@@Stouty IMHO, to use a common LoL quote, just go next. Aka next game. Hopefully there's something good coming just around the corner. Maybe the game you're helping with. Maybe anotther.
After a few thousand hours I've come to the conclusion that instead of advocating for the removal of drags, I will advocate for the removal of Mordhau from my hard drive.
Awesome that Mordhau combat revolves around stuff this isn't explained, always telling new players "oh I know the tutorial taught you you can only counter a kick with a kick but you can actually parry them now"
not to mention all the incorrect loading screen tips that mislead new players, like "parrying a lance will disarm your weapon" which was changed legit like a year ago but the loading tip is still there. i told jax about this and he just said something like "we'll fix this soon"
I’ve played this game for much longer than I should and I can conclusively say, mordhau is malicious for the most part, with its gameplay and with the louder parts of the community who make it very difficult to play with not only manipulating the game mechanics but also through being a toxic piece of waste, still waiting for patchie.
Honestly, when i started playing mordhau, the first rule i had was to never get serious at the game. Whether i suck or not, the adrenaline still gets me happy to play the game when a huge battle is in front of you. Also, as a game dev myself, seeing the mordhau devs not experiment more now is truly sad. They always have the options to innovate, whether it be from talking with the community, etc. Just look at the phasmophobia team, they are working hard to improve their game and its paying off, whether it be with failures or successes. Its by failing that we succeed.
but sweatlords will be angry if dragging is removed and we can't have that! in all seriousness, there are so many things broken with how mordhau works and I feel like if they change the game too much it won't be itself anymore. I don't really oppose the idea, but I'm not sure how they can make the game easier whilst also keeping the game "skill based" if that's the goal
@@wiggly_xd i wound probably say, drags and accels should deal less damage (like a harder hitting glancing blow). And peak hits (center of your screen) should deal some damage, like maybe the same as an accel or drag. This makes it more skillful as drags and accels don't reward as much (but still have tactical uses) and with the punch through damage, this forces your opponent to really have to react to your attack by stepping into or away from your attack before parrying, so as to invoke the accel/drag rule.
@@GameFuMaster The Deadliest Warrior Expansion for Chivalry 1 actually did this. Whenever you'd swing, the beginning and end of your swing would do less damage and whenever you'd thrust, the end of your thrust would do maximum damage while the beginning would do minimum damage. It was a great system, but since the DW Expansion wasn't as popular the idea never really caught on.
Yeah i completely agree. Im not amazing at game development myself but ive released and updated games and continued supporting them well after release using player feedback. and it really saddens me to see the state of mordhau
@@wiggly_xd What I got in trailers before the game came out compared to what I got when the game actually came out, I realized pretty quickly, that while I was enjoying it at the time, the game I wanted wasn't what Mordhau actually was. And I don't know if making the game "easier" is necessarily what people want, but it could still be plenty skill based by simply being a different game. There's also a ton of counterplay to extreme drags (not in all situations), if we're real, it's just that good players will change what they're doing that's supposed to counter it, and people have little respect for a bunch of other things in the game that are absolutely skill based, just like dragging is (consider all the things people will call "gambling" that aren't actually that if you know what you're doing, to start).
I love how every time the "good" playerbase, that is LV80 to +LV200, likes to defend Drags and say that they are fair after they dominate a server, but they start getting really frustrated and saying that "The Animations of this game are Trash", expecially whith Weapons like War Axe and Zwei, if they get destroyed by someone also abusing drags...
Im late to this convo: But the answer to this is obvious. Drags have been around since War of the Roses and Chiv1. Even if the majority of casual players dont like the mechanic; the amount of players who do like drags isnt insignificant. Plenty of players like this style of combat, and thusly encourage it, and will continue to play games with drags. At this point its effectively a split in mentality of the playerbase. This genre is already niche to begin with, so it splinters the player base further. The only medieval combat games that dont include drags are mount and blade to an extent, and for honor.
You can tell the build up of criticisms is pissing off the devs. And good. They created a game intending to improve upon another game with a very specific and well documented downfall, and they can’t even see that they are making the same mistake. Not even when people directly tell them. The writing is on the wall, they are just too arrogant to read it Also the gold grind is still shit
the solution is obvious, make the damage dependant to some extent on the speed of the swing, so if you drag your speed is lower and thus you would do less or no damage, and make the speed damage cap so accels arent a new issue as they would do more damage, or better yet make the "late" hitbox do little or no damage, and make the ealry hitbox also do less damage because you havent gotten enough speed yet. In this way you could do accels and drags as a mixup but do less damage or you could try and hit with the timed sweetspot or something Also, it is obvious in real life you dont try to parry and then do nothing maybe there should be an overhaul on the parry-block, maybe make chambers the only parries and current parries could be made into normal blocks, just look at fighting games, you dont get hit because you miss timed your block, you get hit because either you didnt block or you blocked wrong, as in low or high, and with parries that does requiere some timing and thus chambers would be a perfect substitute
Woah look at that, a basic understanding of science making a game which claims to contain realistic combat work better. I really love Mordhau, I got it recently and am sinking countless hours into it, as somebody who plays a lot of games like Smash Melee I honestly don't mind drags etc but when I was about 5 hours in I was confused at why a "realistic" combat game doesn't have damage affected by swing speed, especially when swing speed is such a huge part of the gameplay. Implementing this fix would completely change Mordhau and I personally would rather it not happen this far into the game's life but it would be incredible in something like Chiv 2, modded Mordhau servers or whatever next first person melee combat game we get.
@@thatguy7548 thing is, after mordhau and chiv 1 I'm not interested in more pvp slasher games they've all sucked so far due to animation abuse and I'm fine with not waiting for another
I really liked it and was pretty disappointed when Mordhau had capped it to a pretty low number, there's just something oddly satisfying in having that extended field of view. Sure it looks very odd for people not used to it but after a while you don't even notice it.
It was one of the main things that ruined Chiv1. It looks laughably ridiculous. You get used to anything when you're with it long enough, but that doesn't make it good. I flat out refused to play like that in Chiv 1. I'd rather lose a fight that looks and feels remotely realistic than endure the warped and fucked up limbs floating around bird like FOV hacks. And that's what it was a hack. I mean literally, there wasn't an option in the game to set it that high, you literally had to hack it, but because Torn Banner are absolute shit they never clamped down on it. (Dragging isn't literally a hack, it's just manipulating the game's physics.)
@@alkaholic4848 There is nothing even remotely realistic in that game to begin with so why draw the line at that. You either like it or you don't - that's how it is for every single other game as well.
@@Kalmo_ Nobody knows what a "real" sword fight or medieval battle is like, even the so called experts. Because it's too deadly to practice in the modern world, so we make assumptions based on crude recreations combined with sketchy historic records. It's all guesswork. So there are parts of the game you can argue all day about how realistic it could be. But seeing someone's arms disconnected from their body, and a fov that stretches and distorts your vision into something completely unrelatable. That is undeniably ludicrously unrealistic. It doesn't even compare to the rest of it.
When they touted that they had believable fights, it was true for like the first 3 or 4 months before people started abusing the animation system. What we ended up with was something that was visually pleasing, but animation wise was basically just a reskinned Chivalry but with less extreme animation abuse; it looks extremely goofy and not fitting. They talk about how palyers don't want to learn these things, where in other games they'll learn certain nuances that give them an advantage; core difference here is the subtlety of it, drags/accels and whatever other bullshit people pull off is glaringly obvious, where as the subtle advantage of sitting at a specific angle to see better isn't going to abused by every single person who plays the game as a meta slave.
"...defy Newton's laws" you know, when I first encountered drags, this was my thought too. I had to trick myself into believing that slowing a weapon down would still be lethal IRL, because I thought the game was aiming for realism and that maybe MY understanding of physics was wrong...
Lmao it's true, the fews one that could still work will be the sledgehammer, the evening star and the maul. Because even moving at 4 m/s a good maul wack in the head can kill an armored knight. (It will not blow or shatter his skull like in Mordhau tho, just smash his head and fold the metal around the helmet).
@@user-ih7iq6bw5o The ES doesn't have the same weight, it is FAR lighter and faster. (2.35 kg for the head with a long handle that makes it easy to use, sometimes it even have less impact than a one-handed mace) Also, I'm using 4 m/s because it's the average speed currently registered for a sledgehammer with a mass of 5 to 15 kg. Medieval one was much heavier. And in Mordhau you swung them faster than that.
That would be actually awesome. Implementing a system similar to Mount & Blade where the damage is based on the speed of the impact, rewarding proper swings over anything else. You can still exploit the animations to perform a reverse swing or drag or whatever to throw off the enemy's timing, but it won't do much, if anything at all, damage wise.
@@rodrigobecerra750 then accels become king and weapons with unreadable accels like the alt mode battle axe or war axe are king. I understand the thought process here and i agree it can sound sexy on paper but in practice i'm not sure about that.
modding tools should've come out way sooner. if the dev is going to be inflexible about the game, at least let casual players flock into custom servers and see what people are willing to play instead of having them play nothing at all. If it's dogshit, that's still an issue, but then at least you can keep some of the casual playerbase who make the bigger servers fun to play on to begin with, and then maybe it's possible from there to create a compromise.
I agree 100% with marox. When I first played chiv and got killed by ballerinas, it didn't put me off. It made me want to learn how to do it as well, it was challenging and fun. I'm not some sperg looking for realism. I want a fighting game with creative moves and high skill ceiling. Unfortunately people disagree with this and for that reason mord and chiv will always remain niche imo.
@@BigPapaMitchell I think stouty put it well, none of it is shown in trailers and in promoted gameplay. It's sort of disingenuous. That doesn't make it a good or bad mechanic. Just false advertising.
I can compare this drag situation with one exploit in a source game Team Fortress 2 i play a lot - a bunny hopping. The main difference is, while a bunny hopping is a minor exploit that requires a lot, LOT of skill to perform consistently and only grants you a somewhat around 20% speed boost and a (potential) 100% melee crits on only one the most helpless and weak subclass in game, drags is: 1 - easy to perform, 2 - grants an ability to bypass almost all defensive techniques in mordhau, and 3 - it is not an exploit in a movement system that only give you 20% speed buff, but it is an exploit in a MAIN mordhau mechanic, a melee system, and more even more, it actually not only breaking the meta gaming - the meta itself is built around drags and other animation abuses. And last but not least: while bunny hopping is very rarely can be met on TF2 and still is fun to play against, the drags on mordhau is very, VERY common and also super not fun to play against it. And, after all that, Valve actually tried to remove bhop from TF2, and triternium did not even try to fix drags...
Well, but bunny hopping has been a thing since Quake 1. It's been a big part of the Arena FPS genre for years. I don't think people would like TF2 as much if they forcefully removed it from the game, along with blast-jumping, because this players have been doing this for years, and probably expected it to be in the game, since it was a feature in TFC before, and in Quakeworld Teamfortress even before that! In fact, some spinoffs, such as Open Fortress or Fortress Forever, bring back bunny hopping in all it's glory, for the most veteran of players. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that TF2 HAS addressed bunny hopping; b-hopping is nothing compared to what it used to be, and removing it completely would piss off a lot of players. Basically, b-hopping in TFC is like dragging in Chiv 1, and b-hopping in TF2 is like dragging in Mordhau or Chiv 2. With that being said, I do think surfing and b-hopping should be removed from CS:GO. That game is not an arena shooter, so it shouldn't have b-hopping, in the same way it lacks most other arena shooter elements.
@@lordtomlluckrahthegreat9014 Yes, sometimes bhop and surfing do breake games like CS:GO or other less arena-styled shooters, but most of the later source games have bhop baasically removed by applying major speed reduction upon landing after jump, so bunny hopping is not as important in later games. Quake and other shooters like quake do rely on bhop much, but these games usuallly make it feel rather fair when you encounter it, it either can be performed rather easily to be accessable by most of the players or rather hard to do to be a true skill-based movement technique that rewards timing and precision. And most importantly, bhop almost always doesn't break the game's style or atmosphere, like, last source game that had bhop speed boosting in at least some capacity that i remember is HL2:DM, and it didn't really matter because of how horrible weapon hit registration worked there. In Quake or games like Quake bhop only increases the pace of game, which is not bad for arena shooters, i think. Drags, on the other hand, break the main Mordhau's immersion creating feature - reliable combat system. It is very uncanny to see how horribly cab a body in metal armour bend with some of the drags. And when bhop usually only makes flavour of the game it is in more bright, drags and other animation abuse really decrease the medieval part of the Mordhau, and make it feel synthetic, unnatural and somewhat alien to it's own game desing ideas.
I really think mordhau needs to address dragging and accelerating by a damage decrease. If you stand up and swing your arm like you are going to strike someone, at what point do you think your strike will deal the most damage and have the most momentum? It's about in the middle. Damage should scale down based on its distance from this middle point in your swing. Too soon and your swing doesn't have as much momentum built up to damage your opponent. Too late and your swing begins to lose momentum as your swing is forcefully decelerated as it reaches the physical limitations of your arm's reach.
