It’s almost harvesting season
The Mount & Blade series began with the release of the titular game in 2008, followed by the more popular Mount & Blade: Warband1 and the most recent Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord in 2020.
There were also the DLCs Napoleonic Wars and Viking Conquest and spinoff Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword which took the game’s engine and mechanics and put them in various historical eras2 - while a few other licensed uses of the engine did similar without the branding, and there were a variety of mods for major fantasy universes and other historical periods not covered.
The main games, though, are set in the mostly-not-fantastical3 historically-themed world of Calradia. The original game and Warband cover this in a setting reminiscent of the High Middle Ages, while Bannerlord is a prequel at the equivalent of the Fall of Rome.
The game involves wandering the map while recruiting mercenary soldiers, staking your side with one of several kingdoms, bouncing between them as a sword for hire, or trying to establish your own realm. When you run into a battle, you can run through the battle both as the individual lord and commanding the troops you bring with you4. It was an early pioneer in the wave of medieval combat simulators, where direction of sword swings, momentum, etc. mattered.
Also… the games are jank. They’re very rough around the edges, the graphics and polish aren’t amazing, and the much focused-on “realism” of combat is full of inaccuracies and oddities. But despite that… they’re quite fun. The combat is addictive and really gives the impression of feeling powerful when your personal skill is winning the day, and smart when your soldiers are handling things.
In terms of inspiration for The Death of Arthur, I find the game really evokes the wandering knight fantasy in ways a lot of other games don’t, and while you can start really down on your luck (too poor and common-born to be the gentry) and will end very powerful (nobility if not royalty… or higher), the main gameplay is built around that mid-level gentry life.
Footnotes
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I’ve heard suggestion that this was before the adoption of Early Access games, but the original game was effectively that. ↩
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The Napoleonic wars, Viking Age Britain, and the Deluge in 17th-century Poland, respectively. ↩
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There’s a zombie plotline in the original (or maybe just the first patches of the original? It clearly wasn’t the direction they went with Warband at least), as I understand it, and a few easter eggs or strange events - but nothing outright mythical. ↩
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Sort of a more in-person Total War if that’s what you’re more familiar with. ↩