Mount & Blade is the ideal game for those who want to exist, without the need for a pesky pre-written story, in a medieval setting that features five kingdoms full of lords and nobles, castles and villages, and loads and loads of combat. Good lord, the combat. If you want to mount a warhorse and gallop into combat alongside soldiers you’ve recruited, paid and helped to train, wielding sword or lance, bow or javelin, pike or mace, then this is your game.

In Mount & Blade, which is designed by the independent developer TaleWorlds, you are an adventurer in the medieval world of Caladria. At the start of the game, you’re required to fill out a back story that determines your initial set of skills and abilities. The back story is nifty in that it allows you to determine your history as a young child, a youth and a young adult. Your choices in this regard fit into several archetypes. Were you raised the son of a thief? A wild child of the steppes? A nobleman or merchant’s daughter? The choices you make in detailing the phases of your young life logically fit into the kind of initial character you play.

If you spend all of your time out on the plains, you’ll start out much stronger at riding and using a bow, for example. The only aspect of this kind of character generation that’s a bit bizarre is that you can have wild swings in your character’s history. You can start out as the child of a street thief, and move on to be a page in a noble court and then end up apprenticing for a merchant. Not the likeliest of backgrounds. In any case, once you select your history you then select a life-changing event that drives you to leave the life you knew and become an adventurer. Were you cast out? Did somebody wrong you and leave you motivated for revenge? Did you lose a loved one? It’s up to you.

At its heart, this game is an RPG, so all these choices have an affect on your starting skills. Your character has the usual set of attributes: Strength, Agility, Intelligence and Charisma. But there’s also a large set of skills that are grouped into specific classes. There are Personal Skills, like Power Strike (affects your combat damage) and Inventory Management (how much you can carry). There are Party Skills that come into play as you recruit soldiers to join you, like Tactics (affects your Battle Advantage) and Tracking (allows you to track the footprints of anything moving across the world map). And there are two Leader Skills: Prisoner Management (how many prisoners you can hold) and Leadership (how many troops you can command). Finally, there is an additional set of weapon proficiencies that determine how skilled you are with various classes of weapons.

The only real problem with this in depth beginning is that it sets the expectation that the choices you make here are going to have some affect on the game’s story. They don’t. Since this game has no set story, it’s all just a way to configure your initial character skills and starting location. If you enter the world motivated by “revenge” you’ll never find out who wronged you. You’ll never exact that revenge. It’s an implied plot point that doesn’t actually exist in the game and that’s a bit of a letdown. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to get over it.