This is a step in the right direction. Maybe footwork can be affected in someway during a drag...like moving your mouse during a swing will severely limit number of steps/step speed. That might be hard to code though. I do know that the weapons physics/weight in mordhau is excellent though.
@@jimmythecrow seems pretty easy to put in for me. Take the time it takes for the swing to complete and break up that swing into a few segments with different damage values
@@jimmythecrow And... it already is in the game. The only thing you need to know is the difference between "similar to reality" and "realism that will break game balance"
Before someone says that I'm bad at the game or that I'm crying because I don't know how to play, I wanted to say that I've mastered drag mechanics very well. However, as some have said here in the comments, I think this is a completely unrealistic mechanic, not to mention the animation that becomes very bizarre. Accelerating a hit is completely understandable, but the game allows you to drag in such a way that, in a real situation, it wouldn't even tickle if it hit someone. I believe that to improve combat realism, it would be necessary to drastically reduce the damage depending on how long an attack is dragged. Otherwise the laws of physics would be neglected. For those who disagree, it would be better to be playing Chivalry
Lmao saw that reddit post. Chamber feint to parry did "nerf" dragging for a while but that made defense too strong and was rightfully nerfed as well. Maybe a happy medium is making decelerated hits do less damage like in Mount and Blade. The drags will win you duels but accelerated and constant velocity swings will win battles (like in Mount and Blade).
@@jimmythecrow I don't see how your comment is related to my comment. Stamina has always been as important as health and damage in small fights, yet high stam weapons are already favored in casual modes anyways. It only takes two swings to kill someone with such a weapon, giving you a stam return on kill quickly. Very quickly if that enemy is ganked.
@@LaughingMan44 ChFT makes the game easier for higher skill people than it does for low skilled (and more numerous) people. Most people (in my experience) are not manually feinting after failed chambers. It also incentivizes not learning how to drag, and dragging is a core of the gameplay. And chambering isn't the real counter for cucumbers and other such drags, footwork and torso manipulation is.
You can 'drag' irl too. If you swing from right to left from vom Tag to Alber, your opponent might parry to left frontale in anticipation of your incoming swing, at which point you can deliberately drop your point low to bypass his parry and then bring the point back up to thrust him in the chest or face. It's a one tempo move just like in the game, and this is known as Durchwechseln (change through) in German longsword, or cavazione in Italian rapier. The real problem with these games comes from the fact that attacks are directional but not parries. and because parries are not directional the devs have to make it so that you can't hold parry, so that it doesn't become too easy. They also have to put cooldowns on parries so that you can't spam it. But as a result of this 'fix', every man and his mum is feinting like crazy in these games when they're not dragging. The very core mechanics of chivalry and mordhau series are flawed.
IMO what you're describing isn't a drag (which is purely decelerating your swing to make your swing take longer to reach your opponent) but more of a "side stab" style thing from chivalry 1, or "side swing" in this case, where you reposition which part on their body you're targeting mid attack. This is more realistic and would still benefit from being executed quickly and is therefore not visually a problem
@@Stouty Nah you kinda have to slow down the swing a little bit in order to pull off this technique, going at full speed will likely cause your swing to get parried before you have time to drop the point under the parry.
@@hschan5976 Right, but you're not slowing down your swing for the sole purpose of slowing the entire attack down, repositioning a swing will be less direct and slower than committing to the initial swing, the deceleration taking place here is a byproduct
A drag Mordhau/Chivalry style is like swinging your weapon with all your might, but keeping all it's kinetic energy and restraining it's momentum at the same time (it's like your trying to stop your hit, but not really, letting the momentum of the weapon going, when you are pulling it slowly towards you to slow it down at the same time). Which is against all the law of physics. Because your body mass is necessarily greater the mass of your weapon, and therefore it's not momentum/momentum (which any case will make quite a loss in eK) but you just stopping abruptly the weapon
When two handers can be dragged to the point that they are faster than the carving knife, then you know it's better to become an archer or a bush wookie with bear traps
It always seemed stupid for me. The main selling point of weapons like dagger and rapier are their uber fast stabs, but what's the point when you can just accel a 1h axe to achieve even faster strike? Really idiotic.
Comparing quickscopping to dragging takes real level of stupidity. Since quickscopping wasnt that effective in first place it was more of a visual fluff. Its not about dragging as a problem its the high reward of it and making anything else futile that cause problems. For example if quickscoping in MW2 was such a problem IW would definetly nerf it in next games but it wasnt since it required certain skill to confirm kill further than 80meters where as drags/accells reward you since they dont take more stamina that classic slash yet they throw off oponents guard due to janky animation and cannot be chambered since they look weird and sometimes bypasses parry hitbox. Also I have slight beef with accels since I have encountered way many battle axe/war axe mains who just stares at ground like playing GoldenEye speedrun and bashing you in face with higher speed that dagger. These drags and accels should have stamina/damage compensation if someone drag the swing so hard he should be punished by taking lower damage to oponent.
There should be a momentum system making it so the faster your weapon is moving the more damage it does, making substantial drags do little to no damage as you are kinda just tapping your enemy lazily, or make it cost lots of stamina, as it would be tiring in real life to swing a maul and then try to stop it in midair, or maybe just make it so if someone drags they automatically loose their weapon
Just a few thoughts that are not connected: 1. I enjoy sweet manipulation in Mordhau. Although it doesn't quell my knighthood fantasy of intense/realistic combat, I find the mental-chess game aspect pleasing. Learning how the ways in which a player's body contorts would result in a drag or accel, and being able to parry at the last second to avoid feints. It's intense in its own aspect, having to rely on split-second thinking to decide whether that attack is going to be a drag, feint, accel, etc. 2. What if we were to add momentum-physics to the game? Making damage from weapons increase if you were running at the target, or if you hit the target when the weapon is at it's fastest during the swing. And of course, if you were to "drag" that weapon, then it would result in lower damage and perhaps even a lower stam-cost to parry it.
I love chiv 2 so much I can hop on and play the game without worrying about some guy playing dance sword revolution and obliterating my soul with a sword swing that comes from his contorted spine
I got into mordhau from the epic games giveaway and just got done playing in a lobby where everyone was doing this. And your reason about it being physically impossible was also my reasoning why dragging or whatever is an exploit and shouldn’t be in the game. Only someone with Superman strength could achieve this kind of lethal swing manipulation. It’s funny because it defeats the purpose of weapon classes when everyone could just use mauls and give their opponents 0.1 second reaction time.
marox has the right of it saying its simply one more skill to learn and deal with, and most people that try to get better at the game can deal with 99% of drags after an hour of real practice. As for your claim of things like this not existing in real life, I will challenge that as well. Not in the look per-say, but in practice. At risk of flaming I'll admit to being a guy who did full armored melee combat a few years ago, wearing armor made of metal/leather and thick plastic and fighting with either ratan bludgeons or dull steel weapons. A skill I excelled at was throwing what we called wrap shots, which were somewhere between a morph and a drag in real life. You would fake a wide swing at someone to make them try to guard and twist your wrist as the tip of your weapon carried the forward momentum, allowing for a blow that could have connected with the right side of their head landing in the back of their thigh. You could also fake a low swing and crack them in the back of the neck or head. In mordhau the closet thing to it is one of those "bad" drags newer players try to do throwing an lmb and walking past someone, turning it in to hit them past their parry. people that really couldnt learn to time their parrys better, or use footwork, or stouty jump/duck to deal after early parrying.... did they play the game for longer than two hours? Does a niche game REALLY need to cater to the lowest common denominator?
Most people don't try to get better - they quit (source: player count). Some lack of realism will always creep in as you mention, your repositioning example is more akin to a side stab from chivalry 1 than a drag. As to your final statement, why would you want the genre to remain niche?
@@Stouty Its not that I want the game to remain niche so much as most people now a days wont commit time to getting good at a game they find frustrating, and with how high mordhau's (in this example) skill ceiling is, the harder it is for new players to get in on the ground floor regardless of a single mechanic. Do you think that even the majority of the vanishing player base is due to dragging, and not say, feint spamming? Or impossible to block (from their standpoint) accels? The point I'm trying to argue here is the people that complain about dragging would simply complain about a different mechanic they see as insurmountable, especially as they chose on of the easiest to defend against mechanics to get bent over. While I'd love a triple A melee slasher, a game like this probably wont ever be as popular as we'd like it to be while still maintaining a skill ceiling high enough to please the people who are actively enjoying it now. What you should think about it what kind of game you want it to be catered towards and what that would entail. Please don't mistake me for an elitest, its not that I don't want lower skill people enjoying the game. It's just that the majority of games that a huge amount of people play either have popular streamers playing it so they want to get involved or its super accessible to do "well". But I'd argue that games that have large mechanical skill have a smaller player base as time moves on because newer players can't catch up to the older base that's had to adapt to hang, and that's not an issue that's just endemic to melee slashers. I appreciate your content and thanks for making it, by the way.
@@bocajmed Whilst you may be right about casual players leaving due to feints - at least they are founded in realism. In terms of gameplay, they are far more interesting than waving your mouse around and offer opportunities to punish your opponent without resorting to running around and hoping not to get hit
@@Stouty ah, but now you are making a subjective claim and not a factual one saying one mechanic is more interesting than another while I would posit that both are of equal merit. Aside from myself, tracksuit johhny, sublime clamped and more im sure are down there I dont care to find, there are people that find dragging, both learning to do them well and defending against them to not only simply be part of the experience, but one we enjoy. More mechanics = more things to learn = higher skill ceiling = more fun, as long as we are being subjective :). As for realism, you can't use that as a defense in a game where dwarf is a perk, unless you think midgets with comparable strength to grown men is realistic. Drags themselves aren't unrealistic in their movement regardless, whats unrealistic is maintaining the same damage regardless of how fast or slow the weapon moves when it connects. But fixing that would have to power up accels and that sounds bad. A simple fix would be to have a tutorial that actually teaches new players all the available mechanics to them, like how chiv 2 does by teaching you how to accel and drag in the tutorial( as I've seen in vids, I haven't got it since epic launcher is lame.)
1:02 except for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy The last time I played Mordhau, some kid in matchmaking made fun of me cause I couldn't parry some of his stupid looking drags. The problem is that the game relies on these drags so much. The parry-box and the parry-window are extremely big so aiming your parry is not really needed and therefore the only way to win against most opponents is to make him parry too early or too late, it's entirely timing-based. Chivalry obviously had even more stupid drags but the movement was faster and it was harder to aim your parry, so the whole gameplay felt more dynamic.
The biggest issue with drags has to be the fact that a weapon if swing like that wouldn’t hit very hard, as you said, it violates the laws of physics, F=ma, so if the weapon is not accelerating it will have little force, it’s whacky to watch a Zwei travel through space and time just to gently touch your face and your head to come flying off. A potential solution would be to somehow calculate the speed of a swing as it hits a target, idk how you’d code that, and I’d worry it’d make accels hit harder than intended, but if it was possible for damage to scale with your swings speed, perhaps calculated by its position relative to its starting point and the target, you could make drags be tactically useless for damage.
exactly, in fps, when you get better you just learn how to kill people faster and maybe die a little slower, but in mordhau it's like it's the other way around, you learn a few cheeky ways to get a hit in but mainly you just get hit by less things the better you get, meaning as you get better and keep fighting better people you get to hit people way less often, the pace of the game slows down unless there's teammates to sneak hits into as well
@@neen4456 just join a noob duel server, and on pub servers I'm still better than 90% of players. I only struggle against people with people who abuse late ripostes and other janky animations
@@LaughingMan44 "just join a noob duel server" & this is why most newbies end up quitting so fast lol, they join expecting people around their ranks, just to see a top 3 on the leaderboard of people going 20-0 with a 1/1/1 maul build xD
Wow, Mordhau's response is really enfuriating. "Some high level players in other games put up with animation abuse similar to what's in our game, so why don't our low level players want to learn to abuse our animations?" What are they thinking? Their dev team needs an adult.
In Mount and Blade, there was a mechanic that would change your damage based on impact velocity. So, you could stuff opponents stabs by walking into them if you were close enough, or escape into the far end of animation, reducing damage to 1. There would be a "biff" sound, indicating minimal damage. It could be made to only affect the most extreme end of velocity range to avoid changing the game entirely, but allow a counter to un-physical dragging.
Here's an idea to fix dragging. Program in a "Drag-Degree Counter" that counts the amount of degrees of drag has been performed during the release window of an attack. After around 2 degrees of drag (the threshold), lower the damage of the attack by 7.5% per each additional degree, to a damage floor of around -75%. The variables such as the threshold, damage subtraction, and damage floor can be tweaked until gameplay is as desired.
Remove drags and make the windups holdable. You can hold your sword behind your head in the windup position until you want to release it. That could still screw with people who have been parrying mutliple attacks in a row and are in autoparry mode so they'll just parry at the same timing again but if you're holding your attack you can hit them.
