So true mate. This community is tearing itself apart faster than Johnny was by Lisa in the room, and though I hate to see it, it had to happen eventually. Might as well grab some popcorn.
yes and no and yes and no and ...... it made my day but sad to ....naaahhh god dame it can some one pls make the jesus and is suffering for our sins comparison already!
When I was a teenager I played a HL1 mod called The Specialists. Since the game was based on GoldSrc, you could do Quake movement/acceleration tricks (which was called boosting) to accelerate to light speed and fly around the map and, if you could do it consistenly, become nigh unkillable. This mechanic was an exploit, never intended by the devs, ruined the balance of the game, and 90% of players didn't even know what it was- all they knew is that in every server there was some madman with a single pistol was flying around the map dodging bullets and headshotting everyone effortlessly and there was no way to counter it at all. In one of the later releases of the game, a movement speed cap was implemented just to get rid of this once and for all, and as you can predict, the part of the community that used the exploit to dominate every game vocally complained, so the fix was reverted. Can you guess what happened next? You guessed it, the game died. While I don't play Mordhau anymore, I respect Stouty for wanting changes to the game/genre that will maintain an influx of new players, because the default behavior of the "pros" is to want the game to be tailored specifically to their playstyle and punish new blood for not having played the game since its inception and learned all the exploits like they have. This is a very positive and very rare attitude to have.
If dragging was inentional then why did the devs try and fix the issues that Chiv have with it? Why do they reduce your dpi when you swing? Why is there a straight up swing cap on the tank perk to reduce how much you can drag by? Dragging is an intentional design flaw in fighting games - it's an exploit.
it's all about telegraphing in these games, what I loved about my initial 300 hours from launch is that every single death felt as though it was my fault, that i could improve and get better. At this stage in the game's life cycle where every version of dragging as been discovered and prefected, you really end up just scatching your head at a lot of deaths because you can't really pinpoint any user error on your behalf because the game simply doesn't give you the information to process drags in a reasonable way. So in summary dragging detracted from the feeling of clean tight combat that we all got originally. I'm just a washed frontline player at 1600 hours, I still hop on but i know this game could of soared if things were kept cohesive.
I don't mind dragging, until it's performed in combination with footwork/jerking/fake excel etc. by someone that has 'mastered' the game. At some point it gets so ridiculously janky that i ask myself, should i grind 500h+ in order to learn this so i can compete at high level, or do i just quit the game. I suppose that like me, most players chose the latter.
@@tobias064 As someone who left Mordhau after around 100 or 200 hours or so: cause I enjoy fighting games, I still play Chiv 2 a little bit, and I like Stouty. Thats the reasoning for me.
heavily respect that you are fighting to get rid of this awful exploit. it's a damn shame the developers haven't properly acknowledged the fact that this has been pushing new players away from the game like many of my friends.
Dear Darth Kermit this is your comment "Oh yes! You are most correct here sir! You gave the best points and were more logical than these noobs!" Please remember to remove the front and back of this text for the 10 pounds via PayPal.
Coming to Mordhau from a Warband perspective, dragging is irreconcilable with my conception of how combat in a melee game should work. Despite this, it does seem like a difficult problem to address within the framework of Mordhau’s combat. I am curious how you would address this issue; making damage variable based on weapon speed is mentioned a lot in the comments which, while it might discourage the most extreme drags, will surely result in high level players finding a sweet spot between the extremity of their drag and the damage they are satisfied with from each attack. It would mitigate some of the damage done by the mechanic by making its abuse less extreme but would not solve the issue entirely. Would that be enough for you, or do you have another solution in mind to deal with the problem more decisively?
I think utilizing a hold block, and getting rid of flinch blocking, will curve the use of it. Maybe even give it a different purpose. Being killed in Mordhau to a drag feels cheap, because you are killed during a significant cooldown period. As a game dev, you never really want to tie the player's hands up in a game that could be competitive. Naturally it has to exist for gameplay and balancing reasons, however, flinch blocking is a really dumb mechanic to live in the same space as the drag. Especially when it's a stealth "feature". The shield block is ridiculous as it is very slow to bring up and put down, and literally a day one player can over power a shield user with a simple push of F. Alternatively, add another stage to the animation stages. Add in a late release. This would have less momentum, barely cause damage, and avoid the spinaroonies even more. I firmly believe you can have swing manipulation AND reworking drags can only improve the genre. Getting rid of these weird spinny animation exploits that cause unreasonable damage from a pure physics perspective would be a good start.
@@nunyabidness3429 So, in a mod for JKA called Moviebattles 2, the block button is held, but you can time what's called a "perfect block" to disarm an overaggressive opponent. The Jedi Knight games are actually older than the first Mount and Blade, and have swing manipulation, but in this particular mod, the purpose would be to avoid their disarm attempt (which also costs "stamina" for them to use), not to mention you can combo your hits on their block and there's a counterattack system, so proper use of your mouse to turn can mean a lot for coming out on top during an exchange (like if you get to force them to block a few hits consecutively, or on their end, if they can interrupt this attempt has a lot to do with manipulating your aim both for blocking and swinging, and there's other mechanics relating to just what you force your weapon to touch, or what your opponent forces it to touch). I'm not saying things need to be as extreme as having a disarming technique, but every melee combat sim before Chivalry didn't really have a problem with drags, and swing manipulation could be used to allow people to change up the pace of fights more so it doesn't look nearly "turn-based" (you only get to really continue your initiative and be on attack after doing it once if you actually hit them or they're cleanly going to miss). I think the most obvious answer is that the genre should move away from trying to be anything like Chivalry, something similar to feinting (if not feinting outright) but doesn't cost stamina in those games (it's not like it would be exhausting to do in real life either), but they have actual ways to get around people's blocks, and much faster attacks. The core of some of these older games isn't locking your opponent out of their ability to block, or do anything at all for that matter, it's getting around their defense that requires a different kind of precision than just timing to even defend against at all. It seems so obvious that the core shouldn't be so heavily centered on timing (which should still be important) in games where you essentially have full freedom to choose how and where you're attacking from, and where you aim, even just by visuals, clearly is supposed to matter. Better "get off me" tools and mobility could also be a thing that should not only reduce the effectiveness of drags, but prevent other things I've mentioned from becoming too dominant. What I wanted when I saw Mordhau was something like the ability to hit the opponent with the same technique being used to block by placing your weapon perfectly, and the way to aim around blocks, and you could say dragging sort of gives you one of those, but not in a way I wanted, or a way that makes any sense.
>new players hate drags and it pushes them away from the game >"Well I'm a (relatively) new player and I enjoy drags" >LOL U DONT EVEN HAVE 3K HOURS NOOB >meme arrows Come on now lol...
The problem with drags and accels is entirely an animation problem. It’s a problem that spreads out to morphs and other parts of the game as well. The Renown devs have talked about it at length, but Mr. Z has pointed out that a single blending animation is used for the transitions between swing and stab animations. They are working to counter this by painstakingly creating unique animations for every type of transition; including specific transition animations for weapons like polearms. The meta in Mordhau is animation hiding. I could block any plain-Jane drag or accel all day, every day. The problem arises when a high-level player times their swings so that there in little-to-no animation. The game turns into a complete guessing game at that point, with most high-level matches turning into gamble-fests. If there were strong visual cues between an accel or drag, many of these issues would be resolved. For example, if a timer was set so that, should the weapon remain active for a certain amount of time without making contact, an animation cue will be triggered. Additionally, I believe a higher stamina penalty should occur for having to expend a greater amount of energy keeping the weapon aloft. Additionally, the entire catalog of weapons ought to be slowed down, as accels which have been clocked in as faster than human reaction time are simply unreasonable. Add in latency issues and you have swings which Houdini into existence and hit you before you know what’s going on. Chambers either must be removed or they must have an auto-locking feature, similar to how kicks work in Chivalry 1. The micro-drag out of chamber meta is vomit-inducing. It entirely defeats the purpose of chambers, which was created expressly to give new players an easier mechanic to counter feints than hard-reading. 1 handed weapons need to be reworked badly. The heavy handaxe is literally a mini zwei and has no business being that slow AND that fast, while doing that much damage. Most 1 handers need to have damage reduced as well as a general speed reduction. A secondary should never be a main weapon. A secondary is an “oops I fucked up and got disarmed, hopefully I can survive this fight.” I honestly feel my anus pucker MORE after I disarm someone and they have a cleaver, arming sword, or falchion. I could beat anyone in the fuckin game just by grabbing a falchion. Stamina is something I’ve railed about since launch, but the regen stamina on hit is just too much. If you feinted three times in Chiv 1 and got read you were basically fucked. Here, people can morph feint and dance around like a lunatic and just get stamina right back. Particularly if a low level player is attempting to counter the feints with chambers, draining their stamina so much that the stamina lost from the feint-a-palooza is borderline negligible. Additionally, stun on stam out should not be a perk. It should just be the standard.
there's no animation fix you can do to make the deliberate deceleration of a swing look good - so long as players are encouraged to do that the combat will look bad
@@Stouty “Looking good” is pretty grey terminology but I’ll follow through with this line of thinking. Feeling good is the most important aspect of a game because it’s what creates a relationship between the player and his avatar. It’s why Mario is so successful. The jumps “feel” good. I am entirely disinterested in a boring game that looks pretty, and I think that feeling is fairly universal, which is why there is such a backlash. Mostly people are not particularly good at articulating what they are experiencing, and so there’s a feeling of rightness with regards to the current meta for current players because of the relationship between their own self and the visceral feeling of the momentum and timing of the blade. This internal pendulum is 90% of the excitement of Mordhau. This timing change creates the excitement that makes every fight a unique one, and it is what separates games like Chiv and Mordhau from games like For Honor.
I wanted to add here though that I sincerely appreciate your efforts to bring the genre forward. I have spent years in the background trying to make changes in the community and with the development of melee games but I lack the renown that players like yourself have. For what it’s worth, thank you for your efforts and for sticking your neck out to help melee grow.
@@Stouty this kind of argument reduces things to semantics. I suppose I take blame for that with regards to feel as being superior to looks. However, I believe the key component of this is the readability. The underlying argument here is that drags are too hard to read and utilize for most players, so it gives players who posses that ability/knowledge an advantage so great that new players get frustrated and quit. The changes I propose would solve that issue. We have to ask ourselves though at what point can we remove aspects of the game and it still remains novel and fun? Moreover, this problem is more relevant to the duelyard and doesn’t encapsulate the bigger problem in melee which is bad game modes, bad matchmaking, and terrible maps. Competitive play in particular needs stricter classes or else balance between so many weapon and armor combinations become impossible. Players should be restricted to two heavy, two medium, and one light player for team in a competitive, objective-based mode. Casual matches need casual mmr so that teams are properly balanced. I just think there are so many more meaningful changes that could be made and should be made before we start tearing out game mechanics entirely.
"I've never played Chivalry..." "I think it's crazy to say they are clones..." Bruh.. If you speak from a place of passion, you lose logic, usually. Most of the early player of Mordhau came directly from Chivalry. The only huge thing to consider is honestly the blocking system. In Chivalry you hold block ,in Mordhau you can only flinch. It just so happens Mordhau is centered around getting an opponent to block and take advantage of the cooldown. However, the customization of Mordhau is still top tier in my opinion. Choosing to NOT level lock weapons to ridiculous levels is great. The utilization of weapons in their "alt" attacks to deal with different armor types or ranges is a phenomenal add and REALLY calls to us history buffs who like the history element at play with Medieval FPM games. Mordhau could have honestly propelled the game into legendary status. To be one of those indie games turned house-hold name. Now when I bring it up, try to introduce new people into it, or talk to those who have dabbled before... the complaints are the same. They want to like it, but the use of animation exploits are a huge turn off. If games do not maintain a longevity of income, they won't last beyond 5 years. If you only seek to please the small player base you have, as opposed to attracting newer ones, your game will eventually run out of funds and become more expensive to maintain. So lots of coaching money gone out the window. The problem with dragging for me lies within 2 core things: It's third person animation & intent. As stated in Mordhau you will normally utilize a drag to encourage a flinch mechanic. This means as a player, outside of footwork, you can do jack shit until it replenishes. It feels cheap when you fall victim to it because you're being locked out of combat by the flinch block mechanic. What also doesn't help is how terrible they look. Drags translate so unnaturally slow that you wonder how the hell someone is able to get enough force behind it to cause any damage. It's use in Mordhau is only frustrating to those who fall victim to it and doesn't feel like a case of "get gud" as much of a case of "broken game mechanics" that aren't ever introduced to the player base in game to any meaningful extent. They could have adapted it in, took a look at how it's being used, and balanced it out nicely from there. Yes the competitors wont get every little thing they been learning for years, but you also would have a higher chance of new players staying beyond their first few hours, or minutes. Mordhau is currently in the EXACT same place Chiv 1 was in when Mordhau began to pick up player base. Server list looking like a shell of it's former self. However the KEY difference? Chivalry maintained a steady player base longer than Mordhau has. The decision to favor the niched few instead of looking for ways to both satisfy them and new players is an odd decision. I anticipate a second Mordhau going into development, or, the devs just moving onto something else that can hold a longevity longer than 2 years. (because I assume it took longer than 2 years to make) Anyway, that's my piece. I love Mordhau but cannot deny what has poisoned it. Then there's the thing we don't talk about too much. The chat. I've been playing PC games for a LONG time and "Gamer words" are not new to me. But god damn Mordhau has an alarming issue in regards to that. When it comes to a huge game like CoD or (formerly) GMod, one can forgive the abundance. As the game has a MASS appeal. But for a niche game in an even more niche genre... It doesn't exactly entice new comers to join the ranks of the 2k players who love this game and genre. Though I will say, modernly, this is becoming less frequent. Players using such words are ridiculed or kicked by the lobby. So I do have hopes. Plus I have grown fond of Stouty and love his Mordhau videos. Too bad he doesn't care for Chivalry due to it's lack of a Comp scene. I think it's got several great things about it I would have loved to see in Mordhau. Maybe when it goes on Steam there will be a change of heart on part of the developers to include the competitive scene. But since dragging is taught on tutorial, and decently enough, it seems that perhaps they are looking at how to deal with those two things to consider when dragging.
