Your in-game performance even affects the outcomes of the quest. (If the prisoner gets captured on the way out, they will stay in the castle, and you won’t complete the quest.)

What else do you need to design some amazing quests?

An ode to modding comunities and Taleworlds past

Oh what a beautiful game this is, and so much potential it has in its single player! I was around for long enough to experience the multiplayer, which was all the reason you’d ever need to play this game. However, there’s so much more that could have, AND STILL CAN BE, done in the single player.

So many mechanics are already in the game. We can use them to mod our own quests.

The native Warband game’s location designs are exquisite. Whoever designed this game really cared about urban design. The buildings look like authentic medieval architecture. And I can see how much effort went into designing all the back alleys, the different shops and the overall geography. It even affects how you play the game! Villages with hills will give you a hard time riding your horse, so it might be smarter to dismount. If a city has a lot of stairs, you might have to spend a lot of time walking around, looking for the guild master.

It feels like every street should hold something to discover, all the buildings should be full of characters to interact with, and each cities’ structure should have a role in how you play the game. Quests can be designed which let you interact more with the world, get to see more of its beautiful design.

This game is dated, but i keep playing it, and this is my homage to it. Thank you Mount and Blade: Warband.