This is an interesting idea. This is kind of similar to the heavy attack mechanic in Chiv 2 but much more realistic. I wonder how mordhau would play, if dragging were limited to a quarter of the current degrees possible (around 5 degrees of turning away or something so your mouse doesn't feel "locked" when you swing) and we had attack wind ups holding.
Give attacks a damage curve based on their intended animations. Attacks that occur close to when they should, achieve maximum damage. Attacks that occur just after wind-up achieve minimal damage and may not even flinch the opponent, however this should ramp up quite quickly towards the intended attacking window of the weapon, and ramp down sharply just after this window as your character should start recovering from the swing. This kind of thing is similar to how Natural Selection's aliens get their damage from biting (the edge of your "mouth" nips doing minimal damage), but the marines cannot "parry" a bite. BF1 also had a similar thing with sniper rifles, giving them an intended "kill range" (firing too close would over-penetrate the target, dealing less damage, but headshots were always viable 1-shots) and I believe this was well received by the community but I'm not sure. I think this would make combat fairer by making feints more deadly, and I feel this would increase the level of skill needed as good players would need to land good hits, not to just hit their opponent, but it may require overall damage buffs. But yeah, I gave up on this game a long time ago.
I agree with the CEO. Dragging is just something you have to learn. Its difficult, but manageable. Just put out more patchies and polish the animations so that it doesn't become completely impossible. The fact that there is really no other games than Mordhau and Chiv within this genre mostly says something about the market demand for this type of product, and is not a criticism of dragging imo. -- Ethics
You know, ive thought about this alot and i think there is a solution. When your swing is released (or maybe even prerelease), the camera slightly drags from your attack when you go against the direction of your swing whilst the camera tries to magnetize back to its original fixed position. Not only should dragging away from the direction of your attack become very limited, but also look less wonky albeit more natural when attempting to drag. (should actually look like the player is slightly holding back the momentum of their weapon) My hopes this also fixes alot of the more crazier drags aswell. Another thing that needs to happen is angular swing correction. The swing angle animation of your sword should tilt slightly if you are aiming perpendicular to the direction of your swing, that combined with camera drag should fix some of these wonky looking attacks.
I know this might be a bit drastic of a change, but maybe make it a bit like Mount&Blade system, when damage is calculated by speed of a weapon relative to a person being hit. However, people might deccelerate an attack just to accelerate it right before strike, but it would be possible to fix by for example, dealing damage based on average speed during swing. For example, dmg dealt would be some X value * (averege velocity of weapon during swing+velocity of a person being hit). Of course you could move away from swing to get less damage, but that would be pretty realistic and intuitive. I loved the game, but stopped playing because i got bored of all these "exploity" fighting styles. I just don't want to play medieval game, where fighting like a medieval knight won't get you far. They probably won't fix it, because they fear professional players won't like the change, but they don't acknowledge, that most players just want to play a medieval game.
I believe Warband and Bannerlord have a system for calculating the speed a weapon is travelling in relation to it's target upon collision to alter the damage inflicted, causing hitting someone mid-charge causing more damage, or barely hitting someone moving barely slower than your weapon to do very little damage. Mordhau and Chivalry could employ a similar calculation, so that a weapon being dragged, traveling extremely slowly, will deal very little or no damage upon impact, unless it is then granted enough time to speed up again before collision.
Interesting breakdown. I think a simple solution to the drag problem would be to provide a sweet spot to a swing. What I mean by this is define a portion of the swing that deals full damage. A drag could still be used to get around defense, but at the cost of falling outside this "sweet spot" and dealing less damage. This would provide incentive to fight in a more natural way without eliminating drags (or accels as well) completely.
What if they made a weapon velocity mechanic that deals less damage with slow drags? in a real sword fight, you do change the momentum and direction of your swing. When this happens, you lose momentum and damage, but gain control. A weapon velocity mechanic would make it so that drags, while being useful, arent the end all be all.
@@Stouty mate you cant seriously tell me you think drags are more busted than instant accels. anybody forced to play at or above 60 ping either red parries when trying to hard read or gamble parries the insta and gets exploited for it (also making feints a lot scarier). just about every axe weapon, messer, all 1 handers, and even longsword have some freakishly fast max accels. i personally do not suffer too much from this considering im lucky enough to be able to play on 30ish ping generally with a 160-170ms reaction time however anyone on or above 60 ping suffers incredibly from these. For example: Eighty in the 3rd place match in recent EU Arcis tourney when redblue cope switches to bastard sword at 9-9...
I think there are 3 things that can be done to somewhat fix this without completely reworking the concept of melee slashers. Firstly is held block, and not with huge penalties attached to it. is to tightly control turn caps so that ppl can't just accelerate or decelerate by too much, or worse even do a pirouette, mid swing. And thirdly they need to implement a speed measuring system that penalizes super slow attacks that connect in the damage department, similar to M&B. That way if someone gently taps someone else with a weapon, it will be near useless.
Drags are cool imo, i personally like the way they look ingame and how they work. But i get why people are turned off by this mechanic, it makes no sense irl and its confusing to newbies.
@@hardboiled2987 I hate to bring this up but accessibility comes to mind, a game lives and dies by its ability to attract new players and keep them. The issue here is that none of the maneuvers done with the animation exploits would make any logical sense to a new player. All that would happen is that, now that they're at a disadvantage cause they can't tell what the hell their opponent is even doing, leading them to get hit (And more often than not, instantly killed).
coming back to this video and reading the comments it seems like chiv 2 does alot of what people want but there are still complaints that it is a left click spamming game despite feints and dragging being in that game too. It seems like a larger problem than dragging and hit manipulation and really comes down to not being able to please everybody.
Drags and accels could or should have velocity based modifiers that affect stamina or the damage dealt, positively or negatively. A long drag should do less damage because you wasted velocity. A quick accel could use 2 more stam than normal. Dragging on a whole should in theory use more stamina since holding a weapon extended is not very easy to do.
This is exactly why I now nearly only play archer in larger servers, getting dragged by someone who made their zweihander swing last literally more than two seconds or have the lead dancer for mordhau on ice come up to me with his war axe (zero surprise because what is a changing meta lol just have the same 5 weapons since launch) only to make an ice sculpture of me while doing 360's and looking in every direction at once somehow. Flame me all you want but the melee has gotten so incredibly boring as nothing is being done about what is ruining it.
Dragging is ok if the special animation would be triggered. The thing is - it doesn't look natural cause the hit lands when the speed of weapon is minimal, that should not cause any dmg case physics. Instead it should look like the the release is delayed.
its funny how you make some of the best and most logical arguments i have ever heard and you are making them over a medieval fighting game with 2k players
Maybe a good way to fix dragging would be to make it so that the animation gradually increase speed over the course of the entire swing which would make it so that your weapon would hit roughly the same time or not much later even if you tried to drag it to the end of your screen
The coaching drop there was clever, and it’s true I bought his coaching to understand some basics and it really does help. I personally love drags, I think it’s really cool to have mix ups like that in the game but completely agree with you at the same time. When I first got into mordhau I was so turned off to the combat due to top fraggers toe dragging me or doing their cute little cucumber drags. I hope there’s a system implemented to either add more counter play to drags or maybe make you lose more stam to drag accels or deaccels.
@@zamo8076 in a sense make them less of a crutch and more as an actual mix up. I believe stam cost was mentioned in the video - I think that could be an interesting way to balance it out and experience it less frequently. I can speculate all I want but I truly don’t know what I’m talking about - lol I just enjoy the game *shrug*
I don't think that all drags are bad, a portion of them look fine and fun to pull off. The one example would be toe drags since it isn't really ''decelaration'' and just smart swing manipulation. I love drags as a mechanic, they provide a unique challange and gameplay but I also understand how it's necessary to tone them down. There is a middle ground that both parties can agree to Since if I'm being honest, Mordhau without drags would be pretty shit. Doing nothing but ''reading'' feints is as boring as it gets and the hate shields get is proof of that. It's clear the devs knew and intended for drags to stay but left them out for marketing, they understand the combat can't hold up without them Maybe we are just spoiled by the amount of options and fun drags add (when they aren't used by 5k hours gs sweatlords) but it's interesting to see what people can come up with
I've heard your disdain for locational swing manipulation like Z-stabs and waterfalls, which is very understandable due to how they look visually, but I truly believe that if Mordhau shifted its focus from timing parries towards positioning parries, it would give more weapons an identity while simultaneously allowing them to overhaul drags. One way they could implement this positioning emphasis is by severely decreasing the width of the parry box size. As of right now, positioning only matters in the sense of getting out of your opponent's FOV, and in order to create an angle with footwork, you have to throw off their aim to the point that you're 90 degrees off their center screen. This makes it so that throwing off their aim, which should be one of the main ingredients to a successful parry, is highly irrelevant, to the point where combat just devolves into sliding around each other hoping to affect the TIMING of both you and the opponent's tracer. One of the arguments that I've heard against this change is that it would make 1vX impossible. Mechanically, the only impossibility this would introduce is parrying two angles simultaneously. With footwork you could alter the timings at which tracers would collide and be capable of flicking to parry anything as long as they don't land simultaneously, which is already very difficult to coordinate as the X. I don't think decreasing the vertical size would be a good idea as combat would devolve into getting cheeky leg hits. Instead, something along the lines that allows footwork to actually create openings, which would also act as an indicator for the defender as to which side to flick their parry. Getting into riposte wars against a MAA was exhilarating as all of their mixups, aside from the Dane Axe's whopping 500 ms release, were locational, and the only viable timing mixup would be a feint. How tracers interact with the parry box is one of the biggest aspects of the slasher genre that makes it unique.
I feel like we should have an overhaul mod that makes parry directional and holdable. It seems like it could change Mordhau in a very positive way but we would have to see what kind of bs the players did with a system like that. Shields might become meta for anything other than duels but maybe that isn't the worst thing.
dude positional parries is actually a sick idea. when i first started playing i legit thought that's what the game was so i used to look down at footdrags but still got hit which left me clueless
@@AR-yr5ov For sure... there definitely is at least some type of reward for attempting to intercept the tracer with the center of your screen. But that reward ultimately is time based, and not a gap in the parry box :(. You gain an extended invisible box that is the equivalent of stopping their tracer earlier. In chivalry, when you wound up a stab you had multiple options depending on how much velocity you built up, which direction that momentum was traveling, and which direction you were facing as you would leap once entering release phase. The movement in chivalry had a lot more inertia. If you had already gained momentum before the lunge of your swing you could use that leap to gain an angle and turn while still going the same direction of your leap. Chivalry had a huge emphasis on conservation of momentum. In Mordhau however if you wind up a stab all of your options are essentially time based. You can morph into a strike, feint it, morph feint it, drag it, or morph drag from the stab. All of these options which essentially attempt to bait out a mistimed parry. There is already very emergent gameplay from these options as everything is relative to the opponent's position, but it ends up making every weapon feel the same. The path to landing a strike is always about getting the opponent to mistime their input and it's poopy
wouldn't an easy solution be to make the speed of a blade a factor in the damage of a swing? so when decelerating away from an opponent, your blade ends up doing less if any damage at all?
Curios to know if there's a custom server that includes modifications to combat physics to prevent excessive dragging or accels, and what fights on that server would look like. Ultimately I think it comes down to the skill ceiling and "fun" factor of the fights. If we remove these mechanics from the game entirely and leave everything else as is, would that lead to fights that are still enjoyable, or would it devolve into feint spamming and/or stamina attrition wars between two evenly matched players?
@@Stouty Fair enough, I trust your judgement here. I guess you have a sense for what a game like that would look like, because when I've tried dueling players around the same skill level as me, and it was agreed beforehand that there would be no dragging, it made for slightly bland and very repetitive combat.
Such awesome content, really makes me want to get back into this game and even get lessons to be way better at the genre, I always hated that I was only okay and could never majorly improve. Being plat 5 and then getting knocked back to plat 1 because of poor decisions and playing with rage is the worst, and when I play mordhau, I am not angry with losing, or the idea of getting beaten, its when the game doesn't have a sense or realism or fairness in how mechanics interact with each other. I dont like getting shit on by a toxic sweat and having no chance to properly address the mechanics they use to time and time again kick my ass. A fantastic video and totally accurate points. this genre if applied to massively multiplayer games or rpgs would would blow the fuck out of shooters.
I seriously don't understand why the developers don't shut this shit down and remove dragging. Chivalry 2 hasn't been ruined just yet by it but if it continues down the path its going it'll be dead by the time it drops on steam, and then shortly after the steam release it'll die again.
@@thegibbehhh9430 and it's a Wessex type drag it's a completely fucked up animation that basically goes through parry look up mordhau carpet drag and you'll see
Perfect drag nerf: they deal significantly less damage, since you're decelerating the attack, but can still flinch someone out of their own attack. Keep them in as a mechanic but make it less punishing on people who struggle against them.