Chiv 2 does some things much better than mordhau (even in terms of the combat) but unfortunately they went astray in other areas, like removing the traditional feint
About to hit 400 hours, played on and off since it was launched, dragging is the only mechanic which has made me put this game back on the shelf. Feints are annoying but the only person to blame for falling for them is myself. If I've waited for every visual indicator and held my parry a few ms already, and a drag still gets through by floating backwards towards my face, I'm gonna get real mad.
I find myself almost never using drags in gamemodes like frontline where it's more team-based and there are a lot more casual players, but whenever I play in a duel server or in ranked where there are more skilled players who have 500+ hours in the game it almost becomes a requirement to have fun in the game. This shouldn't be an option, the fact that we are required to learn and use a mechanic which isn't designed in the main portion of the game which the vast majority of the playerbase plays shows how much it needs to be reworked. Like the point you made, if you enjoy swing manip just log into a duel server and play to your hearts content. They need to open up more team-based combat, if you look at classical medieval warfare they weren't going around having 1v1 duels, they were shoulder to shoulder fighting. It almost looks like the Mordhau devs saw the cheesy 1986 Highlander movie and said "yeah, that's medieval combat, they only fought each other 1v1". Swing manip encourages less tactical gameplay, doesn't improve player count and adds high skill gaps for no reason.
Im ngl I refunded the game since dragging looked so unfun to do and learn while everyone was doing it even in a shitty pub server, it makes it really unappetising to play
"I suppose the people that enjoy dragging subconsciously dont like the mechanic. For every drag they land they get by one themselves" This is a phenominal point!!!
I've always been of the position "fuck dragging, but you need to learn it." In mordhau when chatting with newer players than I. admit I am biased because I would be like two million times better at this game without dragging being an existing mechanic, I win in almost any fight in which outpositioning and outwitting the opponent and make up all sorts of silly underhanded maneuvers on the fly. I want to know, how would you remove dragging in a satisfying way? I am curious about this.
The response video is right about the fact that your opinion that "fighting games are niche because of the acceptance of exploits" is completely unfounded. Your counterpoint to it missed the point he was making in the first place which was just him showcasing a statement made without any justification or experience behind it. It doesn't matter whether fighting games getting more players because of exploits is unrealistic compared to the opposite, the point he was illustrating is that you made a claim which made no sense. I will go so far as to say that fighting games are in fact not a genre that became niche because of its acceptance to exploits but rather because of it's strict mechanical barrier which any new player must overcome to play the game at a level higher than just button mashing. Although this isn't related to an exploiting of the game's mechanics in any way, there is still a comparison to be made with drags or even reading feints to where it is a very niche mechanical skill that has to be learned. The main difference in this case being that the mechanics in fighting games don't look bad like drags do, which in my opinion is your only correct reasoning for the removal of drags in this whole thing. This brings me to a question for you Stouty: Since a strict mechanical barrier has been proven to act as a deterrent and even a filter for the casual player base, how would the lack of dragging alone solve the issue that is the niche aspect of Mordhau's mechanical skill?
DREEEEEEEES GAAAAAAAAAAANG. I said in my last video that the exploits/tech obtuseness of the fighting game mechanics plays a part in their low player counts, not necessarily the driving cause. I can't see how this isn't true - overly complicated mechanics are not popular with casual players. Mechanical barrier can't be a filter - if so, how is CSGO the #1 game on steam?
@@dresboni It's only niche because it's not top 1 yet. The mechanics of FPM's (if done right) can be more accessible than FPS, where good players will remove you from the round from across the map in a matter of ms
hmmm, drags are one of those things I dont really know if I like. You mentioned subconsciously disliking it, which seems credible. Drags have always been there in these melee games and I wouldnt disagree. I simply am indifferent to it because I've always been using it, fighting it. And again the sole feeling I get from using drags derives from the fact that I learned the skill with hard work, which could in theory be translated to a more practical and balanced mechanic. Good debate, very impressed
I would like to make a quick point. Exploit is a very vague term; "In order to have a debate involving the use of such vague terms it is necessary to give it a specific definition. It doesn't matter what the definition as long as all parties involved understand what is meant by the term. By doing so we can avoid unnecessary arguments on semantics and reduce confusion and misunderstanding." For the purposes of debate, exploit means what it is defined as.
What i don't understand about no dragging is how do players with good defences hit each other ? without drags wouldn't it just be a stamina battle and feint spam ?
I would argue that dragging was omitted from the combat tutorial video but kept in the game as part of a complex balance between maintaining new players interest and maintaining the spirit of chivalry combat, beloved (at least to an extent) by its long term player base, which was almost entirely dragging based.
On another note, I'm surprised you never mentioned the obvious connection that could be made between current dragging in Mordhau and the backwards overhead / rainbow slash of Chivalry, which was a staple of chivalry combat at the time but was proudly removed in Mordhau, as it was believed to sully the combat due to the exact issues you previously mentioned.
I'm with you that there needs to be change but it would be hard, as moving away from dragging combat will effectively completely change the combat for most long term players. The end result would look radically different, and even if these changes were great, I think it is natural for people to be scared of that scale of change.
there was a much to-do over the backswing removal because they were able to do so. The implication is that they were unable to remove dragging so instead they didn't talk about it
imma be honest, i think the drag meta is much better than spam feint meta. spam feint is just boring and easy to punish. with drags, theres footwork, timing, along with other factors that is just more fun to do. If they removed drags and changed feints to where there wouldnt be a spam meta, then i'd be all for it; but at the current state only removing drags would be bad for the game imo.
@@Stouty with the spam feint meta it is. Also Theres not much else you can do with the feint meta besides read and punish. Its just gonna be a whole lot less fun imo. Along with the fact that light-medium armor will then be COMPLETELY irrelevant. At least now i can do really good in 1-1-1 armor, but with the removal of drags everyone would be using 3-3-3 armor. Far less variety and it will begin to force people into a meta. All for the sake of immersion. I dont like it either but, drags are an important part of mordhau. It would require a lot of work to remove them without even worse detriments. Btw i am just a casual duelyard lurker, so a large portion of the game atm and probably the majority of who cares.
@@Stouty im na with terrible internet, there is no way i'd stand a chance on any server outside the one i normally play on. but if you wanna have an ez win we can ft10 i guess. also while i find it relatively easy to read, i was talking about punishing. update: obviously i lost. i read like, 40% of feints. also i feel i should clarify, i was talking about spam feint meta. if you dont fall for 1-2 then you probably wont fall for 3-4. i just overestimated myself lmfao
This argument about what is or isn't an exploit is getting more and more pedantic and tedious. This whole argument has devolved into your misuse of the term "exploit" rather than the mechanic in question, you'd have far less people arguing with you if you had just made the case for why drags are janky and never used the term exploit. Focus on why you think drags are bad, with examples, and give your ideas of how to replace them while still maintaining control over swing manipulation. Chivalry 2 has pretty much made drags unimportant and they rarely get used, at least at lower levels. It feels OK not using them, but the game does feel less fluid and like I have less control. How would you remedy this? I don't understand how you could have real time, manipulable swings without dragging, how you could have access without drags. I think we need to look at why dragging is used in the first place. It's one of the only reliable ways to get players to mistime their parries, parries that cover a huge area that aren't directional. In Mordhau it's hard to land a hit past someone's parry without resorting to various janky or exploitive techniques. In Chivalry 1 you could use S drags and such to hit someone's flank or feet while they are parrying. If the parry bubble was much smaller, and matching parry direction with attack direction mattered and was divided into 4 quadrants (top right/left, bottom left/right), we wouldn't even need drags most of the time. With such a system we could have held parry or some sort of guard system like For Honor.
@@Stouty I know and I disagree that it's important, it sounds like you're grasping at the negative connotations of the word to make your argument for you. Whether or not it's an exploit has become increasingly irrelevant. It just becomes a toxic, deconstructive argument. A constructive argument would be looking at the mechanic in depth, why it looks janky, what they allow players to do, the pros and cons, and finally how to replace them and what such a combat system would look like. It'd be hard to do a melee system with real time swing manip without drags that doesn't feel janky itself. Show us how it's done.
idk if this was discussed or not, but I think a good solution for dragging problem would be the following: make the damage proportional to the instantaneous acceleration of the weapon (like in real life). Thus the attack that was slowed by a drag will do less damage since the attack has less acceleration at the moment of the impact
I stopped at 9:33 min to write this. You say that dragging is better than ever and this just isn't true. Turn cap is being reduced more and more every patch and defense has never been so good. I think you are just playing differently than other people, and that this debate has turned into more of playstyle opinion than anything else. Also, I think the guy who made the response did a great job a summarizing drags and accel for new players. For me, drags were more natural because I could see them. I started comp in NA at a relatively low level and something I noticed is that what makes the game really hard to get into isn't the drag, its the accel. In mordhau when someone starts a swing you first need to check if its a feint or not. If its not a feint then good now read if its a drag or an accel. the problem here is that the accel is so fast that the feint becomes a really strong weapon and when the feint and the accel are scary then the drags becomes a threat. To reinforce this idea, when is the last time you have seen a new player complain about drags ? All I see all the time is people talking about unreadable feints. Bastard sword is probably the biggest offender. This weapon can be played at all level of player with absolutely 0 use of drags and still be the most cancer weapon to play against. So Stouty my question is : What kind of game do we want ? A game without drag where people spam feint or a game with slower accels and more reading ? Sorry if this is a bit hard to read, my main language isn't English but I hope I could formulate a good response to what I have seen so far. I add this little section at the end to ask you about what you think about renown and the fact that they decided to market drags and are making an effort to put them in front of the marketing campaign.
@@epikoperfectnoob6408 I have 1000 hours right now maybe even a bit more, I reached Elite3 but it doesn’t really matter here in NA since no one really plays ranked. And my In game name is Just Dodge. I am well known in the NA comp scene.
@@justdodge4133 u based ur name around a mechanic in the game that is dogshit please dont mention the whole E3 thing if it dont matter drags suck with the turn cap ur right but i think stouty doesnt even drag bc he hates them so fucking much so he must not know
It's true dragging has been nerfed since release but so has everything else alongside it and has player skill increases dragging becomes increasingly meta due to it costing 0 stamina. As a result the meta now is the most riposte drag dominated that it's ever been. As for what I want - you'll have to wait and see. I haven't seen Renown's drag marketing attempts as of yet
What if damage calculations took speed into account like in Mount and Blade? It wouldn't make dragging impossible, but if drags did less damage than accels then that would at least be consistent with reality.
Accels would still be a problem then. Yeah, it’s possible to do an accel irl but you leave yourself vulnerable to counterattack, plus it wouldn’t be as broken irl since biology is involved, since humans can’t turn at breakneck speeds like you can in a video game with your sensitivity increased
@@Liam-ke2hv not entirely. You'll have to transition the drag into an accel. I mean dont people do that anyways? If anything itll make it more difficult to abuse drag.
@@Liam-ke2hv that way itll make predictions slightly better since in order to do real damage with the drag, you gotta move into an accel, which eventually people will start to read drags as a tell for an accel.
next first person melee slasher will definately utilize and implement light and heavy attacks properly or some other mechanic that would appeal to casuals instead of the same swing manipulation exploits that use the same animation for fast and slow attacks from a decade ago, right guys?
Tarkov already has the ability to change your face, faction, voice, outfit, and arm bands if you want to match your color with your teammates. Further more, you should be able to identify your teammates through the gear and gun they have, something that this guy brought up about being able to do irl, but fails to mention in Tarkov. Target identification is a major part of the hardcore military sim type genre anyways. I don’t know why he brought this up because it sounds like he never played Tarkov before, further invalidating his irrelevant point.
@@platinumdrip3928 The idea that game has at one point of time enough players to full lobby is just idiotic. He even talked about pro scene and other shit, dont get me started.
I am a new mordhau player level 16, 30 hours in game i dont know who the other guy is but i recognize stoutys voice so im just gonna say the guy in the back has no idea what he is talking about i dont know much about mordhau but i know how real life, cs and other game mechanics work. As a new player i find it very difficult to play against good players, i spend time to understand what is it that i do wrong and it always boils down to i cant read drags and i panic parry a bit but most of the time while i cant begin to understand how drag mechanic works the good players keep dragging and dragging and it feels like everyone has an extra ability which i havent and feels unplayeable and after like 20 minutes of pure getting slapped on the ass and dying i quit desktop and i open the game again next day cuz i really like to learn the game and play it on a good level but since day 1 dragging felt like a bug to me i said wtf is this but accels were fine cuz it made sense in my opinion
@@Stouty try what??? When I first started playing I did not like drags, but they're an important part of the game and the only way to validate any time of pressure with a riposte. Complaining about drags being unreadable is like crying about feint spamming. You said it yourself learning how to read is an important aspect of the game. This rings true with drags as well so falling for drags all the time is indeed a skill issue. You have footwork/leanback and chambers all at your disposal to read drags. Your rank will never validate your opinion to anyone with critical thinking skills.
I'm still not sold on the complete removal of drags. Shit like wessexes needs to go, yes, but your garden-variety slowed-swing drag is an important mixup tool. Asking for melee slashers to dethrone FPSes is just unrealistic. Any slasher more complicated than a one-button-mode is going to be less accessible than the dead simple point-and-shoot of FPS. Even RPG slashers like the Souls series often get dismissed as "too hard" despite being relatively mechanically simple. That's just a bridge no amount of simplifying can cross with modern mass market gamers. Tone down the worst ones, by all means, but "remove all drags" is just as bad a position as the newbie that wants feints removed because they're hard to read and look unnatural.
