@@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.
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.
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.
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.
Easy solution (probably an actual pain in the ass to code) is to make swing velocity or swing time (how long the swing has been active) a factor in damage. If you get hit by someone dragging, maybe it does a third the damage of a normal swing. Maybe an accel adds up to +5 dmg depending on the weapon. I feel like this could be a simple solution that makes sense and adds depth to the combat while discouraging players from relying on a crutch in the form of a mechanical exploit.
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.
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).
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.
hey man just letting you know you are empirically right and it's stupid to even try to argue otherwise. I got chiv 1 thinking it would be a cool sword game, got instantly exploited to death and quit instantly realising the game I bought and the game I got were two different things. Then I saw mordhau and said "you're not getting me again" Then I saw chiv 2 and I got it ONLY because I thought there'd be more players and less tryhards and exploiting seemed to be less mandatory/less ugly looking, but I live in fear that it will one day become like mordhau and chiv 1, and seeing your high tier duels i see that it already is that at the highest level, i just hope the online doesn't devolve into it. Keep fighting the good fight or this game will die.
What do you think about a damage curve in swing where you only do maximum damage at the intuitive peak of the swing with both ends doing far less damage? This already somewhat exists, but it is rarely a factor in determining fights. What if it was somewhat of a bell curve where the beginning and end of your swing did increasingly small amounts of damage when it got to either end? Perhaps if damage was low enough (say below 10 damage in a strike), the hit would not stagger your opponent, encouraging you to hit where the swing would be most powerful irl. This would also reward skilled play through swing accuracy and would punish unskilled play with less damage and potentially an in game punish through not staggering your opponent. I would love to hear what you think! I played chiv and had a ton of fun when it first came out but helicoptering and drag jank made me uninstall. I still play mordhau, but excessive dragging and accels really sap a lot of the fun and magic the game once had for me.
@@Stouty I'm not familiar with that game. Very unfortunate that there is seemingly no clean solution to this in a high skill environment. Perhaps in addition to a turn cap for a weapon swing, there could also be a time limit for adjusting your swing after which it would lock the swing's path? I'm not sure if that would fix it either though.
I think you could balance dragging, with less dmg and maybe a better animation system. Its hard to code though. I like the idea of dragging, but it doesn't make sense rationally doing the same dmg as all other swings, and if it is as strong as you say, maybe make it do half dmg.
I wonder if they would ever try to make it so that the damage calculation is affected by the speed of the weapon moments before impacts so that dragged attacks would deal substantially less damage, since the weapon has been slowed down so much. Makes me think of Mount & Blade!
But what happens when you nerf/discourage drags and accels, both players will be looking dead centre of each other and it will either be a reposte fest with the weapon with the better stamina stats will win or it will be a feint/chember-fest both, i feel, would be very boring gameplay wise. If you remove dragging and accels then you need to replace it with a high skill cap mechanic.
You can still kick feint,morph or dodge ? I think that is enough options already at least "fights would look like fights" . Also people can alternate mode on weapons which can give them another advantage. Drags and accels are not necessary mechanic in game. I would give them dmg multiplier if you slow down weapon too much you would have glancing blow since its a joke when guy can almost stop weapon before your face to bait a parry then accel it and lob of your head. It takes solid 4 hits to decapitate dead body in Mordhau why in single drag swing you can lob a persons head without momentum ?
this problem cant be solved and still call the game a first person slasher. the literal only solution is to introduce canned animations you cant aim. but thats boring and would destroy the entire framework of genre otherwise... you have to remake combat entirely. which will take forever assuming its possible, or even whether devs want to bother with it in the first place. chiv 2 just destroyed turncaps and made everything slower, which isnt a fix at all.
I've played Mordhau for over 2000 hours and have practiced dragging and acceling to it's peak. It is a serious problem with Mordhau as it completely ruins the New Players experience as it just shows them that the only way to win in the game is throw out all sense of honor and nobility for a bullshit animation abuse, hence why Mordhau's player base took a incredibly deep fall to the shitty game it is now. When new players first saw the games trailer it coaxed them into believing the combat was a smooth and realistic experience when it wasn't, for their first game they immediately got stomped by a level 200 Riverofsweatmaker doing a impossible to read drag or accel with broken weapons such as the pole axe. They would shrug this off as a bug and think that the next games would be better only finding out the same thing would happen. This would lead to two different outcomes, the player simply uninstalls the game and never touches it again or he rages and continuously tries to learn these drags and improve their overall skill leading them down the exact same path that the sweaty players that killed them so long ago had went down as well. Back in 2019 to early 2020 Mordhau was known as a goofy melee fighting game with Frankensteiner and a ton of funny moments happening in the game however as the years progressed these funny moments would die out leaving the horribly unbalanced competitive scene the only thing left. The goofy characters and moments were the lifeline of Mordhau and as the trolls and actually fun people moved on to different titles such as chivalry it showed how reliant the game was on those trolls.
I kinda thought as a player that slowly got better and better and sticking to big high tier dueling servers. That although dragging made me kinda mad i still feel that Mordhau doesn't know what it wants to be casual, competitive, or a mix of both because right now it is none of the above.