That was my thought, swing animations could have a damage curve where you deal less the further the opponent is from the center of your screen when it connects. Though i'm not sure how possible it would be to implement something like that.
why not make stamina go down when swinging, like when you drag the stamina bar goes down with the start of the swing? Lets say that you have a 100 stam, then if you drag it continually goes down at the start of the swing... making dragging a risky manuever or someshit.
I think one potential fix for dragging is having it still be possible but including a better "glancing hit" mechanic, if the relativ speed your weapon hits the opponent with is below a certain threshold it won't do much damage, maybe even no damage if the enemy is wearing armor.
I think Cavalry II did an amazing job explaining drags and accels in their tutorial. While the game is much more welcoming and casual than MORDHAU, I think MORDHAU would benefit greatly from taking a note out of Chiv II's book in that aspect.
Very well made video. A game like that can't exist without drags, unless you make the release time of all weapons really short and the windups of the weapons longer or shorter. Or you trash the whole physic based combat and do the route of for honour (even though that game is dead I think) or dark souls.
Mordhau doesn't have physics based combat at all, it's all just tracers and collidors. Only examina and that hellish quart game have physics based combat
Maybe we actually do need to bite the bullet and do something like a number of players have said and just introduce a damage penalty on drags. I always thought it was a stupid idea but maybe with that we can start focusing on making some other mechanics more interesting. Accels will become more powerful, but IMO accel animation abuse is typically much more readable than drag animation abuse so maybe that's worth it, and without having to guess as much whether they will drag or not it becomes less of a guessing game. At least this way drags still exist and you can still use them but they become more niche and less impactful. I do miss chambers being a more prominent feature in the game and I think I had the most fun in alpha when chambers were busted, but I'm a lot less experienced than some other players so my experience is biased towards low/mid tier players
inconsistent, also I don't know how you can say that accels are more readable since good accel won't be long enough on your screen to get a proper look
@@pekar4713 Just saying it's inconsistent isn't an argument. It's also inconsistent that we can chamber with strikes but not with morphs, we make sacrifices for realism or consistency for gameplay. > also I don't know how you can say that accels are more readable That's just my experience with the game. You can usually tell when an accel is coming by reading body movement, dragging is a weird beast.
They shouldnt change any of the swing manipulation animations (thats a good way to lose 80% of players over level 60), but they should demonstrate how to do it in the tutorial.
you definitely would not lose close to that many players if you removed the "swing manipulation animations". There aren't swing manipulation animations, that's dumb. There are animations, and people break them by manipulating the swing. The only thing that's important is if the manipulation of that animation is consistently readable given practice against it. Some are, some aren't. You want to remove the ones that aren't.
@@millinom of course you would. The only reason I keep playing is under the idea I can improve. Remove the main function that allows for improvement and the vast majority of vets will leave
@@XSCSCGS there's a big big difference in having techniques that increase the variety of tools you have to catch your opponent off guard vs having techniques that force your opponent to gamble their response due to insufficient feedback from the game. One adds to the skill ceiling and the variety of ways u can exist there and one detracts, taking away from the variety of playstyles that can exist there. The majority of swing manipulation is just fine, I think, but there are a few things that deal with this problem and ultimately high level combat is worse for it.
Idk im not a competitive player but to me dragging feels fun, it looks retarded but the combat in mordhau feels very good to me. My fear isn't that the combat can become too unreadable. The bigger problem you want to avoid, imo, is if it becomes too readable. Imagine you removed drags and then suddenly a level 200 player can just stand there for 10 minutes hard reading everything you throw, parrying everything, occasionally walking backwards to regain stamina. How cancer would that be? Currently I feel like there's just enough tools in the game that I can find my way through anybody's defenses. Its always better for duelling games to be offense focused rather than defense
@@Stouty Okay so I don't understand what the vision for the game is if you dislike dragging. Don't you remember, especially in the early games, the go to complaint for new players is not actually dragging, but its feint spamming. They hate that shit just as much or even more than dragging. So if you remove drags, either you have to buff feinting such that it becomes unreadable and then its a legit complaint that the game is just a feint guessing simulator, or if you leave it untouched then high level hard reading players will legit never get hit in a 1v1.
@@ravenoushydra7948 >So if you remove drags, either you have to buff feinting such that it becomes unreadable That doesn't follow, for example if Mordhau was to suddenly not have drags, feinting would be the primary offensive tool and whilst readable, top players would still fall for them (in the same manner that even the best FPS players will still miss shots). Would players then refocus all their complaints to feints? I guess we'd have to find out but the combat itself would undoubtedly look better (and imo play better)
@Stouty Have you tested this? No matter how I think about it it seems really trivial to defend against pure feints if you don't have to worry about accels or drags. Some of the smaller weapons have very tight windows but even bastard sword users mix in drag and accel for good reason. And it would be very disadvantageous to ever throw a feint, you are just instantly putting yourself in stamina disadvantage, for a feint that is probably not going to even do anything. Im saying this because a normal feint without drag/accel is much less potent then it is right now, in addition to the opponent being able to use 100% of their brain to focus on reading the feint, it follows that feinting becomes much less worth it. The mechanical difficulty of having reaction time for a feint and learning to not panic, is nowhere near the mechanical difficulty of aim. Aim is also very open ended since aim can be anything from fast tracking a target moving around you in 3d space up in your face, to snapping to a tiny target in the distance. Plus it's not like pro players are having trouble hitting targets, their competition is about hitting the target before the target hits them, so they must sacrifice some stability to aim and fire as fast as they can to win that fight. I don't see that in mordhau. Without swing manipulation, what is the difference between your feint and mine, or a new player's feint? Not much really. Some subtle footwork. Maybe you'll try to "condition" me. Good luck with that when you're not dragging or doing anything special. Your options are: feint, morph, morph feint. not much to it. So the way I see it, most fights are just going to be trading boring, easily read ripostes, until someone wins by a small stamina advantage. Why would anyone want to play that? But also I think you're really underestimating how much people hate feints especially new players. So I don't think it's "refocusing complaints", the complaints are already there. To me, swing manipulation is the only thing making the game dynamic and not feint spamming. Without swing manipulation, there simply aren't enough layers to the combat. Im not sure how that makes the game look or feel better. It looks more "realistic", as in there aren't weird floating swings, but jerking your bastard sword up and down in repeated feints doesn't look great either. On the contrary, while I think drags look stupid, they actually feel super fun to play, and the fact that you can combine them with your feints and morphs is what makes the game dynamic and open ended to me
@@Stouty And one prediction I would have, if you remove drags: Someone will create a mod for a practice gamemode where a bot runs at you and feints/swings randomly without stopping. Your goal is to hard read the attacks. Within a few weeks, players will get so good at this that they can last for hours, for so long that they can go until they get bored or lose to mental fatigue. Then they hit the duelyard and every fight is just boring or plain frustrating because nobody can get past their defense. People will improve at feint reading in such a way, if its the only thing left in the game. No different from fps players using aimlabs or whatnot.
Hello girls! :) Anyway, what about making damage dependant on the time of the swing. Let's say, first 10% time of the swing you will make just 10% of the damage, then 100% in the middle of the swing time, but again 10% only in the very end of the swing? This will nerf broken accels and drags heavilly.
The problem is the only way to get 100% damage is by making them parry at the wrong time with miss combo or feints. This game relies on drags and accels to get past parry.
@@LaughingMan44 Yes, bigger the risk, higher the damage. So most easier strike to parry would cause most damage. You will be able to do drags like previously, just do less damage. For example, when you do combo accel strike (one of broken practices) or drag away with something like executioner to avoid parry.
The simplest way to kill the effectiveness of drags is to make damage output strictly based on weapon velocity or time spent in release. There needs to be additional systems in place to allow skill based input to land hits however, to avoid stamina wars and generally frustrating combat.
Ok and then how do you hurt players besides feinting? Is feintspam really something that the dunning kruger new players, that stouty loves so much, like?
@OHGAS So you will increase time to kill and make feintspamming far more viable and thus no one will drag or it will be rarely done because feintspamming is far superior.
damn here I was thinking this game was skillful, but nah you right it's just a guessing game of accel/drag, don't get me wrong I enjoy it, but I shouldn't go into a duel server & every single fight feels the same :p
Coaching: r.metafy.gg/mtp3o5Y (Get 10$ credit after your first 10$ order with this link)
Book Stouty Coaching: mfy.gg/@stouty
maybe if mordhau stops hemorrhaging players like a severed artery
You teach one handed aswell? Diamond onehander trying to get some tricks.
@@azorah8167 yeah I mained warhammer last patch
@@imout9739 Not the ideal solution but we play the game that we have unfortunately
@@Stouty IMHO, to use a common LoL quote, just go next. Aka next game. Hopefully there's something good coming just around the corner. Maybe the game you're helping with. Maybe anotther.
After a few thousand hours I've come to the conclusion that instead of advocating for the removal of drags, I will advocate for the removal of Mordhau from my hard drive.
based
sometimes the only way to win is not to play
Lmfao
At least you can listen to you unlike crunch and any player
How many of those hours did you cheat? Like copemenu or something else.
Awesome that Mordhau combat revolves around stuff this isn't explained, always telling new players "oh I know the tutorial taught you you can only counter a kick with a kick but you can actually parry them now"
not to mention all the incorrect loading screen tips that mislead new players, like "parrying a lance will disarm your weapon" which was changed legit like a year ago but the loading tip is still there. i told jax about this and he just said something like "we'll fix this soon"
Don't worry the devs said they're working on a new tutorial for about a year now, should be out in another year
@@lassim3111 😳
@@alpatr0s596 *Soonᵀᴹ
I’ve played this game for much longer than I should and I can conclusively say, mordhau is malicious for the most part, with its gameplay and with the louder parts of the community who make it very difficult to play with not only manipulating the game mechanics but also through being a toxic piece of waste, still waiting for patchie.
Honestly, when i started playing mordhau, the first rule i had was to never get serious at the game. Whether i suck or not, the adrenaline still gets me happy to play the game when a huge battle is in front of you.
Also, as a game dev myself, seeing the mordhau devs not experiment more now is truly sad. They always have the options to innovate, whether it be from talking with the community, etc.
Just look at the phasmophobia team, they are working hard to improve their game and its paying off, whether it be with failures or successes. Its by failing that we succeed.
but sweatlords will be angry if dragging is removed and we can't have that! in all seriousness, there are so many things broken with how mordhau works and I feel like if they change the game too much it won't be itself anymore. I don't really oppose the idea, but I'm not sure how they can make the game easier whilst also keeping the game "skill based" if that's the goal
@@wiggly_xd i wound probably say, drags and accels should deal less damage (like a harder hitting glancing blow). And peak hits (center of your screen) should deal some damage, like maybe the same as an accel or drag.
This makes it more skillful as drags and accels don't reward as much (but still have tactical uses) and with the punch through damage, this forces your opponent to really have to react to your attack by stepping into or away from your attack before parrying, so as to invoke the accel/drag rule.
@@GameFuMaster The Deadliest Warrior Expansion for Chivalry 1 actually did this. Whenever you'd swing, the beginning and end of your swing would do less damage and whenever you'd thrust, the end of your thrust would do maximum damage while the beginning would do minimum damage.
It was a great system, but since the DW Expansion wasn't as popular the idea never really caught on.
Yeah i completely agree. Im not amazing at game development myself but ive released and updated games and continued supporting them well after release using player feedback. and it really saddens me to see the state of mordhau
@@wiggly_xd What I got in trailers before the game came out compared to what I got when the game actually came out, I realized pretty quickly, that while I was enjoying it at the time, the game I wanted wasn't what Mordhau actually was.
And I don't know if making the game "easier" is necessarily what people want, but it could still be plenty skill based by simply being a different game. There's also a ton of counterplay to extreme drags (not in all situations), if we're real, it's just that good players will change what they're doing that's supposed to counter it, and people have little respect for a bunch of other things in the game that are absolutely skill based, just like dragging is (consider all the things people will call "gambling" that aren't actually that if you know what you're doing, to start).
Good luck bringing any of this up in-game. The playerbase is insanely defensive about drags, even after it killed the game.
I can't drag, but I still don't want those gone because dragging enemies are the only challenge left in the game.
I love how every time the "good" playerbase, that is LV80 to +LV200, likes to defend Drags and say that they are fair after they dominate a server, but they start getting really frustrated and saying that "The Animations of this game are Trash", expecially whith Weapons like War Axe and Zwei, if they get destroyed by someone also abusing drags...
Got 500+ hours before I quit and I hated drags since day 1. Shit is annoying.
@@vincentdolente7053 I don't really see what they're milking, I paid the game 20 bucks and that's it
Im late to this convo: But the answer to this is obvious. Drags have been around since War of the Roses and Chiv1. Even if the majority of casual players dont like the mechanic; the amount of players who do like drags isnt insignificant. Plenty of players like this style of combat, and thusly encourage it, and will continue to play games with drags. At this point its effectively a split in mentality of the playerbase. This genre is already niche to begin with, so it splinters the player base further. The only medieval combat games that dont include drags are mount and blade to an extent, and for honor.