You can tell who has a command of logic when it comes down to debate. the guy you're responding to in this video is not nearly as articulate as you are. Also strikes me as very odd that some casual with 200 hours in just one title is willing to debate someone who has dedicated a large part of his life to a game genre spanning multiple titles. He almost seems proud in his admitted ignorance.
Being in the NA comp scene I see alot of players complaining more about chambering and chamber feints. Removing drags would give people less options to counter chambers. It's been a long-lasting mechanic that certain players learn to utilize in their own way that its better to legitimize, atleast for mordhau. Being able to have three types of swing speeds strengthens a players ability to mix different attacks and throw off their opponents expectations. I don't think I would be able to not read feints if I couldn't be dragged I would also be able to chamber every swing/stab confidently.
i think dragging is enjoyable and that it should be a thing, but it cant be as extreme as it is now because its very jarring and confusing to new players trying to understand the flow of the game and im tired of how dead this genre is
Perhaps I just don't have the vision for it, but what would a first person melee game without drags look like? It's all well and good to put emphasis on feinting, but if every weapon had a relatively consistent swing time/windup it would become incredibly stale and easily read without another mechanic to mask the feint or otherwise punish a delayed parry.
I enjoy dragging but i can see how it makes the game very unnaproachable. Id love for the anims to get sorted, but i dont truly believe you could ever make them visually understandable while keeping the visuals in line the with Mordhau's aesthetic. You'd need some gamey sword trail colors or some such, which would equally detract from the presentation as bad as the animations. I suppose the real question is would the game be as fun with dragging gone? Who knows, id have to try it. I think if you truly want to push the genre to its next level, you will have to let the combat system you designed speak for itself once people can play.
From a conceptual standpoint, I think the answer is fairly obvious. And that is to make the calculation of damage to the opponent, a function of the weapon's momentum (velocity x mass), rather than a fixed amount based upon mass alone. By "mass", I mean whatever flat damage figures the developers have assigned to a weapon, which are loosely based upon what the weapon's perceived mass would be in reality. E.g. the zweihander and maul do larger amounts of base damage than a dagger... makes sense. But not if that Zweihander is travelling at a the speed of a geriatric slug! Of course, the usual damage modifiers should remain, i.e. part of the body hit and tier of armour on that body part should increase or decrease the damage dealt in a logical way. Drags would not even need to be patched out, because you'd need to be an idiot to make them part of your core repitoire of moves, as they'd do little to no damage. I'm not the first person to suggest this, nor will I be the last.
@@Stouty You're right. I guess what I was asking was more related to your comments on how you believe the first-person slasher genre will be very popular. do you think that the success of Elden Ring will have any impact, mechanically or popularity-wise, on the genre despite being differently designed? also, would you ever consider getting into the PVP of Elden ring and the Souls franchise?
Don't know where the part of not having a way to spot your teammate in tarkov came from but I am pretty sure there are colorful armbands that you can buy and equip
Do you have any ideas on how to restrict dragging? I don't think spiking turn cap to 1000 will make the game feel good. Also significantly shortening swings to the point where they cannot drag could add a lot more potency to footwork and make team play, cleaving in 1vx more clunky, etx
I'm 7 months late to this and pretty bad at the game, but what would be wrong with just significantly curbing damage the slower a swing gets? You don't need to mess with the swing system, there's no chance of collateral making weapon control less satisfying. People can still pull of drags, it's just that when someone lightly taps your helmet with their sword, you take very little damage. F=ma
this guy doesn't make any valid counterpoints. especially his last one referencing Tarkhov and stating team indicators would be more realistic in game over "wiggling guns" and "tilting" backwards. in WW2, plenty of military units developed vocal cues or hand gestures to signal it was someone they knew... because they could be wearing or appear different physically than what was normally recognizable.
Stouty is never wrong because all of his opinions would lead to a game where my stock raises and my peers lower and honestly that's the reality I want to live in. He's also correct but that's not really as important?
Why couldn't you just focus on why dragging is problematic instead of on this horrendous argument that not only you are wrong about by using your own definitions, is completely inconsequential to whether or not dragging is healthy or not for the game? Plenty of exploits exist in other games that are recognized as good and increasing the skill caps of their games (e.g. Overwatch movement physics for characters like Mercy or Doomfist), so clearly whether or not dragging is an exploit is irrelevant to whether or not it's good for the game
@@Stouty I wasted enough time debating you on forums I'd rather just add to the ratio now. I'm not wasting 20 minutes to listen to you regurgitate the same points we've discussed in the past you've been wrong about.
@@BigPapaMitchell Nope you wasted my time making fallacious arguments that I've now dismantled across a 3 part video series, hence why I refuse to repeat myself further when there's already a clearly labelled "Why "exploit" matters" chapter that you failed to click
None of my friends enjoy playing in public lobbies with me, its impossible for them to learn anything or even understand what's going on, dragging is the worst looking mechanic in the game that feels almost unreadable at times. I have a decent sized friend group (all of them have Mordhau) and I'm the only one that consistently plays and its getting to the point where even I don't enjoy the game. The game feels abandoned and the only people who are still playing are the ones who have mastered it, there is no way to improve without learning this shitty mistake of a mechanic.
Doenst a system that gives max dmg at the apex of the swing with a falloff if hit too early or too late fix this problem? makes accels and drags not super viable but still leaves em in the game.
Personally I think dragging adds depth to MORDHAU specifically that makes it more interesting and in turn fun (I could just be a masochist) I respect the points you made and I think as a whole and in the grander picture dragging does more harm than it does good for not only MORDHAU but the genre as a whole. The melee slasher has a huge future in my opinion (and I believe yours as well), and I think Chivalry 2 is an example that there needs to be a good balance between the complexity and depth of MORDHAU and the accessibility of Chivalry 2. It's obviously easier said than done, and I am not a game dev but I think if that sweet spot was hit, we could have a massive game that retains a large player base for more than a couple months at most.
Isn't Chiv 2 as dead, if not more dead than Mordhau? You can't give props to Chiv 2 in that regard when it actually counters your own point. The game is more accessible yet still dead. So what happened there? A niche genre like melee slashers should really cater to one crowd or another in my opinion. Other games can suffer from this sort of "identity crisis" where they can't decide if they are a competitive game or a casual game, but if they have a strong enough player count in the right genre of game it doesn't matter. However with melee slashers you don't have that luxury (mainly because I believe other game developers can FORCE their game to stay alive by pumping money into tournaments and cosmetics for the respective crowds). If you are a small game dev, and your game you put out has a high skill ceiling and is fun to play, you will retain a core competitive crowd inherently that enjoy said game. Steam Early Access is chock full of games that are "accessible" and fun to play, but they just don't retain that crowd regardless without the potential for people to capture that bag $$$.
@@calciferrr My point was Chivalry 2 was too casual. It was too accessible to the point that it abandoned any sense of competitive play. In a perfect world if a game could land somewhere in-between MORDHAU and Chivalry 2 it would retain a player base of both scenes (Comp and Casual). You have a solid point that it has to cater to one, it can't play both sides, my point was purely if it COULD (in a perfect world) it would retain a large player base for far longer.
Almost all my friends that got into Mordhau with me can’t enjoy it because they are looking for a game that they can play and be able to profess at getting better but don’t like drags because it just doesn’t make a lot of sense because they figure it’ll do less damage because you are slowing the speed of the swing which should make it do less damage and it just looks extremely ugly. Feint spamming is annoying at the start yes but they learned to read feints better over time but just don’t like drags and the even uglier drags that look even jankier like the wessex or the pickle or carpet drag. Yes I find it fun to drag but I’d give it up to be able to bring friends on and all be able to enjoy the game and see the game thrive and not wait 20 minutes to 2 hours to get into a ranked game. I would love to see more game modes like the old battle Royale or gold rush to become core game modes because in all honesty and I don’t mean to offend anyone but frontline or invasion are both extremely boring game modes to me, and the only reason I play them on occasion is because that is where the new players are so I can sometimes have a buddy that will be able to do something against those level of players. Dragging is fun for me because I enjoy learning and improving at things that interest me but like I said before would gladly sacrifice it for a more clean looking game that would still be as much fun for me but make it more accessible for new players to get into and enjoy for themselves and be able to understand it on a competitive level but not necessarily be able to be as good as the comp players. You also know the game is dying when Plat 3 is considered top 100 lol.
Alternatively to getting rid of drags, make damage based on the apex of the swing. A weapon will do its maximum damage when it's in the middle of the swing (i.e. a weapon with 400ms release would do maximum damage at ~175ms - 250ms). You don't get much force in a swing at the beginning and end of it, so the game should reflect that through a damage curve. Stamina drain would be affected too, ofc. Jank moves likes drags and accels will be punished with pitiful damage, while game mechanics like feints and morphs will become more commonplace due to them being able to do full damage. Essentially this would relegate them to be "finisher" moves, for when you know your enemy is extremely low HP. This would alter stabs too - you can only damage an enemy with a stab assuming you actually hit them while your arm is extending.
that is one solution but it is more of a band-aid fix that was attempted in Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior with poor results as it still encouraged partial dragging to achieve max damage
@@Stouty I think removing the ability to cancel parry midswing and increasing delay to parry when missing would be a more reasonable solution withing the established mechanics. The way I see it, drags are the meta because it's way too safe as there is little to no punishment to perform (i.e. less stamina loss campared to other manouvers, having the opponent have to gamble in having a successful chamber just to counter a simple yet hard to read manouver).
I know this video was mostly about dragging but at this point it feels like grasping at straws as to why the game failed to entice new players, which I don't think you can causally link them at all. The bottom line is there is no reason for new people to come to the melee genre, grind it for 2000+ hours, learn all the ins and outs of the game even if that includes 'exploits' and meta when the developers abandoned the comp scene on arrival. And the comp scene is what helps to retain and entice new players to come and learn the game. There was also very little community building, so the only real communities that formed were small factions of scrimmers and RPers which were hard to join and obscure. As someone who scrimmed for a year+ and hosted tournaments, it's sad that there were so few new faces in all my playtime but that's the reality of not having proper tutorials for your games mechanics, poor implementation and no endorsement of competitive players and content creators who had the knowledge to teach new players and help them learn. No wonder RP and modded servers are the most popular servers next to casual invasion pubs, because the modders and RPers create new content for casuals to enjoy. I'm not saying dragging is an exploit or not, it doesn't really matter what mechanics in this game are worth keeping when there isn't any reason to play or learn them at all.
3:20 so instant accel wouldn't be a problem if drag wasn't a thing? What about normal hits? Wouldn't those hit you if one wouldn't instant accel and you tried to parry an instant accel?
Both sides fail to really tip me over. Dragging is fun yet can be used as annoying tactic to deal with. A question i would like answered is "What Replacement Mechanics would you pose since you are a combat designer for another in the melee genre" Or "Would you enjoy a melee game exactly how mordhau is now but without the dragging"
I feel like drags among mid tier players where pretty fun, mixing up your moves to throw off an opponent. The problem when you fight top tier players is that you basically have to gamble on what's going to hit you. I mean, the nastiest drags are gambles in off itself, they just hope that they will hit you.
I played Mordhau for almost 1000 hours solely on duel servers. All my friends quit due to silly drags and weapons that made drag/accels even worse. You are not rewarded at all for chambering or feinting.
Complete waste of time someone with 200 hours couldn't even begin to comprehend what a drag is and why it is bad. You play the game for the cool realistic knight fights the game is very cartoonish with the dragging exploits
I think there’s something to be said about intention, at least as neutral talking point; how it COULD enrich and improve a combat system. A good example could be true combos in souls games. Specifically ds3 where innate 2 hit combos is intended design. You land 1 melee attack on an opponent and they are stunned for you to get 1 free follow up. However, certain weapons have special attacks(weapon arts), you can combo with these specific weapons by landing a hit>using the first part of the weapon art(this resets that follow up attack window)>and follow up with the second part of that weapon art or a basic attack granting you 3 hits in most cases. These weapons although having true combos didn’t become as meta and abused as dragging and lead to people experimenting with combining 2 separate weapon classes; the most prevalent being greataxe/other heavy or colossal in off hand, estoc in main creating pseudo combos etc. but these only helped to diversify combat and push the skill ceiling higher, they didn’t become meta since it was predictable and can be punished by outspacing and footwork like all other weapons, but you’d still see them around 1/4 of the duels you fight. Wasn’t intended but was never patched out, and ds3, before the servers were taken offline due to rce exploits, boasted 12k-18k to even 23k concurrent players But dragging, ehh I agree that its janky especially when faking an accel and then throwing your mouse across the room to pull the weapon back into a drag. In its current form I’m inclined to agree with you. But I think it should stay as a mechanic; reworked and reintroduced into a fleshed out opposite of the accel. It would be the best of both worlds. A slower attack that spices up the pot. Or maybe not, mordhau is a lot of foot work and swing manipulation, a simple slow attack button doesn’t reflect how accels were first introduced in chiv.
he's completely wrong about tarkov, there are many different outfits you can choose from, colored armbands to wear, and with a diverse range of equipment to run you should be able to tell who is on your team.
