Modding tools are like building blocks, right? And the thing about building blocks is that ever since 1977 once any set of building blocks was made available to the general public, somewhere, a group of ner– that is to say, devoted fans promptly asked ‘Can we play Star Wars with these?’
So yes, some of these people got their hands on Mount & Blade, basically, and the end result was Star Wars: Conquest. If you haven’t come across it already it’s one of the most ambitious total conversions being worked on for Taleworlds’ sprawling sandbox of medieval hack’n'slash. UserCreated have covered it before, but the team have recently got another release out, so… after spending a few hours struggling to resist the call of the Dark Side, here’s what I thought.
Though not without some significant differences, Conquest is basically a Star Wars reskin of the vanilla game. In its current beta state at the time of writing it’s a 200MB download, from which you can extract a folder which behaves like any other module for Mount & Blade. The Star Wars mythos gives us three factions in place of the original game’s rival kingdoms – the Galactic Empire, Rebel Alliance and the Hutt Cartel.
You’re basically dropped next to your chosen faction’s homeworld, expected to pledge allegiance right off the bat, which (as with the original game) makes their enemies your enemies. The structure remains broadly identical, only castles and villages are now planets and their moons, military outposts, weapons platforms or orbital shipyards. Patrol fleets replace wandering horsemen. Characters from the films replace lords and their vassals.
Though Conquest includes no graphical enhancements as such, some of the visuals are surprisingly effective given the limitations of Mount & Blade’s engine. The galactic map is a good deal more atmospheric than you might expect, a flat black plane dotted with planets, stars and various celestial bodies like a shoal of twinkling marbles. Anyone who loved playing with Mass Effect’s galaxy map will squeal with glee at this. Ships have been fairly well modelled – unlike the original, your mount planetside (a speeder bike) does not carry over to the world map, and you can purchase a range of craft to ferry you and your men through the void.
Some of the character models are notably well done – Imperial stormtroopers, Twileks and Tusken Raiders are some standout examples. One or two exteriors are similarly well set out. But for every piece of eye candy to delight your inner child there’s something not quite right. The engine can’t handle fur; Wookies are plasticine nightmares. The same skybox turns up in all the maps. Everyone shares the same throne room, or bridge, or main hall. The animations are clearly the same flailing matchstick men who followed you from end to end of Calradia.
In fact while the makers are perfectly open about Conquest being a work in progress – which is to their credit – it’s still horribly patchy. Why leave so much of the basic text identical? Sign up with the rebels’ Mon Mothma and it’s the same spiel as it ever was about pledging your steel and defending her legitimate heirs, not to mention she’s referred to as a he. Countless speeches are the exact same medieval bluster as the base game; it seems a strange thing to neglect when you’re working with a universe as storied as Star Wars.
More worryingly, the difficulty curve is suspiciously out of kilter. Missile weapons are now so shockingly damaging, not to mention accurate as to see half your men cut down before they’ve even closed the distance. If you don’t outnumber the enemy by at least three to one you have the mother of all battles on your hands, and taking anything other than a lightsaber into close quarters is suicide, plain and simple. Ships are a grand idea, in theory, but yours is so slow, your scanner half-blind and everything else is so prohibitively expensive you need to take out a loan to finance a new one as fast as possible, or you’ll never be able to catch anyone – any enemies you could actually beat will flee before you can even see them.
At the same time, the drip-feed of minor achievements (small victories turning into larger) still manages to compel you to keep playing. Mounted combat is just as gloriously satisfying as ever, even if the risks are higher – even more satisfying, maybe, given how much faster you’re going on a speeder than a horse when you introduce your lightsaber to someone’s face. And even if the weapons are unbalanced there’s something about coming out on top against impossible odds, hacking through a tightly-packed mob which feels, well, very Star Wars.
Conquest is a work in progress, but it’s a hell of an achievement and it does have that certain spark that elevates a mod from fanboy self-indulgence to something approaching a real labour of love. It isn’t yet up to the level of something like Third Age: Total War, but it does suggest it could be with a bit more polish. It does get a cautious recommendation – unless you’re a fiend with Mount & Blade’s missile combat, be prepared to struggle – but anyone who likes the idea of the mod should certainly snap it up as soon as possible.
And you can trade in Ewok furs. Yes, really. It’s almost enough to make you want to hand over some money right now.
The ModDB page for Star Wars: Conquest can be found here. Plenty of screenshots, art and video clips as well as the mod itself.