You can tell the build up of criticisms is pissing off the devs. And good. They created a game intending to improve upon another game with a very specific and well documented downfall, and they can’t even see that they are making the same mistake. Not even when people directly tell them. The writing is on the wall, they are just too arrogant to read it
Also the gold grind is still shit
What was the other game?
@@johngojcevic8731 Chivalry
the solution is obvious, make the damage dependant to some extent on the speed of the swing, so if you drag your speed is lower and thus you would do less or no damage, and make the speed damage cap so accels arent a new issue as they would do more damage, or better yet make the "late" hitbox do little or no damage, and make the ealry hitbox also do less damage because you havent gotten enough speed yet. In this way you could do accels and drags as a mixup but do less damage or you could try and hit with the timed sweetspot or something
Also, it is obvious in real life you dont try to parry and then do nothing maybe there should be an overhaul on the parry-block, maybe make chambers the only parries and current parries could be made into normal blocks, just look at fighting games, you dont get hit because you miss timed your block, you get hit because either you didnt block or you blocked wrong, as in low or high, and with parries that does requiere some timing and thus chambers would be a perfect substitute
Woah look at that, a basic understanding of science making a game which claims to contain realistic combat work better. I really love Mordhau, I got it recently and am sinking countless hours into it, as somebody who plays a lot of games like Smash Melee I honestly don't mind drags etc but when I was about 5 hours in I was confused at why a "realistic" combat game doesn't have damage affected by swing speed, especially when swing speed is such a huge part of the gameplay. Implementing this fix would completely change Mordhau and I personally would rather it not happen this far into the game's life but it would be incredible in something like Chiv 2, modded Mordhau servers or whatever next first person melee combat game we get.
@@thatguy7548 yeah i agree it may be too late to implement into the game, but a modded server to test new ideas would be cool
@@thatguy7548 thing is, after mordhau and chiv 1 I'm not interested in more pvp slasher games
they've all sucked so far due to animation abuse and I'm fine with not waiting for another
A game like that already exists just no pvp yet its called exanima
Isn't what you just described is literally how Mount and Blade works?
I still find the FOV of chiv hilarious
I really liked it and was pretty disappointed when Mordhau had capped it to a pretty low number, there's just something oddly satisfying in having that extended field of view. Sure it looks very odd for people not used to it but after a while you don't even notice it.
@@Kalmo_ Oddly satisfying? It's an atrocity. Lay off the meth mate
It was one of the main things that ruined Chiv1. It looks laughably ridiculous. You get used to anything when you're with it long enough, but that doesn't make it good.
I flat out refused to play like that in Chiv 1. I'd rather lose a fight that looks and feels remotely realistic than endure the warped and fucked up limbs floating around bird like FOV hacks. And that's what it was a hack. I mean literally, there wasn't an option in the game to set it that high, you literally had to hack it, but because Torn Banner are absolute shit they never clamped down on it. (Dragging isn't literally a hack, it's just manipulating the game's physics.)
@@alkaholic4848 There is nothing even remotely realistic in that game to begin with so why draw the line at that. You either like it or you don't - that's how it is for every single other game as well.
@@Kalmo_ Nobody knows what a "real" sword fight or medieval battle is like, even the so called experts. Because it's too deadly to practice in the modern world, so we make assumptions based on crude recreations combined with sketchy historic records. It's all guesswork.
So there are parts of the game you can argue all day about how realistic it could be.
But seeing someone's arms disconnected from their body, and a fov that stretches and distorts your vision into something completely unrelatable. That is undeniably ludicrously unrealistic. It doesn't even compare to the rest of it.
i think melee slashers should just remove weapons. should clean this whole mess right up
Taking the Bear approach, I see.
still would have the opportunity to drag in a fist fight
theres fist drags in mordhau lol
sensible
Chiv 2 listened... lol
When they touted that they had believable fights, it was true for like the first 3 or 4 months before people started abusing the animation system. What we ended up with was something that was visually pleasing, but animation wise was basically just a reskinned Chivalry but with less extreme animation abuse; it looks extremely goofy and not fitting.
They talk about how palyers don't want to learn these things, where in other games they'll learn certain nuances that give them an advantage; core difference here is the subtlety of it, drags/accels and whatever other bullshit people pull off is glaringly obvious, where as the subtle advantage of sitting at a specific angle to see better isn't going to abused by every single person who plays the game as a meta slave.
well said
"...defy Newton's laws" you know, when I first encountered drags, this was my thought too. I had to trick myself into believing that slowing a weapon down would still be lethal IRL, because I thought the game was aiming for realism and that maybe MY understanding of physics was wrong...
That's called mental gymnastics.
Lmao it's true, the fews one that could still work will be the sledgehammer, the evening star and the maul. Because even moving at 4 m/s a good maul wack in the head can kill an armored knight. (It will not blow or shatter his skull like in Mordhau tho, just smash his head and fold the metal around the helmet).
@@Hazel_42 4 m/s? The ES literally has the potential to nearly come to a horizontal stop if you drag right
@@user-ih7iq6bw5o The ES doesn't have the same weight, it is FAR lighter and faster. (2.35 kg for the head with a long handle that makes it easy to use, sometimes it even have less impact than a one-handed mace) Also, I'm using 4 m/s because it's the average speed currently registered for a sledgehammer with a mass of 5 to 15 kg. Medieval one was much heavier. And in Mordhau you swung them faster than that.
i don't know where you and others got this misunderstanding from, but these games aren't simulators.
Just lower damage of drags, especially with blunt weapons
@@jimmythecrow what no they don’t
@@jimmythecrow so true jimmy crow!
@@jimmythecrow what the hell are you talking about?
That would be actually awesome.
Implementing a system similar to Mount & Blade where the damage is based on the speed of the impact, rewarding proper swings over anything else. You can still exploit the animations to perform a reverse swing or drag or whatever to throw off the enemy's timing, but it won't do much, if anything at all, damage wise.
@@rodrigobecerra750 then accels become king and weapons with unreadable accels like the alt mode battle axe or war axe are king.
I understand the thought process here and i agree it can sound sexy on paper but in practice i'm not sure about that.
modding tools should've come out way sooner. if the dev is going to be inflexible about the game, at least let casual players flock into custom servers and see what people are willing to play instead of having them play nothing at all. If it's dogshit, that's still an issue, but then at least you can keep some of the casual playerbase who make the bigger servers fun to play on to begin with, and then maybe it's possible from there to create a compromise.
The SDK doesn't allow modders to do more than they're already doing
I agree 100% with marox. When I first played chiv and got killed by ballerinas, it didn't put me off. It made me want to learn how to do it as well, it was challenging and fun. I'm not some sperg looking for realism. I want a fighting game with creative moves and high skill ceiling.
Unfortunately people disagree with this and for that reason mord and chiv will always remain niche imo.
Amazing video very well made as always
Hard to argue that it's a good mechanic considering the response of the playerbase overall.
@@BigPapaMitchell I think stouty put it well, none of it is shown in trailers and in promoted gameplay. It's sort of disingenuous. That doesn't make it a good or bad mechanic. Just false advertising.
@@thejhonnie Its not like the problem would have been solved by showing the janky, ugly combat in trailers.
@@BigPapaMitchell take it back, or ft10. To me, each fight has an eb and flow like a dance. I think it's quite pretty.
I can compare this drag situation with one exploit in a source game Team Fortress 2 i play a lot - a bunny hopping. The main difference is, while a bunny hopping is a minor exploit that requires a lot, LOT of skill to perform consistently and only grants you a somewhat around 20% speed boost and a (potential) 100% melee crits on only one the most helpless and weak subclass in game, drags is: 1 - easy to perform, 2 - grants an ability to bypass almost all defensive techniques in mordhau, and 3 - it is not an exploit in a movement system that only give you 20% speed buff, but it is an exploit in a MAIN mordhau mechanic, a melee system, and more even more, it actually not only breaking the meta gaming - the meta itself is built around drags and other animation abuses. And last but not least: while bunny hopping is very rarely can be met on TF2 and still is fun to play against, the drags on mordhau is very, VERY common and also super not fun to play against it. And, after all that, Valve actually tried to remove bhop from TF2, and triternium did not even try to fix drags...
well said
Well, but bunny hopping has been a thing since Quake 1. It's been a big part of the Arena FPS genre for years. I don't think people would like TF2 as much if they forcefully removed it from the game, along with blast-jumping, because this players have been doing this for years, and probably expected it to be in the game, since it was a feature in TFC before, and in Quakeworld Teamfortress even before that! In fact, some spinoffs, such as Open Fortress or Fortress Forever, bring back bunny hopping in all it's glory, for the most veteran of players.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that TF2 HAS addressed bunny hopping; b-hopping is nothing compared to what it used to be, and removing it completely would piss off a lot of players. Basically, b-hopping in TFC is like dragging in Chiv 1, and b-hopping in TF2 is like dragging in Mordhau or Chiv 2.
With that being said, I do think surfing and b-hopping should be removed from CS:GO. That game is not an arena shooter, so it shouldn't have b-hopping, in the same way it lacks most other arena shooter elements.
@@lordtomlluckrahthegreat9014 Yes, sometimes bhop and surfing do breake games like CS:GO or other less arena-styled shooters, but most of the later source games have bhop baasically removed by applying major speed reduction upon landing after jump, so bunny hopping is not as important in later games. Quake and other shooters like quake do rely on bhop much, but these games usuallly make it feel rather fair when you encounter it, it either can be performed rather easily to be accessable by most of the players or rather hard to do to be a true skill-based movement technique that rewards timing and precision.
And most importantly, bhop almost always doesn't break the game's style or atmosphere, like, last source game that had bhop speed boosting in at least some capacity that i remember is HL2:DM, and it didn't really matter because of how horrible weapon hit registration worked there. In Quake or games like Quake bhop only increases the pace of game, which is not bad for arena shooters, i think.
Drags, on the other hand, break the main Mordhau's immersion creating feature - reliable combat system. It is very uncanny to see how horribly cab a body in metal armour bend with some of the drags. And when bhop usually only makes flavour of the game it is in more bright, drags and other animation abuse really decrease the medieval part of the Mordhau, and make it feel synthetic, unnatural and somewhat alien to it's own game desing ideas.
I really think mordhau needs to address dragging and accelerating by a damage decrease.
If you stand up and swing your arm like you are going to strike someone, at what point do you think your strike will deal the most damage and have the most momentum? It's about in the middle.
Damage should scale down based on its distance from this middle point in your swing. Too soon and your swing doesn't have as much momentum built up to damage your opponent. Too late and your swing begins to lose momentum as your swing is forcefully decelerated as it reaches the physical limitations of your arm's reach.
This is a step in the right direction. Maybe footwork can be affected in someway during a drag...like moving your mouse during a swing will severely limit number of steps/step speed. That might be hard to code though. I do know that the weapons physics/weight in mordhau is excellent though.
@@jimmythecrow seems pretty easy to put in for me. Take the time it takes for the swing to complete and break up that swing into a few segments with different damage values
@@jimmythecrow And... it already is in the game. The only thing you need to know is the difference between "similar to reality" and "realism that will break game balance"
I made this suggestion before and got reed at on Reddit, stoo stealing my ideas
@@bannor216 there is no physics being simulated in mordhau
Before someone says that I'm bad at the game or that I'm crying because I don't know how to play, I wanted to say that I've mastered drag mechanics very well. However, as some have said here in the comments, I think this is a completely unrealistic mechanic, not to mention the animation that becomes very bizarre. Accelerating a hit is completely understandable, but the game allows you to drag in such a way that, in a real situation, it wouldn't even tickle if it hit someone. I believe that to improve combat realism, it would be necessary to drastically reduce the damage depending on how long an attack is dragged. Otherwise the laws of physics would be neglected. For those who disagree, it would be better to be playing Chivalry
Lmao saw that reddit post. Chamber feint to parry did "nerf" dragging for a while but that made defense too strong and was rightfully nerfed as well. Maybe a happy medium is making decelerated hits do less damage like in Mount and Blade. The drags will win you duels but accelerated and constant velocity swings will win battles (like in Mount and Blade).
Go play Exanima for 5 minutes and tell me how enjoyable you really think that is.
@@arnlaugr Maybe not so, but play exanima for a few hours and it may become enjoyable, As it did for me.
Nothing was wrong with CFT , the only people who cried about it are the ones who abuse awful drag animations, late riposte drags, cucumbers etc
@@jimmythecrow I don't see how your comment is related to my comment. Stamina has always been as important as health and damage in small fights, yet high stam weapons are already favored in casual modes anyways. It only takes two swings to kill someone with such a weapon, giving you a stam return on kill quickly. Very quickly if that enemy is ganked.