Triternion also added a mechanic (I forgot the name) where if the drag is too big it will deal like 2 damage(Dunno how much it would do if they would make that mechanic more opressive), which is a parralel to jet flying up or mei using ice walls, instead of jumping on heads. They legitamized it. Also as I already said on the previous video they showed dragging in some of the promotional videos I saw, especially stab drags, just didnt call it drags, but they also didnt talk about accels in specific. I havent played mordhau in a longer time now and are there with 700 hours and I am like slightly above average I would say and had a lot of fun by memeing around and dueling as well in which I was more frustrated with feints than drags or accels, except for the level 200 people that pulled of that 360 and cucumber, or whatever the vegetable moves are called(who the fuck named them), but those are rare, while feinting isnt as rare. I am quite bad at reading feints tbf and got better over time but also got better countering the cucumber. In general I think its more fun to move the camera around and have a lot of movement rather than try to read the feints. That is my personal experience and I dont think that mine is unique. I admire your effort to make the genre the best, but I dont think that this is the best way to approach the issue, since it just comes off as arguing about semantics (I know the point is to put negative light on it so people are easier convinced that it should be gone), but I think a better way is to show alternatives, suggest fixes, say why and show that. I know its hard to do that and I dont think that you can mod to restrict certain camera movement if the swing comes from a certain direction or have shorter releases over all, but maybe a way is to play a skirmish (or whatever), once with the dirties drags you have in your pocket, and then the other without any kind of drags, with some commentary. Maybe also make use of the people you coach and have them do the same thing and have them talk about their experience. PS: Just finished the last few seconds of the video and I am completely wrong and I agree with you to 101%. I actually always hated drags and love 5 foot 6 british people. PSS: Are there any news of Contingent that you can leak? I would be curious how the game would approach the combat. If its more like chiv 2, meaning alway high release, but longer or shorter windup, or something completely different.
glance mechanic is mainly a backswing band-aid (rather than a dragging fix), it it was legitimised they would have showcased it in dev blog 2. Dev blog 2 has ZERO dragging, they talk about repositioning a stab to hit the head, which is a normal use-case of the real time strike system taken from chivalry. I can't show alternatives due to NDA
i played a few hundred hours of chiv as a kid casually, and ive played 250 hours of mordhau the same way. dragging is always frustrating to me because it feels like you cant ever tell if youre going to be insta acceld or not. i really like the chamber mechanic and i think its fun to use and makes the fights more interesting but you basically cant chamber a drag. i dont see why people are defending dragging since as far as im aware they put the turn caps into the game specifically to stop being able to spin around like a top????? unless im wrong idk. i really like playing mordhau as a side game but dueling ppl that fling their mouse everywhere and then drag its just annoying. it can be a skill issue and thats fine but regardless its just not fun. i can read people spamming feints and can usually tell if i will be acceld but im not good enough to fight drag mixups. it doesnt seem like you can do much against them because you cant chamber them.
14:30 he hit the nail on the fucking head here. Most ppl who play video games are shitters with a bad mentality lets be honest. Even if slow sword hacking is removed from mordhau, they will find something else to point their finger at.
@Stouty Bad teamates, AWPs, bad map design, camping, RNG spray patterns (from the top of my head) My point is that bending over for ppl who unironically complain about "s-slow sword hacks!!" wont and will never do any good for the game. Drags are the perfect strawman for people with a bad mentality to deflect the blame away when they lose. Also dontnget the wrong idea. Im not saying that drags are or arent an exploit. If anything I agree with you here. The devs knew it would be impossible to prevent drags from existing so they relunctantly added em into the tutorial but not trailers. Still swing manip is an integral part of this game no matter how exploit-ish they are.
I'd like to see a Mordhau mod or high level match where drags are "disabled", cuz I'd love to understand your position but I can't imagine what this game would look like without drags...
Long comment warning - don't want to make another voice over. "Mentioning how fighting game players have to make content proves my point here" - Although it's quite well known that content creation can be more comfortable, easier and lucrative than being a professional player. Not to mention that only small subset of CSGO pros can actually make a decent living from competition alone. Also CSGO teams are notoriously poor investments(due in part to inflated salaries) and generally only exist due to the prestige of Counter-Strike. Same could be said for a subset of fighting game players, there are a handful that are capable of supporting themselves by their winnings. Flashbang example - I should have clarified that this was to illustrate how "pop flashes" exist in CSGO when in Valorant there are characters who can simply deploy these sort of unreactable flashes without prior set up or understanding of geometry of the map/knowledge of how flashes operate. Realism - I didn't include the full comment because I recorded the audio twice and it kept going too long. But my point is that while you could say accels are more "realistic" as F=MA you could argue that dragging abstracts some form of "stuttered" or "semi-feinted" strike (think delayed penalty kick in football). My point wasn't necessarily to argue that your specific reasoning was wrong (hence why I didn't tie it specifically to dragging) but mostly that realism is a fickle argument and personally I don't find it compelling from a game design perspective. That's why I use tarkov to illustrate that designing something to be "realistic" can actually make it less immersive/intuitive. Ultimately this discussion revolves around the concept of "emergent gameplay". Emergent gameplay being gameplay strategies that come about from player exploration, and may or may not have been anticipated by the game designers. Stuff like "bhopping" (which I find a much better example of an "exploit" then boosting which is arguably fairly realistic (soliders hoist each other IRL all the time)), wavedashing, some combos in fighting games, potentially dragging. Emergent gameplay yes isn't as intuitive or potentially supportive of new players, but I personally find these "exploits" to be defining characteristics in some games, and losing them for the sake of "clarity" or "mainstream appeal" doesn't seem worth it to me. Dragging might be bad, but I think rather than removing it for Mordhau, it should just be removed from the game you are helping create. If you can create a competitor in the genre, and it doesn't have dragging and it is more fun you will have proven your point. But I don't think removing an element of the game for the potential audience of a 5+ year old game makes any sense. While the genre hasn't taken the #1 spot, Mordhau is a success by almost any metric. From a game development perspective it's a niche title that generated a BOATLOAD of cash, ANY developer would consider it a success, regardless of it's twitch standing. Cool beans m8 good vid, still not convinced personally but if I can experience a drag free game I'd happily be proven wrong.
Top tier CS pros dwarf the top tier fighting game pros Realism - that is more akin to a feint than it is a drag, dragging in football would be like slowing down the ball in mid air after belting it (impossible) Emergent gameplay - like I said, if you like it, you already have it (but it ain't popular) This debate was never about what should happen to Mordhau, as the devs stopped caring a long time ago thanks for the debate
Most other mechanics morphs, feints, chambers, (clashes?) and ripostes (implicitly from parry) have a stamina cost associated with them. Dragging comes down to swing and see what happens. Zero investment and huge reward, even if your opponent reads the drag they gain nothing.
as an okay player, i think the biggest problem with mordhaus community is the closed mindedness. The only fun had nowadays is mostly just strictly RPing, or trying to break the game as much as possible. The combat in mordhau is not fun for new players, and its only fun to try and improve, at which point most hit a ceiling unless you play the game for thousands of hours. despite this, most of the current "playerbase" accept dragging because its a fundamental mechanic of mordhau, when this discussion is not about mordhau, its about first person melee.
Can't say I enjoy feints too much more, but they are certainly more understandable, since I started playing on release I thought of drags as a complete wreck, imagine stopping all momentum in a swing, yet dealing the same damage. Personally, I alone could think of ways to incorporate it as a proper mechanic to serve both realism or fun. I'd guess anyone smart could do so much better.
The thing is, completely taking a mechanic away like dragging I feel just leaves the player with less options with no alternative to replace it. Without dragging, what I see is an inevitable stam war almost every single duel, as dragging is another tool that allows the user to trick their opponent into making a mistake. Feinting is the most hard read mechanic in the game, so as time goes on in this world where dragging doesn't exist anymore, I feel like feinting will become less powerful with the removal of dragging to the point where landing an attack can be much harder largely because a major tool has completely been stripped from the game. You could say that this is a good thing for the game, but I'm not sure about that myself. Also on the point that dragging is a deterrent for new players because it's ugly is an opinionated statement in my opinion, I could argue that a lot of drags can be beautiful if done right, might not be realistic looking, but that's a different point. When I was new to the game, (still relatively new compared to the vets as of now) I saw dragging as something that was skillful that added to the skill level of the game, it was frustrating to a degree at first I will admit, but it also motivated me to learn it at the same time. At around level 80-90 I saw myself being able to beat way higher levels than me and it motivated me that I was able to do this despite coming into mordhau late, if you are a competitive player losing shouldn't demotivate you, it should motivate you to try to get better, and dragging shouldn't either in my opinion. The point on the fact that dragging is killing the game is a good point, but I'm also questioning if that is the biggest reason for players quitting the game, it could be a number of reasons that ultimately conclude that the game was just too hard for them, or whatever reason they had. You can't really know for sure the reason that players quit the game other than testimony from people which are valid ways to conclude the reason but it shouldn't be taken as fact as it's a hard thing to know for sure unless you ask at least most of the players who quit the game. I will say that dragging should be tuned in certain ways, the exaggerated drags are really stupid in my opinion and should be removed, but dragging entirely? I personally believe not.
1. Having more options isn't necessarily good, e.g. it's not necessarily good I have the option to shoot people in PH duelyard at random rather than play properly 2. We have thousands of steam reviews to point to dragging being a main cause for leaving the genre
@@Stouty But having that said tool like I said makes feinting stronger and thus makes the overall fights more diverse and harder in general. All these tools we have add to each other in tandem to make each other stronger, taking a crucial tool makes the whole thing weaker.
@@nickdiaz4837 feinting doesn't need dragging what you said here doesn't make sense (unless you mean dragging to counter chambers but of course a game without dragging would need a complete rework)
Naturally though its a video game, so increased realism often leads to worse playability. I feel feints are worse because when I was new to mordhau feints looked stupid and unrealistic, and if you're looking for realistic medieval combat, feints wont be there either because real knights didn't have a parry window they had to time correctly, being punished with lockouts from everything except for moving should they mistime it. Drags also look weird and aren't good, that argument can't be denied, but I agree with the fella arguing against you, where I feel that being hit by a drag is less offputting than being hit cause someone feints five times. On a side note, why go to hunt? not a clever move in my experience lol.
True, "looked" was the wrong word for me to use, as a big drag or a wessex are some of the dumbest fucking things I've ever seen. The concept more is what gets to me, because if realism is the goal, faking a swing serves no purpose and in reality would most likely just put you off balance and on the backfoot (if using a two handed / polearm). With smaller and faster weapons it makes sense more, but I dont feel they should be viable in realistic games (again, viable with two handed or polearm weapons that is).
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Pipe down
Yes buy it
yes sirs please buy
good morning
Ratio + Unkempt + Unclean + Unworthy of existing
Why is there a clip of you being bald? Monk coaching?
Stouty causing civil wars and tears in the community is creating drama that is more interesting and fun than actually playing the game itself.
true
So true mate. This community is tearing itself apart faster than Johnny was by Lisa in the room, and though I hate to see it, it had to happen eventually. Might as well grab some popcorn.
yes and no and yes and no and ...... it made my day but sad to ....naaahhh god dame it can some one pls make the jesus and is suffering for our sins comparison already!
When I was a teenager I played a HL1 mod called The Specialists. Since the game was based on GoldSrc, you could do Quake movement/acceleration tricks (which was called boosting) to accelerate to light speed and fly around the map and, if you could do it consistenly, become nigh unkillable. This mechanic was an exploit, never intended by the devs, ruined the balance of the game, and 90% of players didn't even know what it was- all they knew is that in every server there was some madman with a single pistol was flying around the map dodging bullets and headshotting everyone effortlessly and there was no way to counter it at all. In one of the later releases of the game, a movement speed cap was implemented just to get rid of this once and for all, and as you can predict, the part of the community that used the exploit to dominate every game vocally complained, so the fix was reverted. Can you guess what happened next? You guessed it, the game died.
While I don't play Mordhau anymore, I respect Stouty for wanting changes to the game/genre that will maintain an influx of new players, because the default behavior of the "pros" is to want the game to be tailored specifically to their playstyle and punish new blood for not having played the game since its inception and learned all the exploits like they have. This is a very positive and very rare attitude to have.
Interesting anecdote, sounds similar to GunZ
If dragging was inentional then why did the devs try and fix the issues that Chiv have with it? Why do they reduce your dpi when you swing? Why is there a straight up swing cap on the tank perk to reduce how much you can drag by?
Dragging is an intentional design flaw in fighting games - it's an exploit.
To be fair those changes were to keep swing manip itself in check
it's all about telegraphing in these games, what I loved about my initial 300 hours from launch is that every single death felt as though it was my fault, that i could improve and get better. At this stage in the game's life cycle where every version of dragging as been discovered and prefected, you really end up just scatching your head at a lot of deaths because you can't really pinpoint any user error on your behalf because the game simply doesn't give you the information to process drags in a reasonable way. So in summary dragging detracted from the feeling of clean tight combat that we all got originally. I'm just a washed frontline player at 1600 hours, I still hop on but i know this game could of soared if things were kept cohesive.
A non braindead take in this comment section? God bless you my man. Godspeed.
Stouty, the last man who cares about the future of Mordhau.
this is about the genre, Mordhau is a goner
@@Stouty sad but true
What future? 😂
mordhau was an amazing game
"So you're actually saying that I am not a man" JK
I don't mind dragging, until it's performed in combination with footwork/jerking/fake excel etc. by someone that has 'mastered' the game.
At some point it gets so ridiculously janky that i ask myself, should i grind 500h+ in order to learn this so i can compete at high level, or do i just quit the game. I suppose that like me, most players chose the latter.
Exactly why I left after 30hrs
@@DaganKay Question: assuming that was a while ago, why do you keep watching this videos? I'm really asking.
at this point it's just better to go and learn to play the piano
@@arturogenso2224 That's true for any game though
@@tobias064 As someone who left Mordhau after around 100 or 200 hours or so: cause I enjoy fighting games, I still play Chiv 2 a little bit, and I like Stouty. Thats the reasoning for me.
heavily respect that you are fighting to get rid of this awful exploit. it's a damn shame the developers haven't properly acknowledged the fact that this has been pushing new players away from the game like many of my friends.
