Mount & Blade: Warband (2010)

  One of the first recommendations I was given after I started playing video games on Steam, was that of Mount & Blade: Warband (2010). The reason became obvious to me after the first few hours of playing, this 3rd-person medieval fighting simulator not only is set in a realistic fantasy world but allows you to make your own stories. Whatever faction, style of life, and even companions you keep are left up for your decision. You always begin the same though, as a nothing peasant or low-level lord with no claims to land, trying to make an honest wage in the world. You can either bend the knee to a higher noble (becoming a vassal of him or her), gain renowned in the land as a helpful hand during the war (setting your price to conduct war as a mercenary band), or become a bloodthirsty cut-throat that pillages across lands with a band of thieves. Those are just some of the many ways that one may reach a point of accomplishment, of course, this game being open-world, there is never really an end-point.

In addition to the main game, a larger and thriving modding community has kept this now 10-year-plus game alive. Some were made to purely add content to the main story, while others recreate worlds known in pop culture. Mods that add the complexity of the Game of Thrones or Star Wars Universes, constructing new games with the engine of Warband. Another aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked is the historical community mods that have been popular online for Warband for over a decade. The Napoleonic Mod specifically was so popular that the game’s team created a DLC with the modding team that designed the original mod.

Company of Heroes (2006-2023)

Company of Heroes Three Artwork

Released near the end of WWII fever in media, Company of Heroes (2006) was one of the first real-time strategy games that I played which had been set during the era and felt "realistic" to an extent. The gameplay of resource gathering, in-direct control, and unit management made me feel like a real commander of a squad, platoon, and even the aforementioned company. The sequel, Company of Heroes 2 (2013) takes the player to the Eastern Front of Europe to view the brutality and destruction present on the shores of Stalingrad or the outskirts of Moscow. Currently, the online sequel still has a thriving competitive and casual community, additional content to the game like the American and British forces of the Western Front has changed the foundation of these scenes many times. A Third game is due to release in February of 2023, taking place in the under-represented Italian Theater of war!

Age of Empires (1997-2022)

One of the first Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games I played growing up was strangely Age of Empires III (2005). Maybe it was my age or the era of history that it depicted but before I played its predecessor Age of Empires II (1999), I had several years in number three. Many people associate the series with the second game because of the accessibility and common appearance on dad's old 1998 Dell. While this wasn't my experience, clearly a game that focused on the Colonial/Imperial ambitions of the 16th-19th century rather than the pure conquest and domination aspects of the 12th-15th century (like number two) made enough sense to me. This is even more obvious in both the remake of Age of Empires III (2020) and the recently released Age of Empires IV (2022). While both will always have a place in my heart as a historian, the Third game helped me understand a lot about pre-modern history. An aspect of my studies that I still use every day in most of my fieldwork here in the United States.