@@LaughingMan44 ChFT makes the game easier for higher skill people than it does for low skilled (and more numerous) people. Most people (in my experience) are not manually feinting after failed chambers. It also incentivizes not learning how to drag, and dragging is a core of the gameplay. And chambering isn't the real counter for cucumbers and other such drags, footwork and torso manipulation is.
You can 'drag' irl too. If you swing from right to left from vom Tag to Alber, your opponent might parry to left frontale in anticipation of your incoming swing, at which point you can deliberately drop your point low to bypass his parry and then bring the point back up to thrust him in the chest or face. It's a one tempo move just like in the game, and this is known as Durchwechseln (change through) in German longsword, or cavazione in Italian rapier. The real problem with these games comes from the fact that attacks are directional but not parries. and because parries are not directional the devs have to make it so that you can't hold parry, so that it doesn't become too easy. They also have to put cooldowns on parries so that you can't spam it. But as a result of this 'fix', every man and his mum is feinting like crazy in these games when they're not dragging. The very core mechanics of chivalry and mordhau series are flawed.
IMO what you're describing isn't a drag (which is purely decelerating your swing to make your swing take longer to reach your opponent) but more of a "side stab" style thing from chivalry 1, or "side swing" in this case, where you reposition which part on their body you're targeting mid attack. This is more realistic and would still benefit from being executed quickly and is therefore not visually a problem
@@Stouty Nah you kinda have to slow down the swing a little bit in order to pull off this technique, going at full speed will likely cause your swing to get parried before you have time to drop the point under the parry.
@@hschan5976 Right, but you're not slowing down your swing for the sole purpose of slowing the entire attack down, repositioning a swing will be less direct and slower than committing to the initial swing, the deceleration taking place here is a byproduct
@@Stouty True
A drag Mordhau/Chivalry style is like swinging your weapon with all your might, but keeping all it's kinetic energy and restraining it's momentum at the same time (it's like your trying to stop your hit, but not really, letting the momentum of the weapon going, when you are pulling it slowly towards you to slow it down at the same time). Which is against all the law of physics.
Because your body mass is necessarily greater the mass of your weapon, and therefore it's not momentum/momentum (which any case will make quite a loss in eK) but you just stopping abruptly the weapon
When two handers can be dragged to the point that they are faster than the carving knife, then you know it's better to become an archer or a bush wookie with bear traps
When town handers can be dragged to be faster than a carving knife? How do you drag a weapon and also make it faster 🤔
Just used dragged as a general word instead of adding accel to it
It always seemed stupid for me. The main selling point of weapons like dagger and rapier are their uber fast stabs, but what's the point when you can just accel a 1h axe to achieve even faster strike? Really idiotic.
@@Igor369 Morph mixups makes those weapons stupid fast and almost impossible to read. Try it out
Drain stamina when they move the mouse the opposite direction of the swing.
Boom. They now hindered themselves.
Comparing quickscopping to dragging takes real level of stupidity. Since quickscopping wasnt that effective in first place it was more of a visual fluff. Its not about dragging as a problem its the high reward of it and making anything else futile that cause problems. For example if quickscoping in MW2 was such a problem IW would definetly nerf it in next games but it wasnt since it required certain skill to confirm kill further than 80meters where as drags/accells reward you since they dont take more stamina that classic slash yet they throw off oponents guard due to janky animation and cannot be chambered since they look weird and sometimes bypasses parry hitbox.
Also I have slight beef with accels since I have encountered way many battle axe/war axe mains who just stares at ground like playing GoldenEye speedrun and bashing you in face with higher speed that dagger. These drags and accels should have stamina/damage compensation if someone drag the swing so hard he should be punished by taking lower damage to oponent.
hello stouty i will teach you how to drag (free of charge) if you stop coping
5-4 on ranked BOY
i come back to this video every once in a while. to shed a tear about what could have been.
Drags are seriously so easy to fix. Damage needs to be tied to relative swing velocity. Half speed sweed, half damage. Acceling would give a boost.
meanwhile bannerlord and warband : if you slow your weapon down you get negative gamage multiplier
There should be a momentum system making it so the faster your weapon is moving the more damage it does, making substantial drags do little to no damage as you are kinda just tapping your enemy lazily, or make it cost lots of stamina, as it would be tiring in real life to swing a maul and then try to stop it in midair, or maybe just make it so if someone drags they automatically loose their weapon
The frames feel smoother on my phone than my pc...
Just a few thoughts that are not connected:
1. I enjoy sweet manipulation in Mordhau. Although it doesn't quell my knighthood fantasy of intense/realistic combat, I find the mental-chess game aspect pleasing. Learning how the ways in which a player's body contorts would result in a drag or accel, and being able to parry at the last second to avoid feints. It's intense in its own aspect, having to rely on split-second thinking to decide whether that attack is going to be a drag, feint, accel, etc.
2. What if we were to add momentum-physics to the game? Making damage from weapons increase if you were running at the target, or if you hit the target when the weapon is at it's fastest during the swing. And of course, if you were to "drag" that weapon, then it would result in lower damage and perhaps even a lower stam-cost to parry it.
This is actually legitimately a good idea
NOOOO YOU CANT JUST MOVE YOUR MOUSE TO MAKE THE SWING SLOWER!!!!!!!
I love chiv 2 so much I can hop on and play the game without worrying about some guy playing dance sword revolution and obliterating my soul with a sword swing that comes from his contorted spine
I tried learning drags so hard my mouse always fell off the desk for how fucking hard i'd drag just to hit the opponent
I got into mordhau from the epic games giveaway and just got done playing in a lobby where everyone was doing this. And your reason about it being physically impossible was also my reasoning why dragging or whatever is an exploit and shouldn’t be in the game. Only someone with Superman strength could achieve this kind of lethal swing manipulation. It’s funny because it defeats the purpose of weapon classes when everyone could just use mauls and give their opponents 0.1 second reaction time.
marox has the right of it saying its simply one more skill to learn and deal with, and most people that try to get better at the game can deal with 99% of drags after an hour of real practice. As for your claim of things like this not existing in real life, I will challenge that as well. Not in the look per-say, but in practice. At risk of flaming I'll admit to being a guy who did full armored melee combat a few years ago, wearing armor made of metal/leather and thick plastic and fighting with either ratan bludgeons or dull steel weapons. A skill I excelled at was throwing what we called wrap shots, which were somewhere between a morph and a drag in real life. You would fake a wide swing at someone to make them try to guard and twist your wrist as the tip of your weapon carried the forward momentum, allowing for a blow that could have connected with the right side of their head landing in the back of their thigh. You could also fake a low swing and crack them in the back of the neck or head. In mordhau the closet thing to it is one of those "bad" drags newer players try to do throwing an lmb and walking past someone, turning it in to hit them past their parry. people that really couldnt learn to time their parrys better, or use footwork, or stouty jump/duck to deal after early parrying.... did they play the game for longer than two hours? Does a niche game REALLY need to cater to the lowest common denominator?
Most people don't try to get better - they quit (source: player count). Some lack of realism will always creep in as you mention, your repositioning example is more akin to a side stab from chivalry 1 than a drag. As to your final statement, why would you want the genre to remain niche?
@@Stouty Its not that I want the game to remain niche so much as most people now a days wont commit time to getting good at a game they find frustrating, and with how high mordhau's (in this example) skill ceiling is, the harder it is for new players to get in on the ground floor regardless of a single mechanic. Do you think that even the majority of the vanishing player base is due to dragging, and not say, feint spamming? Or impossible to block (from their standpoint) accels? The point I'm trying to argue here is the people that complain about dragging would simply complain about a different mechanic they see as insurmountable, especially as they chose on of the easiest to defend against mechanics to get bent over.
While I'd love a triple A melee slasher, a game like this probably wont ever be as popular as we'd like it to be while still maintaining a skill ceiling high enough to please the people who are actively enjoying it now. What you should think about it what kind of game you want it to be catered towards and what that would entail. Please don't mistake me for an elitest, its not that I don't want lower skill people enjoying the game. It's just that the majority of games that a huge amount of people play either have popular streamers playing it so they want to get involved or its super accessible to do "well". But I'd argue that games that have large mechanical skill have a smaller player base as time moves on because newer players can't catch up to the older base that's had to adapt to hang, and that's not an issue that's just endemic to melee slashers.
I appreciate your content and thanks for making it, by the way.
@@bocajmed Whilst you may be right about casual players leaving due to feints - at least they are founded in realism. In terms of gameplay, they are far more interesting than waving your mouse around and offer opportunities to punish your opponent without resorting to running around and hoping not to get hit
@@Stouty ah, but now you are making a subjective claim and not a factual one saying one mechanic is more interesting than another while I would posit that both are of equal merit. Aside from myself, tracksuit johhny, sublime clamped and more im sure are down there I dont care to find, there are people that find dragging, both learning to do them well and defending against them to not only simply be part of the experience, but one we enjoy. More mechanics = more things to learn = higher skill ceiling = more fun, as long as we are being subjective :). As for realism, you can't use that as a defense in a game where dwarf is a perk, unless you think midgets with comparable strength to grown men is realistic. Drags themselves aren't unrealistic in their movement regardless, whats unrealistic is maintaining the same damage regardless of how fast or slow the weapon moves when it connects. But fixing that would have to power up accels and that sounds bad.
A simple fix would be to have a tutorial that actually teaches new players all the available mechanics to them, like how chiv 2 does by teaching you how to accel and drag in the tutorial( as I've seen in vids, I haven't got it since epic launcher is lame.)
I remember when mordhau went free on epic we noobs were votekicking high level players to keep the game clear of crazy drags
1:02 except for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy
The last time I played Mordhau, some kid in matchmaking made fun of me cause I couldn't parry some of his stupid looking drags.
The problem is that the game relies on these drags so much. The parry-box and the parry-window are extremely big so aiming your parry is not really needed and therefore the only way to win against most opponents is to make him parry too early or too late, it's entirely timing-based.
Chivalry obviously had even more stupid drags but the movement was faster and it was harder to aim your parry, so the whole gameplay felt more dynamic.
The biggest issue with drags has to be the fact that a weapon if swing like that wouldn’t hit very hard, as you said, it violates the laws of physics, F=ma, so if the weapon is not accelerating it will have little force, it’s whacky to watch a Zwei travel through space and time just to gently touch your face and your head to come flying off.
A potential solution would be to somehow calculate the speed of a swing as it hits a target, idk how you’d code that, and I’d worry it’d make accels hit harder than intended, but if it was possible for damage to scale with your swings speed, perhaps calculated by its position relative to its starting point and the target, you could make drags be tactically useless for damage.
the problem with games like chivalry and mordhau is that they by design get less fun the better you are
exactly, in fps, when you get better you just learn how to kill people faster and maybe die a little slower, but in mordhau it's like it's the other way around, you learn a few cheeky ways to get a hit in but mainly you just get hit by less things the better you get, meaning as you get better and keep fighting better people you get to hit people way less often, the pace of the game slows down unless there's teammates to sneak hits into as well
ahhh, the knight's curse...yes.
@@neen4456 just join a noob duel server, and on pub servers I'm still better than 90% of players. I only struggle against people with people who abuse late ripostes and other janky animations
That’s when you start playing meme builds. Sneaky naked dwarf who doesn’t look for kills, instead looks for enemy archers bows to steal.
@@LaughingMan44 "just join a noob duel server" & this is why most newbies end up quitting so fast lol, they join expecting people around their ranks, just to see a top 3 on the leaderboard of people going 20-0 with a 1/1/1 maul build xD
i feel chilvary really better for this (the two), cause now the block allow new players to block slow drags
Wow, Mordhau's response is really enfuriating. "Some high level players in other games put up with animation abuse similar to what's in our game, so why don't our low level players want to learn to abuse our animations?" What are they thinking? Their dev team needs an adult.
In Mount and Blade, there was a mechanic that would change your damage based on impact velocity. So, you could stuff opponents stabs by walking into them if you were close enough, or escape into the far end of animation, reducing damage to 1. There would be a "biff" sound, indicating minimal damage.
It could be made to only affect the most extreme end of velocity range to avoid changing the game entirely, but allow a counter to un-physical dragging.
would be the axe main complaining about drags lol
messer main*
@@Stouty ok
Here's an idea to fix dragging. Program in a "Drag-Degree Counter" that counts the amount of degrees of drag has been performed during the release window of an attack. After around 2 degrees of drag (the threshold), lower the damage of the attack by 7.5% per each additional degree, to a damage floor of around -75%. The variables such as the threshold, damage subtraction, and damage floor can be tweaked until gameplay is as desired.
Remove drags and make the windups holdable. You can hold your sword behind your head in the windup position until you want to release it. That could still screw with people who have been parrying mutliple attacks in a row and are in autoparry mode so they'll just parry at the same timing again but if you're holding your attack you can hit them.