Dear Darth Kermit this is your comment "Oh yes! You are most correct here sir! You gave the best points and were more logical than these noobs!" Please remember to remove the front and back of this text for the 10 pounds via PayPal.
Coming to Mordhau from a Warband perspective, dragging is irreconcilable with my conception of how combat in a melee game should work. Despite this, it does seem like a difficult problem to address within the framework of Mordhau’s combat. I am curious how you would address this issue; making damage variable based on weapon speed is mentioned a lot in the comments which, while it might discourage the most extreme drags, will surely result in high level players finding a sweet spot between the extremity of their drag and the damage they are satisfied with from each attack. It would mitigate some of the damage done by the mechanic by making its abuse less extreme but would not solve the issue entirely. Would that be enough for you, or do you have another solution in mind to deal with the problem more decisively?
you'll see my solution soon enough but I'm not allowed to talk about it for now
I think utilizing a hold block, and getting rid of flinch blocking, will curve the use of it. Maybe even give it a different purpose. Being killed in Mordhau to a drag feels cheap, because you are killed during a significant cooldown period. As a game dev, you never really want to tie the player's hands up in a game that could be competitive. Naturally it has to exist for gameplay and balancing reasons, however, flinch blocking is a really dumb mechanic to live in the same space as the drag. Especially when it's a stealth "feature". The shield block is ridiculous as it is very slow to bring up and put down, and literally a day one player can over power a shield user with a simple push of F.
Alternatively, add another stage to the animation stages. Add in a late release. This would have less momentum, barely cause damage, and avoid the spinaroonies even more. I firmly believe you can have swing manipulation AND reworking drags can only improve the genre. Getting rid of these weird spinny animation exploits that cause unreasonable damage from a pure physics perspective would be a good start.
@@nunyabidness3429 So, in a mod for JKA called Moviebattles 2, the block button is held, but you can time what's called a "perfect block" to disarm an overaggressive opponent. The Jedi Knight games are actually older than the first Mount and Blade, and have swing manipulation, but in this particular mod, the purpose would be to avoid their disarm attempt (which also costs "stamina" for them to use), not to mention you can combo your hits on their block and there's a counterattack system, so proper use of your mouse to turn can mean a lot for coming out on top during an exchange (like if you get to force them to block a few hits consecutively, or on their end, if they can interrupt this attempt has a lot to do with manipulating your aim both for blocking and swinging, and there's other mechanics relating to just what you force your weapon to touch, or what your opponent forces it to touch). I'm not saying things need to be as extreme as having a disarming technique, but every melee combat sim before Chivalry didn't really have a problem with drags, and swing manipulation could be used to allow people to change up the pace of fights more so it doesn't look nearly "turn-based" (you only get to really continue your initiative and be on attack after doing it once if you actually hit them or they're cleanly going to miss). I think the most obvious answer is that the genre should move away from trying to be anything like Chivalry, something similar to feinting (if not feinting outright) but doesn't cost stamina in those games (it's not like it would be exhausting to do in real life either), but they have actual ways to get around people's blocks, and much faster attacks. The core of some of these older games isn't locking your opponent out of their ability to block, or do anything at all for that matter, it's getting around their defense that requires a different kind of precision than just timing to even defend against at all. It seems so obvious that the core shouldn't be so heavily centered on timing (which should still be important) in games where you essentially have full freedom to choose how and where you're attacking from, and where you aim, even just by visuals, clearly is supposed to matter. Better "get off me" tools and mobility could also be a thing that should not only reduce the effectiveness of drags, but prevent other things I've mentioned from becoming too dominant.
What I wanted when I saw Mordhau was something like the ability to hit the opponent with the same technique being used to block by placing your weapon perfectly, and the way to aim around blocks, and you could say dragging sort of gives you one of those, but not in a way I wanted, or a way that makes any sense.
Damn I couldn't imagine being so confident of such a terrible opinion with only 200-300 hours, Mordhau be praised.
When it’s the opposite position I’m told that your argument doesn’t matter because you have less than 1000 hours
>new players hate drags and it pushes them away from the game
>"Well I'm a (relatively) new player and I enjoy drags"
>LOL U DONT EVEN HAVE 3K HOURS NOOB
>meme arrows
Come on now lol...
@Agent Cobalt ye lol id expect the newbish opinion to be taken into consideration more than this considering the context.
@@Agent_Cobalt If you don't even fully understand the core mechanics of the game then how can you expect to give an educated argument?
@@hardboiled2987 Maybe on the forums. But the fact that people like this exist leads me to believe that most just leave quietly
The problem with drags and accels is entirely an animation problem. It’s a problem that spreads out to morphs and other parts of the game as well. The Renown devs have talked about it at length, but Mr. Z has pointed out that a single blending animation is used for the transitions between swing and stab animations. They are working to counter this by painstakingly creating unique animations for every type of transition; including specific transition animations for weapons like polearms. The meta in Mordhau is animation hiding. I could block any plain-Jane drag or accel all day, every day. The problem arises when a high-level player times their swings so that there in little-to-no animation. The game turns into a complete guessing game at that point, with most high-level matches turning into gamble-fests. If there were strong visual cues between an accel or drag, many of these issues would be resolved. For example, if a timer was set so that, should the weapon remain active for a certain amount of time without making contact, an animation cue will be triggered. Additionally, I believe a higher stamina penalty should occur for having to expend a greater amount of energy keeping the weapon aloft. Additionally, the entire catalog of weapons ought to be slowed down, as accels which have been clocked in as faster than human reaction time are simply unreasonable. Add in latency issues and you have swings which Houdini into existence and hit you before you know what’s going on. Chambers either must be removed or they must have an auto-locking feature, similar to how kicks work in Chivalry 1. The micro-drag out of chamber meta is vomit-inducing. It entirely defeats the purpose of chambers, which was created expressly to give new players an easier mechanic to counter feints than hard-reading. 1 handed weapons need to be reworked badly. The heavy handaxe is literally a mini zwei and has no business being that slow AND that fast, while doing that much damage. Most 1 handers need to have damage reduced as well as a general speed reduction. A secondary should never be a main weapon. A secondary is an “oops I fucked up and got disarmed, hopefully I can survive this fight.” I honestly feel my anus pucker MORE after I disarm someone and they have a cleaver, arming sword, or falchion. I could beat anyone in the fuckin game just by grabbing a falchion. Stamina is something I’ve railed about since launch, but the regen stamina on hit is just too much. If you feinted three times in Chiv 1 and got read you were basically fucked. Here, people can morph feint and dance around like a lunatic and just get stamina right back. Particularly if a low level player is attempting to counter the feints with chambers, draining their stamina so much that the stamina lost from the feint-a-palooza is borderline negligible. Additionally, stun on stam out should not be a perk. It should just be the standard.
there's no animation fix you can do to make the deliberate deceleration of a swing look good - so long as players are encouraged to do that the combat will look bad
@@Stouty “Looking good” is pretty grey terminology but I’ll follow through with this line of thinking. Feeling good is the most important aspect of a game because it’s what creates a relationship between the player and his avatar. It’s why Mario is so successful. The jumps “feel” good. I am entirely disinterested in a boring game that looks pretty, and I think that feeling is fairly universal, which is why there is such a backlash. Mostly people are not particularly good at articulating what they are experiencing, and so there’s a feeling of rightness with regards to the current meta for current players because of the relationship between their own self and the visceral feeling of the momentum and timing of the blade. This internal pendulum is 90% of the excitement of Mordhau. This timing change creates the excitement that makes every fight a unique one, and it is what separates games like Chiv and Mordhau from games like For Honor.
I wanted to add here though that I sincerely appreciate your efforts to bring the genre forward. I have spent years in the background trying to make changes in the community and with the development of melee games but I lack the renown that players like yourself have. For what it’s worth, thank you for your efforts and for sticking your neck out to help melee grow.
@@SameDayTwice Drags look bad and feel bad, as noted by the devs of chivalry (see my first video)
@@Stouty this kind of argument reduces things to semantics. I suppose I take blame for that with regards to feel as being superior to looks. However, I believe the key component of this is the readability. The underlying argument here is that drags are too hard to read and utilize for most players, so it gives players who posses that ability/knowledge an advantage so great that new players get frustrated and quit. The changes I propose would solve that issue. We have to ask ourselves though at what point can we remove aspects of the game and it still remains novel and fun? Moreover, this problem is more relevant to the duelyard and doesn’t encapsulate the bigger problem in melee which is bad game modes, bad matchmaking, and terrible maps. Competitive play in particular needs stricter classes or else balance between so many weapon and armor combinations become impossible. Players should be restricted to two heavy, two medium, and one light player for team in a competitive, objective-based mode. Casual matches need casual mmr so that teams are properly balanced. I just think there are so many more meaningful changes that could be made and should be made before we start tearing out game mechanics entirely.
stouty is the most oppressed person on earth
rise up stoutlaws
"I've never played Chivalry..."
"I think it's crazy to say they are clones..."
Bruh.. If you speak from a place of passion, you lose logic, usually. Most of the early player of Mordhau came directly from Chivalry. The only huge thing to consider is honestly the blocking system. In Chivalry you hold block ,in Mordhau you can only flinch. It just so happens Mordhau is centered around getting an opponent to block and take advantage of the cooldown. However, the customization of Mordhau is still top tier in my opinion. Choosing to NOT level lock weapons to ridiculous levels is great. The utilization of weapons in their "alt" attacks to deal with different armor types or ranges is a phenomenal add and REALLY calls to us history buffs who like the history element at play with Medieval FPM games. Mordhau could have honestly propelled the game into legendary status. To be one of those indie games turned house-hold name. Now when I bring it up, try to introduce new people into it, or talk to those who have dabbled before... the complaints are the same. They want to like it, but the use of animation exploits are a huge turn off.
If games do not maintain a longevity of income, they won't last beyond 5 years. If you only seek to please the small player base you have, as opposed to attracting newer ones, your game will eventually run out of funds and become more expensive to maintain. So lots of coaching money gone out the window. The problem with dragging for me lies within 2 core things: It's third person animation & intent.
As stated in Mordhau you will normally utilize a drag to encourage a flinch mechanic. This means as a player, outside of footwork, you can do jack shit until it replenishes. It feels cheap when you fall victim to it because you're being locked out of combat by the flinch block mechanic. What also doesn't help is how terrible they look. Drags translate so unnaturally slow that you wonder how the hell someone is able to get enough force behind it to cause any damage. It's use in Mordhau is only frustrating to those who fall victim to it and doesn't feel like a case of "get gud" as much of a case of "broken game mechanics" that aren't ever introduced to the player base in game to any meaningful extent. They could have adapted it in, took a look at how it's being used, and balanced it out nicely from there. Yes the competitors wont get every little thing they been learning for years, but you also would have a higher chance of new players staying beyond their first few hours, or minutes.
Mordhau is currently in the EXACT same place Chiv 1 was in when Mordhau began to pick up player base. Server list looking like a shell of it's former self. However the KEY difference? Chivalry maintained a steady player base longer than Mordhau has. The decision to favor the niched few instead of looking for ways to both satisfy them and new players is an odd decision. I anticipate a second Mordhau going into development, or, the devs just moving onto something else that can hold a longevity longer than 2 years. (because I assume it took longer than 2 years to make)
Anyway, that's my piece. I love Mordhau but cannot deny what has poisoned it. Then there's the thing we don't talk about too much. The chat. I've been playing PC games for a LONG time and "Gamer words" are not new to me. But god damn Mordhau has an alarming issue in regards to that. When it comes to a huge game like CoD or (formerly) GMod, one can forgive the abundance. As the game has a MASS appeal. But for a niche game in an even more niche genre... It doesn't exactly entice new comers to join the ranks of the 2k players who love this game and genre. Though I will say, modernly, this is becoming less frequent. Players using such words are ridiculed or kicked by the lobby. So I do have hopes.
Plus I have grown fond of Stouty and love his Mordhau videos. Too bad he doesn't care for Chivalry due to it's lack of a Comp scene. I think it's got several great things about it I would have loved to see in Mordhau. Maybe when it goes on Steam there will be a change of heart on part of the developers to include the competitive scene. But since dragging is taught on tutorial, and decently enough, it seems that perhaps they are looking at how to deal with those two things to consider when dragging.
Chiv 2 does some things much better than mordhau (even in terms of the combat) but unfortunately they went astray in other areas, like removing the traditional feint
About to hit 400 hours, played on and off since it was launched, dragging is the only mechanic which has made me put this game back on the shelf.
Feints are annoying but the only person to blame for falling for them is myself. If I've waited for every visual indicator and held my parry a few ms already, and a drag still gets through by floating backwards towards my face, I'm gonna get real mad.
The real question is: Will Contingent have Dragging? or will Stouty eat his words?
I find myself almost never using drags in gamemodes like frontline where it's more team-based and there are a lot more casual players, but whenever I play in a duel server or in ranked where there are more skilled players who have 500+ hours in the game it almost becomes a requirement to have fun in the game. This shouldn't be an option, the fact that we are required to learn and use a mechanic which isn't designed in the main portion of the game which the vast majority of the playerbase plays shows how much it needs to be reworked. Like the point you made, if you enjoy swing manip just log into a duel server and play to your hearts content. They need to open up more team-based combat, if you look at classical medieval warfare they weren't going around having 1v1 duels, they were shoulder to shoulder fighting. It almost looks like the Mordhau devs saw the cheesy 1986 Highlander movie and said "yeah, that's medieval combat, they only fought each other 1v1". Swing manip encourages less tactical gameplay, doesn't improve player count and adds high skill gaps for no reason.
Im ngl I refunded the game since dragging looked so unfun to do and learn while everyone was doing it even in a shitty pub server, it makes it really unappetising to play
Do you have any real life friends?
I love how all of his arguments come from or end with a "I don't know" or an "I think". Like he isn't certain about anything lmfao
Are you trying to tell me that Zweihander ultra time stopping Churchill drags aren't intentional?
