This mod lets you seamlessly fight Crusader Kings 3 battles in Mount & Blade 2

If you like the grand strategy of Crusader Kings 3, but wish it had a little bit of that Total War mojo and let you descend from the map to fight battles in real-time, there's a mod for that. The Crusader Blade mod takes the composition of your armies in Crusader Kings 3, transfers them to Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, and lets you fight the battle there. Then it sends the results back and you pick up your CK3 campaign right where you left off.

It's a wonderful idea, and looking at the videos, seems to work surprisingly well. The massive clashes possible in CK3 have to be represented proportionally by the smaller forces of M&B2, but then, one archer in a Total War battle clearly doesn't represent one human being either.

For the switch from one to the other to work properly you'll need to select a maximum battle size, set Mount & Blade 2 to run in windowed or borderless fullscreen mode, and make sure the mod knows exactly where both game's executables are. You can download Crusader Blade from itch.io, and its creator has a Patreon. Future updates will apparently ensure it's compatible with DLC.

Thanks, Kotaku.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.