This is an interesting idea. This is kind of similar to the heavy attack mechanic in Chiv 2 but much more realistic. I wonder how mordhau would play, if dragging were limited to a quarter of the current degrees possible (around 5 degrees of turning away or something so your mouse doesn't feel "locked" when you swing) and we had attack wind ups holding.
Give attacks a damage curve based on their intended animations.
Attacks that occur close to when they should, achieve maximum damage.
Attacks that occur just after wind-up achieve minimal damage and may not even flinch the opponent, however this should ramp up quite quickly towards the intended attacking window of the weapon, and ramp down sharply just after this window as your character should start recovering from the swing.
This kind of thing is similar to how Natural Selection's aliens get their damage from biting (the edge of your "mouth" nips doing minimal damage), but the marines cannot "parry" a bite.
BF1 also had a similar thing with sniper rifles, giving them an intended "kill range" (firing too close would over-penetrate the target, dealing less damage, but headshots were always viable 1-shots) and I believe this was well received by the community but I'm not sure.
I think this would make combat fairer by making feints more deadly, and I feel this would increase the level of skill needed as good players would need to land good hits, not to just hit their opponent, but it may require overall damage buffs.
But yeah, I gave up on this game a long time ago.
This is such an easy solution devs would not implement unless everybody would scream about it. So true thoughts
I agree with the CEO. Dragging is just something you have to learn. Its difficult, but manageable. Just put out more patchies and polish the animations so that it doesn't become completely impossible. The fact that there is really no other games than Mordhau and Chiv within this genre mostly says something about the market demand for this type of product, and is not a criticism of dragging imo. -- Ethics
The potential market demand is much much higher than 2k concurrent players. It opened at 60k, there is a reason players are leaving in droves
It is tho, i know people that put the game down and others that refused to pick it up jus because drags made it too unreadable and wacky
You know, ive thought about this alot and i think there is a solution. When your swing is released (or maybe even prerelease), the camera slightly drags from your attack when you go against the direction of your swing whilst the camera tries to magnetize back to its original fixed position. Not only should dragging away from the direction of your attack become very limited, but also look less wonky albeit more natural when attempting to drag. (should actually look like the player is slightly holding back the momentum of their weapon) My hopes this also fixes alot of the more crazier drags aswell. Another thing that needs to happen is angular swing correction. The swing angle animation of your sword should tilt slightly if you are aiming perpendicular to the direction of your swing, that combined with camera drag should fix some of these wonky looking attacks.
5:27 0 animation feint moment
Wait... what if we will make stamina consumed not after strike, but DURING strike? Than longer time your sword reach the enemy, than more it consumes.
I know this might be a bit drastic of a change, but maybe make it a bit like Mount&Blade system, when damage is calculated by speed of a weapon relative to a person being hit. However, people might deccelerate an attack just to accelerate it right before strike, but it would be possible to fix by for example, dealing damage based on average speed during swing.
For example, dmg dealt would be some X value * (averege velocity of weapon during swing+velocity of a person being hit). Of course you could move away from swing to get less damage, but that would be pretty realistic and intuitive.
I loved the game, but stopped playing because i got bored of all these "exploity" fighting styles. I just don't want to play medieval game, where fighting like a medieval knight won't get you far.
They probably won't fix it, because they fear professional players won't like the change, but they don't acknowledge, that most players just want to play a medieval game.
I believe Warband and Bannerlord have a system for calculating the speed a weapon is travelling in relation to it's target upon collision to alter the damage inflicted, causing hitting someone mid-charge causing more damage, or barely hitting someone moving barely slower than your weapon to do very little damage. Mordhau and Chivalry could employ a similar calculation, so that a weapon being dragged, traveling extremely slowly, will deal very little or no damage upon impact, unless it is then granted enough time to speed up again before collision.
Interesting breakdown. I think a simple solution to the drag problem would be to provide a sweet spot to a swing. What I mean by this is define a portion of the swing that deals full damage. A drag could still be used to get around defense, but at the cost of falling outside this "sweet spot" and dealing less damage. This would provide incentive to fight in a more natural way without eliminating drags (or accels as well) completely.
What if they made a weapon velocity mechanic that deals less damage with slow drags? in a real sword fight, you do change the momentum and direction of your swing. When this happens, you lose momentum and damage, but gain control. A weapon velocity mechanic would make it so that drags, while being useful, arent the end all be all.
im sorry but accels are FAR more broken than drags. and in my personal opinion, swing manip is what makes these games so special
two sides of the same coin
@@Stouty mate you cant seriously tell me you think drags are more busted than instant accels. anybody forced to play at or above 60 ping either red parries when trying to hard read or gamble parries the insta and gets exploited for it (also making feints a lot scarier). just about every axe weapon, messer, all 1 handers, and even longsword have some freakishly fast max accels. i personally do not suffer too much from this considering im lucky enough to be able to play on 30ish ping generally with a 160-170ms reaction time however anyone on or above 60 ping suffers incredibly from these. For example: Eighty in the 3rd place match in recent EU Arcis tourney when redblue cope switches to bastard sword at 9-9...
I think there are 3 things that can be done to somewhat fix this without completely reworking the concept of melee slashers. Firstly is held block, and not with huge penalties attached to it. is to tightly control turn caps so that ppl can't just accelerate or decelerate by too much, or worse even do a pirouette, mid swing. And thirdly they need to implement a speed measuring system that penalizes super slow attacks that connect in the damage department, similar to M&B. That way if someone gently taps someone else with a weapon, it will be near useless.
Drags are cool imo, i personally like the way they look ingame and how they work. But i get why people are turned off by this mechanic, it makes no sense irl and its confusing to newbies.
Whats with this reoccuring "reliams" meme? Who gives a fuck lol. Should you havee one life per match too? Should be a good change since its realistic.
They have anger issues and cry every time they lose. Basically need something to blame their loss on that wasn't their fault.
@@hardboiled2987 I hate to bring this up but accessibility comes to mind, a game lives and dies by its ability to attract new players and keep them. The issue here is that none of the maneuvers done with the animation exploits would make any logical sense to a new player. All that would happen is that, now that they're at a disadvantage cause they can't tell what the hell their opponent is even doing, leading them to get hit (And more often than not, instantly killed).
coming back to this video and reading the comments it seems like chiv 2 does alot of what people want but there are still complaints that it is a left click spamming game despite feints and dragging being in that game too. It seems like a larger problem than dragging and hit manipulation and really comes down to not being able to please everybody.
Dragging is present in Chivalry 2 and so little has changed
Drags and accels could or should have velocity based modifiers that affect stamina or the damage dealt, positively or negatively. A long drag should do less damage because you wasted velocity. A quick accel could use 2 more stam than normal. Dragging on a whole should in theory use more stamina since holding a weapon extended is not very easy to do.
what if dragging reduced damage proportionally to the speed at which it goes (eg slower sword means slower damage) and acceling increased damage?
wouldn't eliminate dragging so it would still be encouraged, just less effective
@@Stouty true, but it would make it more realistic. Also wow man, I'm surprised you still check comments, not many creators do that.
This is exactly why I now nearly only play archer in larger servers, getting dragged by someone who made their zweihander swing last literally more than two seconds or have the lead dancer for mordhau on ice come up to me with his war axe (zero surprise because what is a changing meta lol just have the same 5 weapons since launch) only to make an ice sculpture of me while doing 360's and looking in every direction at once somehow. Flame me all you want but the melee has gotten so incredibly boring as nothing is being done about what is ruining it.
even the top OCE player agrees with me
Lmao lead dancer
I hated drags until I learned how to use them and how useful they were to winning fights. Then I hated them even more.
Dragging is ok if the special animation would be triggered. The thing is - it doesn't look natural cause the hit lands when the speed of weapon is minimal, that should not cause any dmg case physics. Instead it should look like the the release is delayed.
@@jimmythecrow As Arma player yes bullets really slow down at a distance. Checkmate dumbass
@@jimmythecrow In pretty much every fps game long range shots deal way less damage
@@jimmythecrow Bullet slow down actually really, really fast at first due to air resistance.
Drags and combo after miss are why i dont have patience for duels
embrace the drag
The song at 0:23 is massive attack-angel
its funny how you make some of the best and most logical arguments i have ever heard and you are making them over a medieval fighting game with 2k players
Maybe a good way to fix dragging would be to make it so that the animation gradually increase speed over the course of the entire swing which would make it so that your weapon would hit roughly the same time or not much later even if you tried to drag it to the end of your screen
The coaching drop there was clever, and it’s true I bought his coaching to understand some basics and it really does help. I personally love drags, I think it’s really cool to have mix ups like that in the game but completely agree with you at the same time. When I first got into mordhau I was so turned off to the combat due to top fraggers toe dragging me or doing their cute little cucumber drags. I hope there’s a system implemented to either add more counter play to drags or maybe make you lose more stam to drag accels or deaccels.
Can you explan what dym with "more counterplay", you Can parry drags just by listening, even fancy drags like wessex
so many people you could go to for free coaching..shame you bought into paying real money for it.
10 $ was sent to your PayPal. "Thanks for the advertising" -St0uty
@@BIG_M4N probs lol
@@zamo8076 in a sense make them less of a crutch and more as an actual mix up. I believe stam cost was mentioned in the video - I think that could be an interesting way to balance it out and experience it less frequently. I can speculate all I want but I truly don’t know what I’m talking about - lol I just enjoy the game *shrug*
Just like in good old years of Jedi Knight Outcast. This was the first game i know of that developped dragging.
does that mean you will be erasing them from contigent ?
Also this japanese map looks kinda cool...
Can't give any info out yet! NDA
@@Stouty Let me borrow money
I don't think that all drags are bad, a portion of them look fine and fun to pull off. The one example would be toe drags since it isn't really ''decelaration'' and just smart swing manipulation. I love drags as a mechanic, they provide a unique challange and gameplay but I also understand how it's necessary to tone them down. There is a middle ground that both parties can agree to
Since if I'm being honest, Mordhau without drags would be pretty shit. Doing nothing but ''reading'' feints is as boring as it gets and the hate shields get is proof of that. It's clear the devs knew and intended for drags to stay but left them out for marketing, they understand the combat can't hold up without them
Maybe we are just spoiled by the amount of options and fun drags add (when they aren't used by 5k hours gs sweatlords) but it's interesting to see what people can come up with
true, the whole game would need reworking
I've heard your disdain for locational swing manipulation like Z-stabs and waterfalls, which is very understandable due to how they look visually, but I truly believe that if Mordhau shifted its focus from timing parries towards positioning parries, it would give more weapons an identity while simultaneously allowing them to overhaul drags. One way they could implement this positioning emphasis is by severely decreasing the width of the parry box size. As of right now, positioning only matters in the sense of getting out of your opponent's FOV, and in order to create an angle with footwork, you have to throw off their aim to the point that you're 90 degrees off their center screen. This makes it so that throwing off their aim, which should be one of the main ingredients to a successful parry, is highly irrelevant, to the point where combat just devolves into sliding around each other hoping to affect the TIMING of both you and the opponent's tracer. One of the arguments that I've heard against this change is that it would make 1vX impossible. Mechanically, the only impossibility this would introduce is parrying two angles simultaneously. With footwork you could alter the timings at which tracers would collide and be capable of flicking to parry anything as long as they don't land simultaneously, which is already very difficult to coordinate as the X. I don't think decreasing the vertical size would be a good idea as combat would devolve into getting cheeky leg hits. Instead, something along the lines that allows footwork to actually create openings, which would also act as an indicator for the defender as to which side to flick their parry. Getting into riposte wars against a MAA was exhilarating as all of their mixups, aside from the Dane Axe's whopping 500 ms release, were locational, and the only viable timing mixup would be a feint. How tracers interact with the parry box is one of the biggest aspects of the slasher genre that makes it unique.
I think some degree of locational aiming would be cool within reason, they usually have more counter play than the traditional drag
I feel like we should have an overhaul mod that makes parry directional and holdable. It seems like it could change Mordhau in a very positive way but we would have to see what kind of bs the players did with a system like that. Shields might become meta for anything other than duels but maybe that isn't the worst thing.
dude positional parries is actually a sick idea. when i first started playing i legit thought that's what the game was so i used to look down at footdrags but still got hit which left me clueless
@@alpatr0s596 if you look where you parry the range is increased so in a sense there is some positional parrying.
@@AR-yr5ov For sure... there definitely is at least some type of reward for attempting to intercept the tracer with the center of your screen. But that reward ultimately is time based, and not a gap in the parry box :(. You gain an extended invisible box that is the equivalent of stopping their tracer earlier. In chivalry, when you wound up a stab you had multiple options depending on how much velocity you built up, which direction that momentum was traveling, and which direction you were facing as you would leap once entering release phase. The movement in chivalry had a lot more inertia. If you had already gained momentum before the lunge of your swing you could use that leap to gain an angle and turn while still going the same direction of your leap. Chivalry had a huge emphasis on conservation of momentum. In Mordhau however if you wind up a stab all of your options are essentially time based. You can morph into a strike, feint it, morph feint it, drag it, or morph drag from the stab. All of these options which essentially attempt to bait out a mistimed parry. There is already very emergent gameplay from these options as everything is relative to the opponent's position, but it ends up making every weapon feel the same. The path to landing a strike is always about getting the opponent to mistime their input and it's poopy
Drags are funny as shit, even if I get my head chopped off by them
wouldn't an easy solution be to make the speed of a blade a factor in the damage of a swing? so when decelerating away from an opponent, your blade ends up doing less if any damage at all?