"I suppose the people that enjoy dragging subconsciously dont like the mechanic. For every drag they land they get by one themselves"
This is a phenominal point!!!
I've always been of the position "fuck dragging, but you need to learn it." In mordhau when chatting with newer players than I.
admit I am biased because I would be like two million times better at this game without dragging being an existing mechanic, I win in almost any fight in which outpositioning and outwitting the opponent and make up all sorts of silly underhanded maneuvers on the fly.
I want to know, how would you remove dragging in a satisfying way? I am curious about this.
you'll see
how long until the medieval fps gamer community is brainwashed into accepting and even enjoying a game that is rock paper scissors with footwork
that game already exists: the culling, retail rotale
The response video is right about the fact that your opinion that "fighting games are niche because of the acceptance of exploits" is completely unfounded. Your counterpoint to it missed the point he was making in the first place which was just him showcasing a statement made without any justification or experience behind it. It doesn't matter whether fighting games getting more players because of exploits is unrealistic compared to the opposite, the point he was illustrating is that you made a claim which made no sense.
I will go so far as to say that fighting games are in fact not a genre that became niche because of its acceptance to exploits but rather because of it's strict mechanical barrier which any new player must overcome to play the game at a level higher than just button mashing. Although this isn't related to an exploiting of the game's mechanics in any way, there is still a comparison to be made with drags or even reading feints to where it is a very niche mechanical skill that has to be learned. The main difference in this case being that the mechanics in fighting games don't look bad like drags do, which in my opinion is your only correct reasoning for the removal of drags in this whole thing.
This brings me to a question for you Stouty: Since a strict mechanical barrier has been proven to act as a deterrent and even a filter for the casual player base, how would the lack of dragging alone solve the issue that is the niche aspect of Mordhau's mechanical skill?
DREEEEEEEES GAAAAAAAAAAANG. I said in my last video that the exploits/tech obtuseness of the fighting game mechanics plays a part in their low player counts, not necessarily the driving cause. I can't see how this isn't true - overly complicated mechanics are not popular with casual players.
Mechanical barrier can't be a filter - if so, how is CSGO the #1 game on steam?
@@Stouty I did say a niche mechanical skill set, definitely not the case with any FPS
@@dresboni It's only niche because it's not top 1 yet. The mechanics of FPM's (if done right) can be more accessible than FPS, where good players will remove you from the round from across the map in a matter of ms
hmmm, drags are one of those things I dont really know if I like. You mentioned subconsciously disliking it, which seems credible. Drags have always been there in these melee games and I wouldnt disagree. I simply am indifferent to it because I've always been using it, fighting it. And again the sole feeling I get from using drags derives from the fact that I learned the skill with hard work, which could in theory be translated to a more practical and balanced mechanic. Good debate, very impressed
I would like to make a quick point.
Exploit is a very vague term; "In order to have a debate involving the use of such vague terms it is necessary to give it a specific definition. It doesn't matter what the definition as long as all parties involved understand what is meant by the term. By doing so we can avoid unnecessary arguments on semantics and reduce confusion and misunderstanding."
For the purposes of debate, exploit means what it is defined as.
What i don't understand about no dragging is how do players with good defences hit each other ? without drags wouldn't it just be a stamina battle and feint spam ?
what's wrong with feints?
@@Stouty it would make weapons like zwei/barb completely useless
@@Leelko make them faster then, their strength would be their range (like irl)
@@StoutyWill there be booba in contingent???
@Stouty I wonder if you're biased at all considering your playstyle lol. Also did you really just pull a "muh realism"?
I'm so proud that I took place in this ratio so we can get another video
I would argue that dragging was omitted from the combat tutorial video but kept in the game as part of a complex balance between maintaining new players interest and maintaining the spirit of chivalry combat, beloved (at least to an extent) by its long term player base, which was almost entirely dragging based.
On another note, I'm surprised you never mentioned the obvious connection that could be made between current dragging in Mordhau and the backwards overhead / rainbow slash of Chivalry, which was a staple of chivalry combat at the time but was proudly removed in Mordhau, as it was believed to sully the combat due to the exact issues you previously mentioned.
I'm with you that there needs to be change but it would be hard, as moving away from dragging combat will effectively completely change the combat for most long term players. The end result would look radically different, and even if these changes were great, I think it is natural for people to be scared of that scale of change.
there was a much to-do over the backswing removal because they were able to do so. The implication is that they were unable to remove dragging so instead they didn't talk about it
imma be honest, i think the drag meta is much better than spam feint meta. spam feint is just boring and easy to punish. with drags, theres footwork, timing, along with other factors that is just more fun to do. If they removed drags and changed feints to where there wouldnt be a spam meta, then i'd be all for it; but at the current state only removing drags would be bad for the game imo.
reading feints definitely isn't easy
@@Stouty with the spam feint meta it is. Also Theres not much else you can do with the feint meta besides read and punish. Its just gonna be a whole lot less fun imo. Along with the fact that light-medium armor will then be COMPLETELY irrelevant. At least now i can do really good in 1-1-1 armor, but with the removal of drags everyone would be using 3-3-3 armor. Far less variety and it will begin to force people into a meta. All for the sake of immersion. I dont like it either but, drags are an important part of mordhau. It would require a lot of work to remove them without even worse detriments. Btw i am just a casual duelyard lurker, so a large portion of the game atm and probably the majority of who cares.
@@cerb1221 if you think it's easy we can do a no chamber ft10
@@Stouty im na with terrible internet, there is no way i'd stand a chance on any server outside the one i normally play on. but if you wanna have an ez win we can ft10 i guess. also while i find it relatively easy to read, i was talking about punishing.
update: obviously i lost. i read like, 40% of feints. also i feel i should clarify, i was talking about spam feint meta. if you dont fall for 1-2 then you probably wont fall for 3-4. i just overestimated myself lmfao
This argument about what is or isn't an exploit is getting more and more pedantic and tedious. This whole argument has devolved into your misuse of the term "exploit" rather than the mechanic in question, you'd have far less people arguing with you if you had just made the case for why drags are janky and never used the term exploit. Focus on why you think drags are bad, with examples, and give your ideas of how to replace them while still maintaining control over swing manipulation. Chivalry 2 has pretty much made drags unimportant and they rarely get used, at least at lower levels. It feels OK not using them, but the game does feel less fluid and like I have less control. How would you remedy this? I don't understand how you could have real time, manipulable swings without dragging, how you could have access without drags. I think we need to look at why dragging is used in the first place. It's one of the only reliable ways to get players to mistime their parries, parries that cover a huge area that aren't directional. In Mordhau it's hard to land a hit past someone's parry without resorting to various janky or exploitive techniques. In Chivalry 1 you could use S drags and such to hit someone's flank or feet while they are parrying. If the parry bubble was much smaller, and matching parry direction with attack direction mattered and was divided into 4 quadrants (top right/left, bottom left/right), we wouldn't even need drags most of the time. With such a system we could have held parry or some sort of guard system like For Honor.
I cover why the definition is important in the video, it has it's own chapter
@@Stouty I know and I disagree that it's important, it sounds like you're grasping at the negative connotations of the word to make your argument for you. Whether or not it's an exploit has become increasingly irrelevant. It just becomes a toxic, deconstructive argument. A constructive argument would be looking at the mechanic in depth, why it looks janky, what they allow players to do, the pros and cons, and finally how to replace them and what such a combat system would look like. It'd be hard to do a melee system with real time swing manip without drags that doesn't feel janky itself. Show us how it's done.
@@LaughingMan44 Everyone already knows it's janky though, it's self-evident but I did address this in detail in my first video
idk if this was discussed or not, but I think a good solution for dragging problem would be the following: make the damage proportional to the instantaneous acceleration of the weapon (like in real life). Thus the attack that was slowed by a drag will do less damage since the attack has less acceleration at the moment of the impact
It's not an exploit but a bad game mechanic. They coded it like this.
I see what you're doing Stouthammer, you make very good points. No other genre scratches the itch, it must live on!
I stopped at 9:33 min to write this. You say that dragging is better than ever and this just isn't true. Turn cap is being reduced more and more every patch and defense has never been so good. I think you are just playing differently than other people, and that this debate has turned into more of playstyle opinion than anything else. Also, I think the guy who made the response did a great job a summarizing drags and accel for new players. For me, drags were more natural because I could see them. I started comp in NA at a relatively low level and something I noticed is that what makes the game really hard to get into isn't the drag, its the accel. In mordhau when someone starts a swing you first need to check if its a feint or not. If its not a feint then good now read if its a drag or an accel. the problem here is that the accel is so fast that the feint becomes a really strong weapon and when the feint and the accel are scary then the drags becomes a threat. To reinforce this idea, when is the last time you have seen a new player complain about drags ? All I see all the time is people talking about unreadable feints. Bastard sword is probably the biggest offender. This weapon can be played at all level of player with absolutely 0 use of drags and still be the most cancer weapon to play against. So Stouty my question is : What kind of game do we want ? A game without drag where people spam feint or a game with slower accels and more reading ? Sorry if this is a bit hard to read, my main language isn't English but I hope I could formulate a good response to what I have seen so far. I add this little section at the end to ask you about what you think about renown and the fact that they decided to market drags and are making an effort to put them in front of the marketing campaign.
How many hours and rank? Or ingame name?
@@epikoperfectnoob6408 I have 1000 hours right now maybe even a bit more, I reached Elite3 but it doesn’t really matter here in NA since no one really plays ranked. And my In game name is Just Dodge. I am well known in the NA comp scene.
@@justdodge4133 u based ur name around a mechanic in the game that is dogshit please dont mention the whole E3 thing if it dont matter drags suck with the turn cap ur right but i think stouty doesnt even drag bc he hates them so fucking much so he must not know
@@lamorak2983 bit cringe
It's true dragging has been nerfed since release but so has everything else alongside it and has player skill increases dragging becomes increasingly meta due to it costing 0 stamina. As a result the meta now is the most riposte drag dominated that it's ever been. As for what I want - you'll have to wait and see. I haven't seen Renown's drag marketing attempts as of yet
What if damage calculations took speed into account like in Mount and Blade? It wouldn't make dragging impossible, but if drags did less damage than accels then that would at least be consistent with reality.
Accels would still be a problem then. Yeah, it’s possible to do an accel irl but you leave yourself vulnerable to counterattack, plus it wouldn’t be as broken irl since biology is involved, since humans can’t turn at breakneck speeds like you can in a video game with your sensitivity increased
But overall I think it makes sense, it would be used as a last resort to chip away at health
That would result in more hits to kill which would make them completely pointless
@@Liam-ke2hv not entirely. You'll have to transition the drag into an accel. I mean dont people do that anyways? If anything itll make it more difficult to abuse drag.
@@Liam-ke2hv that way itll make predictions slightly better since in order to do real damage with the drag, you gotta move into an accel, which eventually people will start to read drags as a tell for an accel.
next first person melee slasher will definately utilize and implement light and heavy attacks properly or some other mechanic that would appeal to casuals instead of the same swing manipulation exploits that use the same animation for fast and slow attacks from a decade ago, right guys?
Tarkov already has the ability to change your face, faction, voice, outfit, and arm bands if you want to match your color with your teammates. Further more, you should be able to identify your teammates through the gear and gun they have, something that this guy brought up about being able to do irl, but fails to mention in Tarkov. Target identification is a major part of the hardcore military sim type genre anyways. I don’t know why he brought this up because it sounds like he never played Tarkov before, further invalidating his irrelevant point.
I cringed when he talked about "game is not dead, game genre isnt dead." That was the most delusional/stupid thing i have heard in weeks.
why was it delusional/stupid?
@@platinumdrip3928 The idea that game has at one point of time enough players to full lobby is just idiotic.
He even talked about pro scene and other shit, dont get me started.
I am a new mordhau player level 16, 30 hours in game i dont know who the other guy is but i recognize stoutys voice so im just gonna say the guy in the back has no idea what he is talking about i dont know much about mordhau but i know how real life, cs and other game mechanics work. As a new player i find it very difficult to play against good players, i spend time to understand what is it that i do wrong and it always boils down to i cant read drags and i panic parry a bit but most of the time while i cant begin to understand how drag mechanic works the good players keep dragging and dragging and it feels like everyone has an extra ability which i havent and feels unplayeable and after like 20 minutes of pure getting slapped on the ass and dying i quit desktop and i open the game again next day cuz i really like to learn the game and play it on a good level but since day 1 dragging felt like a bug to me i said wtf is this but accels were fine cuz it made sense in my opinion
It's ok you're just experiencing a skill issue trust me drags are litty af
@@Leelko try that one on me
@@Stouty try what??? When I first started playing I did not like drags, but they're an important part of the game and the only way to validate any time of pressure with a riposte. Complaining about drags being unreadable is like crying about feint spamming. You said it yourself learning how to read is an important aspect of the game. This rings true with drags as well so falling for drags all the time is indeed a skill issue. You have footwork/leanback and chambers all at your disposal to read drags. Your rank will never validate your opinion to anyone with critical thinking skills.
@@Leelko he has a legitimate complaint that you brushed off as a skill issue. You of course can not do that against the rank 1 player in the game
I left mordhau because of drags. (500 hours, diamond)
I'm still not sold on the complete removal of drags. Shit like wessexes needs to go, yes, but your garden-variety slowed-swing drag is an important mixup tool.
Asking for melee slashers to dethrone FPSes is just unrealistic. Any slasher more complicated than a one-button-mode is going to be less accessible than the dead simple point-and-shoot of FPS. Even RPG slashers like the Souls series often get dismissed as "too hard" despite being relatively mechanically simple. That's just a bridge no amount of simplifying can cross with modern mass market gamers.
Tone down the worst ones, by all means, but "remove all drags" is just as bad a position as the newbie that wants feints removed because they're hard to read and look unnatural.