Very bleak outlook :( I enjoyed Chiv 1 and I enjoy Mordhau. I think the obsession with realism is a bit overrated. You composed your thoughts well but I can’t help but feel this video only serves to spread discontent and resentment towards the genre’s current state
It's not an obsession with realism, it just doesn't feel fun to lose to shit like this where you feel like you're either just completely guessing or have no path forward to improve. At least in an FPS your progress can feel more tangible, usually you lost because bad positioning or bad aim. There's still a high skill ceiling, but the path for improvement is fairly obvious. Losing to feints/morphs feels a whole lot better because it seems really obvious what you were supposed to do, you didn't read the animation well and reacted too quickly, and you need to work on patience and reading animations. With ballerina drags it's a whole extra dimension of fucked up to react to
What if slowing down your weapon mid swing made you do less damage and eventually even feint? That would be semi realistic and encourage getting better and Normal combat i believe as well as add an easy way to feint your attacks
Shit like dragging and reverse swings are why I stopped playing Mordhau. It's less noticeable in Chiv 2 so I've been getting my melee slasher fix there.
As someone that has played mordhau for years, and is shit a dragging, been beaten many times by someone that could drag better than me. The fact the devs won't even regonise that dragging takes place is beyond me and it's insulting
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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.
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
@@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...
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
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"
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
literally just uninstalled today because my shit always phases through the enemy and even when I parry window the drag and accels correctly it doesnt matter they still hit me through my parry anyways (the shield symbol itself is on the screen and I get hit anyways with 30 ping), no new patches even though we were promised and no new content we were promised, im fucking done with this game unless they opt to fix something, not to mention the broken shit animations like a jpeg overhead with a polearm
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.
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
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.
I'm a 100% casual andy, level 202 with over 1K hours logged. The only real drags I have an issue with are the pure jpeg ones. It really is just a guess-fest. I'm fine with regular drags beyond that.
bro if someone is attacking you in slow motion that ain't right. 99% of all drags are used to murder in 1 shot. They have 0 honor. If you drag as a last option to save your life, I'd say it's acceptable in certain circumstances. Drags are abused by maul and evening star players to get 1HKOs
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
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.
@@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
I get what your saying but I disagree with your conclusion. Dragging and accel adds depth to combat by adding options beyond the base mechanics. The problem is that it isn't properly treated as a mechanic by the game. Even mordhau which had to of known that the mechanics would allow drags and accels it pretended it didn't exist. What if instead of it being binded to weird mouse movements they were just "fast attack" and "heavy attack" and then just put highly restricted release turncaps. The mechanic in essence would still be there, but they would be put behind proper mechanics that could have actual animations behind them. Now a player wouldn't have any confusion on the mechanic, hell they could do it themselves without needing all the practice on how to make your drags look good. Then all you have to do is shorten release time and even if doing manual drags and accels would possible it would be slight. It could also have punishments attached to them, sure this attack is super fast but it also takes more stam, stuff like that. Dragging doesn't need to be removed from the melee genre, it needs to be turned into a real mechanic.
At this point, that would have to be tried on a totally new IP. Chiv and Mordhau are now bound to their mechanics because of their small audiences. If you change too much, people can't just wait a year for the new one.
>Dragging and accel adds depth to combat by adding options beyond the base mechanics I disagree, as explained in the video, riposte drags are superior in every aspect to the feint. Therefore, your playstyle is limited to playing riposte drags if you want to compete at the top
@@Stouty I agree sort of, right now you are correct that reposte drag accels are meta right now since they have no real effective counterplay because they don't cost stam and there aren't obvious punishes. However this is more due to inefficient balance of mechanics rather than a fundamental problem with drags and accels.
@@danthezulu7707 The problem is fundamental; you can balance it to make it less noticeable but if you can score a hit through drag/accel mix ups (even if its very difficult) the meta will tend to this, as this costs no stamina
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*
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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.
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.
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.
Been playing a lot of chiv 2 lately. A lot of ppl use messer and I have Been noticing a lot of ppl spam slash almost exclusively.. especially ppl on console. This leads to a lot of back and fourth with the “counter system” just hold block and spam slash to trigger an attempted counter which automatically parries the incoming attack of the same type..This leads into these janky looking exchanges where its just the same combos/patterns back and fourth between you and your opponent.. (hold block.. see slash coming… counter spam with a slash.. magically block incoming attack.. opponent parry’s.. you “counter” with a slash ect the cycle continues.. this system effectively eliminated the ability to be able to bait your opponent into letting their guard down or fucking up the combo pattern ect) It’s been getting old pretty fast just seeing a whole lobby of ppl who exclusively spam counter out of held block.. try to fient ? You could and sometimes it works but most of the time your opponent is trying to spam a counter slash so you either get interrupted mid windup or he just holds block effectively negating your feint attempt. I have 100 hours on chiv 2 and tbh I’m about to set it down and play something different if this isn’t addressed. The game has been out for barely 2 months and already it’s getting repetitive and stale..
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
SIR! this does not represent 10% of what i saw in mordhau . i know someone who can rewrite the law of physics by a war axe . and trust me , even if you are the best mordhau player i doubtee that you block his attack . i am level 200 and i got sick of playing the game because its not as healthy as i used to see it . now i know why my friends and most of those who played with me stopped playing .
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?