Curios to know if there's a custom server that includes modifications to combat physics to prevent excessive dragging or accels, and what fights on that server would look like. Ultimately I think it comes down to the skill ceiling and "fun" factor of the fights. If we remove these mechanics from the game entirely and leave everything else as is, would that lead to fights that are still enjoyable, or would it devolve into feint spamming and/or stamina attrition wars between two evenly matched players?
I'd much rather see a game revolve around stamina and feinting which are at least visually presentable then dragging
@@Stouty Fair enough, I trust your judgement here. I guess you have a sense for what a game like that would look like, because when I've tried dueling players around the same skill level as me, and it was agreed beforehand that there would be no dragging, it made for slightly bland and very repetitive combat.
Such awesome content, really makes me want to get back into this game and even get lessons to be way better at the genre, I always hated that I was only okay and could never majorly improve. Being plat 5 and then getting knocked back to plat 1 because of poor decisions and playing with rage is the worst, and when I play mordhau, I am not angry with losing, or the idea of getting beaten, its when the game doesn't have a sense or realism or fairness in how mechanics interact with each other. I dont like getting shit on by a toxic sweat and having no chance to properly address the mechanics they use to time and time again kick my ass. A fantastic video and totally accurate points. this genre if applied to massively multiplayer games or rpgs would would blow the fuck out of shooters.
What about halving the damage as the attack takes longer to hit its target? Problem solved? Drags would be used just to break enemy's defense
I love mordhau, but dont play it cuz of these ugly drags
I seriously don't understand why the developers don't shut this shit down and remove dragging. Chivalry 2 hasn't been ruined just yet by it but if it continues down the path its going it'll be dead by the time it drops on steam, and then shortly after the steam release it'll die again.
didn't chiv 2 already die? I'd read somewhere it had a player count of like less than 1k at some point, might have just been late hours though
@@wiggly_xd you can readily find matches now because of the quick match feature but the game was dying yeah
laughed so much at 5:38, great edit dude
not mine but glad you enjoyed
Have you seen carpet dragging? Shit is just insane and kills all of the new players motivation when they join duel servers
RIP MF DOOM
Carpet dragging? Is that similar to a toe drag?
@@barackobama129 RIP MF DOOM
@@thegibbehhh9430 and it's a Wessex type drag it's a completely fucked up animation that basically goes through parry look up mordhau carpet drag and you'll see
Perfect drag nerf: they deal significantly less damage, since you're decelerating the attack, but can still flinch someone out of their own attack. Keep them in as a mechanic but make it less punishing on people who struggle against them.
That was my thought, swing animations could have a damage curve where you deal less the further the opponent is from the center of your screen when it connects. Though i'm not sure how possible it would be to implement something like that.
why not make stamina go down when swinging, like when you drag the stamina bar goes down with the start of the swing? Lets say that you have a 100 stam, then if you drag it continually goes down at the start of the swing... making dragging a risky manuever or someshit.
This is actually really good idea
I like this
woah genius.
This would fucking punish misses too. Since you can’t punish misses in this fucking melee game
I think one potential fix for dragging is having it still be possible but including a better "glancing hit" mechanic, if the relativ speed your weapon hits the opponent with is below a certain threshold it won't do much damage, maybe even no damage if the enemy is wearing armor.
I think Cavalry II did an amazing job explaining drags and accels in their tutorial. While the game is much more welcoming and casual than MORDHAU, I think MORDHAU would benefit greatly from taking a note out of Chiv II's book in that aspect.
of course St0uty making a video about removing any skill involved
go ft10?
@@Stouty ego
Very well made video.
A game like that can't exist without drags, unless you make the release time of all weapons really short and the windups of the weapons longer or shorter.
Or you trash the whole physic based combat and do the route of for honour (even though that game is dead I think) or dark souls.
Mordhau doesn't have physics based combat at all, it's all just tracers and collidors. Only examina and that hellish quart game have physics based combat
I think the solution would be to make the dragged attacks do less damage since they are slower, that would make sense.
Maybe we actually do need to bite the bullet and do something like a number of players have said and just introduce a damage penalty on drags. I always thought it was a stupid idea but maybe with that we can start focusing on making some other mechanics more interesting. Accels will become more powerful, but IMO accel animation abuse is typically much more readable than drag animation abuse so maybe that's worth it, and without having to guess as much whether they will drag or not it becomes less of a guessing game.
At least this way drags still exist and you can still use them but they become more niche and less impactful. I do miss chambers being a more prominent feature in the game and I think I had the most fun in alpha when chambers were busted, but I'm a lot less experienced than some other players so my experience is biased towards low/mid tier players
This is actually kind of a decent solution. Makes sense physically, a slower object imparts less kinetic force.
inconsistent, also I don't know how you can say that accels are more readable since good accel won't be long enough on your screen to get a proper look
@@drphdmd7064 I don't care about realism tbf
@@BigPapaMitchell Fair enough, it is a video game after all.
@@pekar4713 Just saying it's inconsistent isn't an argument. It's also inconsistent that we can chamber with strikes but not with morphs, we make sacrifices for realism or consistency for gameplay.
> also I don't know how you can say that accels are more readable
That's just my experience with the game. You can usually tell when an accel is coming by reading body movement, dragging is a weird beast.
always appreciate your succinct video essays. thanks!
Yes sir, but you need drags in comp melee otherwise too easy to read and counter.
then feints/morphs could be buffed
Agreed - its the only way to beat chamber bots
@@Stouty chamber and morph removal? I think it would be a great idea
3:08 you couldn't find better guy for Chivalry's animation exploit showcase (we're clanmates)
They shouldnt change any of the swing manipulation animations (thats a good way to lose 80% of players over level 60), but they should demonstrate how to do it in the tutorial.
you definitely would not lose close to that many players if you removed the "swing manipulation animations". There aren't swing manipulation animations, that's dumb. There are animations, and people break them by manipulating the swing. The only thing that's important is if the manipulation of that animation is consistently readable given practice against it. Some are, some aren't. You want to remove the ones that aren't.
@@millinom Yup. Only "extreme" drag are problematic.
You can do some weird sh*t with those.
@@millinom of course you would. The only reason I keep playing is under the idea I can improve. Remove the main function that allows for improvement and the vast majority of vets will leave
@@XSCSCGS there's a big big difference in having techniques that increase the variety of tools you have to catch your opponent off guard vs having techniques that force your opponent to gamble their response due to insufficient feedback from the game. One adds to the skill ceiling and the variety of ways u can exist there and one detracts, taking away from the variety of playstyles that can exist there. The majority of swing manipulation is just fine, I think, but there are a few things that deal with this problem and ultimately high level combat is worse for it.
well they already lost 80% of their players now dumbass
sounds like a get good moment
not in this instance - rank 1 on both leaderboards
I call it the "reason -10% of the player base every month"
Idk im not a competitive player but to me dragging feels fun, it looks retarded but the combat in mordhau feels very good to me. My fear isn't that the combat can become too unreadable. The bigger problem you want to avoid, imo, is if it becomes too readable. Imagine you removed drags and then suddenly a level 200 player can just stand there for 10 minutes hard reading everything you throw, parrying everything, occasionally walking backwards to regain stamina. How cancer would that be? Currently I feel like there's just enough tools in the game that I can find my way through anybody's defenses. Its always better for duelling games to be offense focused rather than defense
The majority of players think feints are unreadable in Mordhau so I don't think this would be an issue
@@Stouty Okay so I don't understand what the vision for the game is if you dislike dragging. Don't you remember, especially in the early games, the go to complaint for new players is not actually dragging, but its feint spamming. They hate that shit just as much or even more than dragging.
So if you remove drags, either you have to buff feinting such that it becomes unreadable and then its a legit complaint that the game is just a feint guessing simulator, or if you leave it untouched then high level hard reading players will legit never get hit in a 1v1.
@@ravenoushydra7948 >So if you remove drags, either you have to buff feinting such that it becomes unreadable
That doesn't follow, for example if Mordhau was to suddenly not have drags, feinting would be the primary offensive tool and whilst readable, top players would still fall for them (in the same manner that even the best FPS players will still miss shots).
Would players then refocus all their complaints to feints? I guess we'd have to find out but the combat itself would undoubtedly look better (and imo play better)
@Stouty Have you tested this? No matter how I think about it it seems really trivial to defend against pure feints if you don't have to worry about accels or drags. Some of the smaller weapons have very tight windows but even bastard sword users mix in drag and accel for good reason.
And it would be very disadvantageous to ever throw a feint, you are just instantly putting yourself in stamina disadvantage, for a feint that is probably not going to even do anything. Im saying this because a normal feint without drag/accel is much less potent then it is right now, in addition to the opponent being able to use 100% of their brain to focus on reading the feint, it follows that feinting becomes much less worth it.
The mechanical difficulty of having reaction time for a feint and learning to not panic, is nowhere near the mechanical difficulty of aim. Aim is also very open ended since aim can be anything from fast tracking a target moving around you in 3d space up in your face, to snapping to a tiny target in the distance. Plus it's not like pro players are having trouble hitting targets, their competition is about hitting the target before the target hits them, so they must sacrifice some stability to aim and fire as fast as they can to win that fight.
I don't see that in mordhau. Without swing manipulation, what is the difference between your feint and mine, or a new player's feint? Not much really. Some subtle footwork. Maybe you'll try to "condition" me. Good luck with that when you're not dragging or doing anything special. Your options are: feint, morph, morph feint. not much to it.
So the way I see it, most fights are just going to be trading boring, easily read ripostes, until someone wins by a small stamina advantage. Why would anyone want to play that?
But also I think you're really underestimating how much people hate feints especially new players. So I don't think it's "refocusing complaints", the complaints are already there. To me, swing manipulation is the only thing making the game dynamic and not feint spamming. Without swing manipulation, there simply aren't enough layers to the combat.
Im not sure how that makes the game look or feel better. It looks more "realistic", as in there aren't weird floating swings, but jerking your bastard sword up and down in repeated feints doesn't look great either. On the contrary, while I think drags look stupid, they actually feel super fun to play, and the fact that you can combine them with your feints and morphs is what makes the game dynamic and open ended to me
@@Stouty And one prediction I would have, if you remove drags:
Someone will create a mod for a practice gamemode where a bot runs at you and feints/swings randomly without stopping. Your goal is to hard read the attacks. Within a few weeks, players will get so good at this that they can last for hours, for so long that they can go until they get bored or lose to mental fatigue.
Then they hit the duelyard and every fight is just boring or plain frustrating because nobody can get past their defense.
People will improve at feint reading in such a way, if its the only thing left in the game. No different from fps players using aimlabs or whatnot.
Hello girls! :)
Anyway, what about making damage dependant on the time of the swing. Let's say, first 10% time of the swing you will make just 10% of the damage, then 100% in the middle of the swing time, but again 10% only in the very end of the swing? This will nerf broken accels and drags heavilly.
I quite like this
The problem is the only way to get 100% damage is by making them parry at the wrong time with miss combo or feints. This game relies on drags and accels to get past parry.
@@LaughingMan44 Yes, bigger the risk, higher the damage. So most easier strike to parry would cause most damage. You will be able to do drags like previously, just do less damage. For example, when you do combo accel strike (one of broken practices) or drag away with something like executioner to avoid parry.
@@luskito Are you having a stroke?
@@LaughingMan44 Are you trying to insult someone trough yb comments because you do not agree with his opinion? Let's see who is having a stroke.
The simplest way to kill the effectiveness of drags is to make damage output strictly based on weapon velocity or time spent in release.
There needs to be additional systems in place to allow skill based input to land hits however, to avoid stamina wars and generally frustrating combat.
Ok and then how do you hurt players besides feinting? Is feintspam really something that the dunning kruger new players, that stouty loves so much, like?
@OHGAS So you will increase time to kill and make feintspamming far more viable and thus no one will drag or it will be rarely done because feintspamming is far superior.
@OHGAS Which is gambling. If he lets loose the swing you die.
MY GOD when will i be in a video, MAKE IT OFFICIAL stout, we cant hide this for any longer
damn here I was thinking this game was skillful, but nah you right it's just a guessing game of accel/drag, don't get me wrong I enjoy it, but I shouldn't go into a duel server & every single fight feels the same :p
gotta love the british, they sound so nice and succinct when describing a problem and proudly exclaiming they've got no solution.
Not succinct enough unfortunately as that's not what I said