Find a feint that looks half way as bad as your average drag
I agree my play style shifted to reading drags and slowly made me hate the mechanic, the game you describe sounds a lot better.
You can tell who has a command of logic when it comes down to debate. the guy you're responding to in this video is not nearly as articulate as you are. Also strikes me as very odd that some casual with 200 hours in just one title is willing to debate someone who has dedicated a large part of his life to a game genre spanning multiple titles. He almost seems proud in his admitted ignorance.
Being in the NA comp scene I see alot of players complaining more about chambering and chamber feints. Removing drags would give people less options to counter chambers. It's been a long-lasting mechanic that certain players learn to utilize in their own way that its better to legitimize, atleast for mordhau. Being able to have three types of swing speeds strengthens a players ability to mix different attacks and throw off their opponents expectations. I don't think I would be able to not read feints if I couldn't be dragged I would also be able to chamber every swing/stab confidently.
for sure, the whole game would need reworking
@@Stouty yes, but what about female skins...?
NA comp player? your name doesn’t ring any bells though
Imagine if this was redirected towards something that mattered
fr lol go touch grass you fuckin nerds
slasher genre was a failed experiment just go play elden ring
@@whatashame.6319 more like elden ROLL AHAHHHAHHAHAHAHH RATIOOOOO
@@Stouty counter
@@Stouty fr tho enemies do be too aggressive
Lmao so he doesn’t know that valorant is csgo with extra steps and mordhau is a chiv clone.
You can ignore most of what this guy says
He’s also bad at tarkov. Lol imagine killing your own team.
i think dragging is enjoyable and that it should be a thing, but it cant be as extreme as it is now because its very jarring and confusing to new players trying to understand the flow of the game and im tired of how dead this genre is
Perhaps I just don't have the vision for it, but what would a first person melee game without drags look like? It's all well and good to put emphasis on feinting, but if every weapon had a relatively consistent swing time/windup it would become incredibly stale and easily read without another mechanic to mask the feint or otherwise punish a delayed parry.
ruclips.net/video/p-B4AwgArwA/видео.html
What game are you playing in the beginning? Looks sick
Hunt: Showdown
I enjoy dragging but i can see how it makes the game very unnaproachable. Id love for the anims to get sorted, but i dont truly believe you could ever make them visually understandable while keeping the visuals in line the with Mordhau's aesthetic. You'd need some gamey sword trail colors or some such, which would equally detract from the presentation as bad as the animations.
I suppose the real question is would the game be as fun with dragging gone? Who knows, id have to try it.
I think if you truly want to push the genre to its next level, you will have to let the combat system you designed speak for itself once people can play.
well said
For what he said about Tarkov : You can create yourself a unique character with special clothes and cosmetic items such as masks and armbands...
the fact that my kd shot up by 1 when i upgraded to a larger mouse pad speaks volumes...
From a conceptual standpoint, I think the answer is fairly obvious. And that is to make the calculation of damage to the opponent, a function of the weapon's momentum (velocity x mass), rather than a fixed amount based upon mass alone.
By "mass", I mean whatever flat damage figures the developers have assigned to a weapon, which are loosely based upon what the weapon's perceived mass would be in reality. E.g. the zweihander and maul do larger amounts of base damage than a dagger... makes sense. But not if that Zweihander is travelling at a the speed of a geriatric slug!
Of course, the usual damage modifiers should remain, i.e. part of the body hit and tier of armour on that body part should increase or decrease the damage dealt in a logical way.
Drags would not even need to be patched out, because you'd need to be an idiot to make them part of your core repitoire of moves, as they'd do little to no damage.
I'm not the first person to suggest this, nor will I be the last.
I wonder what your opinion on elden ring is. Do you think that it will popularise the first person slasher genre?
it has no swing manipulation, so it's not really the same genre
@@Stouty You're right. I guess what I was asking was more related to your comments on how you believe the first-person slasher genre will be very popular. do you think that the success of Elden Ring will have any impact, mechanically or popularity-wise, on the genre despite being differently designed? also, would you ever consider getting into the PVP of Elden ring and the Souls franchise?
@@ariharris9221 it shows people are into swords n stuff, no plans on getting into souls PvP
Don't know where the part of not having a way to spot your teammate in tarkov came from but I am pretty sure there are colorful armbands that you can buy and equip
Do you have any ideas on how to restrict dragging? I don't think spiking turn cap to 1000 will make the game feel good. Also significantly shortening swings to the point where they cannot drag could add a lot more potency to footwork and make team play, cleaving in 1vx more clunky, etx
Yeah, I'm working on an upcoming melee title so I can't divulge the details, although I would like to
I'm 7 months late to this and pretty bad at the game, but what would be wrong with just significantly curbing damage the slower a swing gets?
You don't need to mess with the swing system, there's no chance of collateral making weapon control less satisfying. People can still pull of drags, it's just that when someone lightly taps your helmet with their sword, you take very little damage. F=ma
this guy doesn't make any valid counterpoints. especially his last one referencing Tarkhov and stating team indicators would be more realistic in game over "wiggling guns" and "tilting" backwards.
in WW2, plenty of military units developed vocal cues or hand gestures to signal it was someone they knew... because they could be wearing or appear different physically than what was normally recognizable.
Stouty is never wrong because all of his opinions would lead to a game where my stock raises and my peers lower and honestly that's the reality I want to live in. He's also correct but that's not really as important?
Why couldn't you just focus on why dragging is problematic instead of on this horrendous argument that not only you are wrong about by using your own definitions, is completely inconsequential to whether or not dragging is healthy or not for the game? Plenty of exploits exist in other games that are recognized as good and increasing the skill caps of their games (e.g. Overwatch movement physics for characters like Mercy or Doomfist), so clearly whether or not dragging is an exploit is irrelevant to whether or not it's good for the game
you clearly haven't watched the video lol, it even has chapters to answer these basic questions that have been asked 100 times
@@Stouty I wasted enough time debating you on forums I'd rather just add to the ratio now. I'm not wasting 20 minutes to listen to you regurgitate the same points we've discussed in the past you've been wrong about.
@@BigPapaMitchell Nope you wasted my time making fallacious arguments that I've now dismantled across a 3 part video series, hence why I refuse to repeat myself further when there's already a clearly labelled "Why "exploit" matters" chapter that you failed to click
@@BigPapaMitchell dawg.. circular reasoning at its finest.
None of my friends enjoy playing in public lobbies with me, its impossible for them to learn anything or even understand what's going on, dragging is the worst looking mechanic in the game that feels almost unreadable at times. I have a decent sized friend group (all of them have Mordhau) and I'm the only one that consistently plays and its getting to the point where even I don't enjoy the game. The game feels abandoned and the only people who are still playing are the ones who have mastered it, there is no way to improve without learning this shitty mistake of a mechanic.
Only problem is I fucking love this game, nothing comes close.
Doenst a system that gives max dmg at the apex of the swing with a falloff if hit too early or too late fix this problem? makes accels and drags not super viable but still leaves em in the game.
Not really because it creates randomness in damages and still encourages partial dragging
Personally I think dragging adds depth to MORDHAU specifically that makes it more interesting and in turn fun (I could just be a masochist) I respect the points you made and I think as a whole and in the grander picture dragging does more harm than it does good for not only MORDHAU but the genre as a whole. The melee slasher has a huge future in my opinion (and I believe yours as well), and I think Chivalry 2 is an example that there needs to be a good balance between the complexity and depth of MORDHAU and the accessibility of Chivalry 2. It's obviously easier said than done, and I am not a game dev but I think if that sweet spot was hit, we could have a massive game that retains a large player base for more than a couple months at most.
Isn't Chiv 2 as dead, if not more dead than Mordhau? You can't give props to Chiv 2 in that regard when it actually counters your own point. The game is more accessible yet still dead. So what happened there?
A niche genre like melee slashers should really cater to one crowd or another in my opinion. Other games can suffer from this sort of "identity crisis" where they can't decide if they are a competitive game or a casual game, but if they have a strong enough player count in the right genre of game it doesn't matter. However with melee slashers you don't have that luxury (mainly because I believe other game developers can FORCE their game to stay alive by pumping money into tournaments and cosmetics for the respective crowds). If you are a small game dev, and your game you put out has a high skill ceiling and is fun to play, you will retain a core competitive crowd inherently that enjoy said game. Steam Early Access is chock full of games that are "accessible" and fun to play, but they just don't retain that crowd regardless without the potential for people to capture that bag $$$.
@@calciferrr My point was Chivalry 2 was too casual. It was too accessible to the point that it abandoned any sense of competitive play. In a perfect world if a game could land somewhere in-between MORDHAU and Chivalry 2 it would retain a player base of both scenes (Comp and Casual). You have a solid point that it has to cater to one, it can't play both sides, my point was purely if it COULD (in a perfect world) it would retain a large player base for far longer.
Almost all my friends that got into Mordhau with me can’t enjoy it because they are looking for a game that they can play and be able to profess at getting better but don’t like drags because it just doesn’t make a lot of sense because they figure it’ll do less damage because you are slowing the speed of the swing which should make it do less damage and it just looks extremely ugly. Feint spamming is annoying at the start yes but they learned to read feints better over time but just don’t like drags and the even uglier drags that look even jankier like the wessex or the pickle or carpet drag. Yes I find it fun to drag but I’d give it up to be able to bring friends on and all be able to enjoy the game and see the game thrive and not wait 20 minutes to 2 hours to get into a ranked game. I would love to see more game modes like the old battle Royale or gold rush to become core game modes because in all honesty and I don’t mean to offend anyone but frontline or invasion are both extremely boring game modes to me, and the only reason I play them on occasion is because that is where the new players are so I can sometimes have a buddy that will be able to do something against those level of players. Dragging is fun for me because I enjoy learning and improving at things that interest me but like I said before would gladly sacrifice it for a more clean looking game that would still be as much fun for me but make it more accessible for new players to get into and enjoy for themselves and be able to understand it on a competitive level but not necessarily be able to be as good as the comp players. You also know the game is dying when Plat 3 is considered top 100 lol.
smh top 100 not even big boy diamonds
dragging is fun and satisfying
now excuse me as I puncture bubble wrap with a needle and slowly squeeze the air out
Can you link the age of chivalry accel demonstration video? I can't find it anywhere :(
yo my bad I added the link late to my last vids description ruclips.net/video/uiMlA8n3k58/видео.html
thanks
Alternatively to getting rid of drags, make damage based on the apex of the swing.
A weapon will do its maximum damage when it's in the middle of the swing (i.e. a weapon with 400ms release would do maximum damage at ~175ms - 250ms).
You don't get much force in a swing at the beginning and end of it, so the game should reflect that through a damage curve. Stamina drain would be affected too, ofc.
Jank moves likes drags and accels will be punished with pitiful damage, while game mechanics like feints and morphs will become more commonplace due to them being able to do full damage.
Essentially this would relegate them to be "finisher" moves, for when you know your enemy is extremely low HP.
This would alter stabs too - you can only damage an enemy with a stab assuming you actually hit them while your arm is extending.
this is a joke right
that is one solution but it is more of a band-aid fix that was attempted in Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior with poor results as it still encouraged partial dragging to achieve max damage
@@Stouty I think removing the ability to cancel parry midswing and increasing delay to parry when missing would be a more reasonable solution withing
the established mechanics. The way I see it, drags are the meta because it's way too safe as there is little to no punishment to perform (i.e. less stamina loss campared to other manouvers, having the opponent have to gamble in having a successful chamber just to counter a simple yet hard to read manouver).
I know this video was mostly about dragging but at this point it feels like grasping at straws as to why the game failed to entice new players, which I don't think you can causally link them at all. The bottom line is there is no reason for new people to come to the melee genre, grind it for 2000+ hours, learn all the ins and outs of the game even if that includes 'exploits' and meta when the developers abandoned the comp scene on arrival. And the comp scene is what helps to retain and entice new players to come and learn the game. There was also very little community building, so the only real communities that formed were small factions of scrimmers and RPers which were hard to join and obscure. As someone who scrimmed for a year+ and hosted tournaments, it's sad that there were so few new faces in all my playtime but that's the reality of not having proper tutorials for your games mechanics, poor implementation and no endorsement of competitive players and content creators who had the knowledge to teach new players and help them learn.
No wonder RP and modded servers are the most popular servers next to casual invasion pubs, because the modders and RPers create new content for casuals to enjoy. I'm not saying dragging is an exploit or not, it doesn't really matter what mechanics in this game are worth keeping when there isn't any reason to play or learn them at all.
3:20 so instant accel wouldn't be a problem if drag wasn't a thing? What about normal hits? Wouldn't those hit you if one wouldn't instant accel and you tried to parry an instant accel?
it would still be a problem
Getting ratioed doesn't mean shit when they're wrong.
Both sides fail to really tip me over. Dragging is fun yet can be used as annoying tactic to deal with. A question i would like answered is "What Replacement Mechanics would you pose since you are a combat designer for another in the melee genre" Or "Would you enjoy a melee game exactly how mordhau is now but without the dragging"
feints and yes
1:50 reading from script with a gun to his head
I feel like drags among mid tier players where pretty fun, mixing up your moves to throw off an opponent. The problem when you fight top tier players is that you basically have to gamble on what's going to hit you. I mean, the nastiest drags are gambles in off itself, they just hope that they will hit you.
How do you do that same swing over and over again at 8:18
keybinds
What game’s in the background?
Hunt: Showdown
I played Mordhau for almost 1000 hours solely on duel servers. All my friends quit due to silly drags and weapons that made drag/accels even worse. You are not rewarded at all for chambering or feinting.
