Mount & Blade

As someone who enjoys medieval warfare, strategy, FPS, and a good story, how will Mount & Blade suit me? I've never touched the game, but seen a lot of friends on Steam playing it. Is it worth the price? What is the aim of the game and is there much to do? I've looked into it a bit, but I'm still a bit lost! :P

Necroposting, but I think you'd like it. Make sure to watch some videos before purchasing.

Mount & Blade was the first game and is single-player (campaign) only. It had some mods that were made for it before Mount & Blade: Warband came out, but most have since migrated to Warband (which has single-player campaign as well as various multiplayer modes). So if you are to buy one of the two, Warband is the superior choice.

There have been several spin-off games like Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword, and Blood and Gold: Caribbean! ... These games also have multiplayer but are fairly dead, and have almost no mods. I cannot recommend these unless you enjoy their very "niche" settings. Caribbean! is cool in that there are full on naval battles like in Sid Meier's: Pirates! and has more tactical battles.

Finally there's the DLC question. Warband has two: Napoleonic Wars, and Viking Conquest. NW once had a very large community (I led a regiment/clan of 15 or so guys at one point), and while there aren't as many events now there's still plenty of groups that play on weekends (or you can just play solo). NW has no singleplayer component, but I believe there is a mod in progress that uses the mod's assets and lets you follow around Napoleon and fight in his battles.

Viking Conquest has both single-player and multiplayer. The singleplayer version has naval battles where you can sail around from Ireland to Norway to Holland and everything in between. You can play a sandbox game in VC (you can choose to start as a count or king instead of just a wandering warrior), and there is also a story mode where you get to meet Ragnar Lodbrok's sons and do their dirty work. The multiplayer bit has game modes nearly identical to Native (what people call the unmodded base game of Warband) but usually far fewer players.

Mount & Blade: Bannerlord is being worked on. It is a full fledged revamp of Warband with new graphics and plenty of new features, but it will probably be in development for quite a while, and people with lower end computers will likely stick with Warband.

TL;DR - Get Warband, and see if either of its DLC interests you before getting them.