This guy has 200 hours in mourdhau and shouldn't even be on my screen
Complete waste of time someone with 200 hours couldn't even begin to comprehend what a drag is and why it is bad. You play the game for the cool realistic knight fights the game is very cartoonish with the dragging exploits
I think there’s something to be said about intention, at least as neutral talking point; how it COULD enrich and improve a combat system. A good example could be true combos in souls games. Specifically ds3 where innate 2 hit combos is intended design. You land 1 melee attack on an opponent and they are stunned for you to get 1 free follow up. However, certain weapons have special attacks(weapon arts), you can combo with these specific weapons by landing a hit>using the first part of the weapon art(this resets that follow up attack window)>and follow up with the second part of that weapon art or a basic attack granting you 3 hits in most cases. These weapons although having true combos didn’t become as meta and abused as dragging and lead to people experimenting with combining 2 separate weapon classes; the most prevalent being greataxe/other heavy or colossal in off hand, estoc in main creating pseudo combos etc. but these only helped to diversify combat and push the skill ceiling higher, they didn’t become meta since it was predictable and can be punished by outspacing and footwork like all other weapons, but you’d still see them around 1/4 of the duels you fight. Wasn’t intended but was never patched out, and ds3, before the servers were taken offline due to rce exploits, boasted 12k-18k to even 23k concurrent players
But dragging, ehh I agree that its janky especially when faking an accel and then throwing your mouse across the room to pull the weapon back into a drag. In its current form I’m inclined to agree with you. But I think it should stay as a mechanic; reworked and reintroduced into a fleshed out opposite of the accel. It would be the best of both worlds. A slower attack that spices up the pot. Or maybe not, mordhau is a lot of foot work and swing manipulation, a simple slow attack button doesn’t reflect how accels were first introduced in chiv.
he's completely wrong about tarkov, there are many different outfits you can choose from, colored armbands to wear, and with a diverse range of equipment to run you should be able to tell who is on your team.
Triternion also added a mechanic (I forgot the name) where if the drag is too big it will deal like 2 damage(Dunno how much it would do if they would make that mechanic more opressive), which is a parralel to jet flying up or mei using ice walls, instead of jumping on heads. They legitamized it. Also as I already said on the previous video they showed dragging in some of the promotional videos I saw, especially stab drags, just didnt call it drags, but they also didnt talk about accels in specific.
I havent played mordhau in a longer time now and are there with 700 hours and I am like slightly above average I would say and had a lot of fun by memeing around and dueling as well in which I was more frustrated with feints than drags or accels, except for the level 200 people that pulled of that 360 and cucumber, or whatever the vegetable moves are called(who the fuck named them), but those are rare, while feinting isnt as rare. I am quite bad at reading feints tbf and got better over time but also got better countering the cucumber. In general I think its more fun to move the camera around and have a lot of movement rather than try to read the feints. That is my personal experience and I dont think that mine is unique.
I admire your effort to make the genre the best, but I dont think that this is the best way to approach the issue, since it just comes off as arguing about semantics (I know the point is to put negative light on it so people are easier convinced that it should be gone), but I think a better way is to show alternatives, suggest fixes, say why and show that.
I know its hard to do that and I dont think that you can mod to restrict certain camera movement if the swing comes from a certain direction or have shorter releases over all, but maybe a way is to play a skirmish (or whatever), once with the dirties drags you have in your pocket, and then the other without any kind of drags, with some commentary. Maybe also make use of the people you coach and have them do the same thing and have them talk about their experience.
PS:
Just finished the last few seconds of the video and I am completely wrong and I agree with you to 101%. I actually always hated drags and love 5 foot 6 british people.
PSS:
Are there any news of Contingent that you can leak? I would be curious how the game would approach the combat. If its more like chiv 2, meaning alway high release, but longer or shorter windup, or something completely different.
glance mechanic is mainly a backswing band-aid (rather than a dragging fix), it it was legitimised they would have showcased it in dev blog 2. Dev blog 2 has ZERO dragging, they talk about repositioning a stab to hit the head, which is a normal use-case of the real time strike system taken from chivalry. I can't show alternatives due to NDA
i played a few hundred hours of chiv as a kid casually, and ive played 250 hours of mordhau the same way. dragging is always frustrating to me because it feels like you cant ever tell if youre going to be insta acceld or not. i really like the chamber mechanic and i think its fun to use and makes the fights more interesting but you basically cant chamber a drag. i dont see why people are defending dragging since as far as im aware they put the turn caps into the game specifically to stop being able to spin around like a top????? unless im wrong idk. i really like playing mordhau as a side game but dueling ppl that fling their mouse everywhere and then drag its just annoying. it can be a skill issue and thats fine but regardless its just not fun. i can read people spamming feints and can usually tell if i will be acceld but im not good enough to fight drag mixups. it doesnt seem like you can do much against them because you cant chamber them.
14:30 he hit the nail on the fucking head here. Most ppl who play video games are shitters with a bad mentality lets be honest. Even if slow sword hacking is removed from mordhau, they will find something else to point their finger at.
what do they point at in csgo?
@@Stouty cheats
Just because they will focus their attention on something else is no reason not to remove a mechanic if it's bad.
@Stouty Bad teamates, AWPs, bad map design, camping, RNG spray patterns (from the top of my head)
My point is that bending over for ppl who unironically complain about "s-slow sword hacks!!" wont and will never do any good for the game. Drags are the perfect strawman for people with a bad mentality to deflect the blame away when they lose. Also dontnget the wrong idea. Im not saying that drags are or arent an exploit. If anything I agree with you here. The devs knew it would be impossible to prevent drags from existing so they relunctantly added em into the tutorial but not trailers. Still swing manip is an integral part of this game no matter how exploit-ish they are.
@@hardboiled2987 OK but they still play CSGO
Why does every competetive game I like has to end up like that
I'd like to see a Mordhau mod or high level match where drags are "disabled", cuz I'd love to understand your position but I can't imagine what this game would look like without drags...
What exactly do people think "looks bad" about dragging?
see my first vid, melee's dirty secret
Long comment warning - don't want to make another voice over.
"Mentioning how fighting game players have to make content proves my point here" - Although it's quite well known that content creation can be more comfortable, easier and lucrative than being a professional player. Not to mention that only small subset of CSGO pros can actually make a decent living from competition alone. Also CSGO teams are notoriously poor investments(due in part to inflated salaries) and generally only exist due to the prestige of Counter-Strike. Same could be said for a subset of fighting game players, there are a handful that are capable of supporting themselves by their winnings.
Flashbang example - I should have clarified that this was to illustrate how "pop flashes" exist in CSGO when in Valorant there are characters who can simply deploy these sort of unreactable flashes without prior set up or understanding of geometry of the map/knowledge of how flashes operate.
Realism - I didn't include the full comment because I recorded the audio twice and it kept going too long. But my point is that while you could say accels are more "realistic" as F=MA you could argue that dragging abstracts some form of "stuttered" or "semi-feinted" strike (think delayed penalty kick in football). My point wasn't necessarily to argue that your specific reasoning was wrong (hence why I didn't tie it specifically to dragging) but mostly that realism is a fickle argument and personally I don't find it compelling from a game design perspective. That's why I use tarkov to illustrate that designing something to be "realistic" can actually make it less immersive/intuitive.
Ultimately this discussion revolves around the concept of "emergent gameplay". Emergent gameplay being gameplay strategies that come about from player exploration, and may or may not have been anticipated by the game designers. Stuff like "bhopping" (which I find a much better example of an "exploit" then boosting which is arguably fairly realistic (soliders hoist each other IRL all the time)), wavedashing, some combos in fighting games, potentially dragging. Emergent gameplay yes isn't as intuitive or potentially supportive of new players, but I personally find these "exploits" to be defining characteristics in some games, and losing them for the sake of "clarity" or "mainstream appeal" doesn't seem worth it to me.
Dragging might be bad, but I think rather than removing it for Mordhau, it should just be removed from the game you are helping create. If you can create a competitor in the genre, and it doesn't have dragging and it is more fun you will have proven your point. But I don't think removing an element of the game for the potential audience of a 5+ year old game makes any sense. While the genre hasn't taken the #1 spot, Mordhau is a success by almost any metric. From a game development perspective it's a niche title that generated a BOATLOAD of cash, ANY developer would consider it a success, regardless of it's twitch standing.
Cool beans m8 good vid, still not convinced personally but if I can experience a drag free game I'd happily be proven wrong.
Top tier CS pros dwarf the top tier fighting game pros
Realism - that is more akin to a feint than it is a drag, dragging in football would be like slowing down the ball in mid air after belting it (impossible)
Emergent gameplay - like I said, if you like it, you already have it (but it ain't popular)
This debate was never about what should happen to Mordhau, as the devs stopped caring a long time ago
thanks for the debate
Mordhau is more similar to Chivalry than Chivalry 2. That's how alike they are.
Most other mechanics morphs, feints, chambers, (clashes?) and ripostes (implicitly from parry) have a stamina cost associated with them.
Dragging comes down to swing and see what happens. Zero investment and huge reward, even if your opponent reads the drag they gain nothing.
why did he mention tarkov when the game has team indicators
Mordhau will just go same way as chiv if they can't fix exploitative combat
as an okay player, i think the biggest problem with mordhaus community is the closed mindedness. The only fun had nowadays is mostly just strictly RPing, or trying to break the game as much as possible. The combat in mordhau is not fun for new players, and its only fun to try and improve, at which point most hit a ceiling unless you play the game for thousands of hours. despite this, most of the current "playerbase" accept dragging because its a fundamental mechanic of mordhau, when this discussion is not about mordhau, its about first person melee.
rp gang
Can't say I enjoy feints too much more, but they are certainly more understandable, since I started playing on release I thought of drags as a complete wreck, imagine stopping all momentum in a swing, yet dealing the same damage. Personally, I alone could think of ways to incorporate it as a proper mechanic to serve both realism or fun. I'd guess anyone smart could do so much better.
Great video Stouty! Time for a dragging buff
lmao
@scraatch was still on my laptop xd
The thing is, completely taking a mechanic away like dragging I feel just leaves the player with less options with no alternative to replace it. Without dragging, what I see is an inevitable stam war almost every single duel, as dragging is another tool that allows the user to trick their opponent into making a mistake. Feinting is the most hard read mechanic in the game, so as time goes on in this world where dragging doesn't exist anymore, I feel like feinting will become less powerful with the removal of dragging to the point where landing an attack can be much harder largely because a major tool has completely been stripped from the game. You could say that this is a good thing for the game, but I'm not sure about that myself.
Also on the point that dragging is a deterrent for new players because it's ugly is an opinionated statement in my opinion, I could argue that a lot of drags can be beautiful if done right, might not be realistic looking, but that's a different point. When I was new to the game, (still relatively new compared to the vets as of now) I saw dragging as something that was skillful that added to the skill level of the game, it was frustrating to a degree at first I will admit, but it also motivated me to learn it at the same time. At around level 80-90 I saw myself being able to beat way higher levels than me and it motivated me that I was able to do this despite coming into mordhau late, if you are a competitive player losing shouldn't demotivate you, it should motivate you to try to get better, and dragging shouldn't either in my opinion.
The point on the fact that dragging is killing the game is a good point, but I'm also questioning if that is the biggest reason for players quitting the game, it could be a number of reasons that ultimately conclude that the game was just too hard for them, or whatever reason they had. You can't really know for sure the reason that players quit the game other than testimony from people which are valid ways to conclude the reason but it shouldn't be taken as fact as it's a hard thing to know for sure unless you ask at least most of the players who quit the game.
I will say that dragging should be tuned in certain ways, the exaggerated drags are really stupid in my opinion and should be removed, but dragging entirely? I personally believe not.
Well said nick
'as time goes on'... time has already went on. very entitled view of the game from players that just farmed their first 250+ hours in duel servers.
1. Having more options isn't necessarily good, e.g. it's not necessarily good I have the option to shoot people in PH duelyard at random rather than play properly
2. We have thousands of steam reviews to point to dragging being a main cause for leaving the genre
@@Stouty But having that said tool like I said makes feinting stronger and thus makes the overall fights more diverse and harder in general. All these tools we have add to each other in tandem to make each other stronger, taking a crucial tool makes the whole thing weaker.
@@nickdiaz4837 feinting doesn't need dragging what you said here doesn't make sense (unless you mean dragging to counter chambers but of course a game without dragging would need a complete rework)
14:55 Global Elite (Wingman) in action
hello
@@kontroLau hi
yung gun slanga ..
Naturally though its a video game, so increased realism often leads to worse playability. I feel feints are worse because when I was new to mordhau feints looked stupid and unrealistic, and if you're looking for realistic medieval combat, feints wont be there either because real knights didn't have a parry window they had to time correctly, being punished with lockouts from everything except for moving should they mistime it. Drags also look weird and aren't good, that argument can't be denied, but I agree with the fella arguing against you, where I feel that being hit by a drag is less offputting than being hit cause someone feints five times.
On a side note, why go to hunt? not a clever move in my experience lol.
feints look nowhere near as bad as the average drag but yes there is also room for improvement with feinting
True, "looked" was the wrong word for me to use, as a big drag or a wessex are some of the dumbest fucking things I've ever seen. The concept more is what gets to me, because if realism is the goal, faking a swing serves no purpose and in reality would most likely just put you off balance and on the backfoot (if using a two handed / polearm). With smaller and faster weapons it makes sense more, but I dont feel they should be viable in realistic games (again, viable with two handed or polearm weapons that is).
@@hekinhekhek603 feinting is a thing in HEMA
@@Stouty I guess then does it see similar use and effectiveness? I cant imagine seeing an actual knight do some of the shit I've seen in mordhau
Stouty is on that grind set ngl.
the combat needs to be momentum based with full physics on the player and the weapons, the weapons need a Center of Percussion,
what about people who complain about gambling when you successfully read their feints and punish them
probably cos they're not even aware that punishing is possible lol, even elite 5 player hatchet thinks it's a myth