in the warband beta, we had a new game to play every 2 weeks with the patch. So many good mechanics were added to fix oddities in that time period and make the combat we have now. They listened to and responded greatly to player feedback. I wouldn't have any worry about them ignoring people, imho they simply haven't gotten there yet.
Oh also when they say parry, I THINK they are referring to a mechanic that was in beta a few patches, where if you tap right click instead of holding it you got this sort of swap away animation that was supposed to act differently than a standard block. My issue with it was that you usually tap block anyway and don't hold down so it ended up being the default method of defense rather than skill based.
Wotr, vikings, chivalry, and kingdoms rise, all have lessons to offer and learn from. Probably melee battlegrounds when/if that comes out and also crpg (though i haven't played it in its latest iterations).
For example, I used to think that held strikes working like they do in warband, but having a longer charge time, would add a lot to the combat, then I played vikings for a moment and saw that it just completely obliterates any chance of confusing someone's block direction because you have to hold the weapon out for so long in one direction, its comically easy to block. In order for that to work you would have to add another mechanic like charging up your blocks as well or something.
Wotr had some interesting ideas but unfortunately the engine execution of it was so bad that it was impossible to judge if the mechanics were good or not! They did get sprinting right and do a version of warbands. I remember arguing for it on the forums with them. In alpha they had a sprint hot key and a recharging sprint meter. I know some people are doing a fist pump of YES, THIS IS THE WAY, but in practice you ended up jousting with other players, hold sprint, hold a direction attack and run at them while attacking and you basically play the game every half second like you have a speed boost power up going all the time. It really broke things.
The gears of war rodeo run might work out, but I like the way they have it now a lot, it keeps sprint as something you might enter combat with once to alter things a little bit, but doesn't make the game into a dark souls dodge roll fest or a ww2 boom and zoom dogfight.
In my mind good melee was about controlling your space and range, which is another thing added in the warband beta. At first you could advance much faster than you could go backwards, this resulted in only allowing you to control your space going forward. People argued about it endlessly, but they left us with a really fast backspeed, and yes it does allow backpedaling shenanigans, but it also lets you better control your space around you and had added a lot to the game.
Chivalry had no weapon sweet spots, another feature added in the warband beta. They had issues with this (as I told the guy in alpha, to be dismissed... again) where when players discovered they could do full damage at the immediate start of their weapon animations. This was compounded by the fact that when looking down the player model's torso bends forwards and down too, making overhead attacks basically start inside other players models, giving them instant and fatal attacks with no chance to defend yourself.
Another issue I had with chivalry was not using full hit interrupts. In chiv you could only interrupt another player if you hit them during their start up animation, which was very short. This was an intentionally design choice by the creator and I can respect it for that, he wanted his one handed weapons to be able to swing faster than the two handed ones. With full interrupts the very fast weapons could constantly poke a slower weapon user and prevent them from ever swinging.
What I didn't like about it was as a 2 handed user I could then effectively ignore what my opponent was doing. If dueling a person you could simply health tank them, I know they had less health than me, so all I had to do was just swing at them while taking damage and eventually kill them. In warband I love the race to first touch and being able to judge and confuse attack priority is a pretty amazing dance that was missing from chivalry. (Though as in beta we will see people angry about 2h and 1h swing speed)
Wotr did do the weapon head and shaft alternative damage on some weapons. I thought at first this was a novel idea, but the risk/reward of the difficulty of doing damage was way off. Again, hit and collision were the big issues with wotr so it might have been the net code, but it was pretty hard to find the right range for damage. I always had the thought too that if this were real life i could pull or extend my arms to get the axe head on target rather than swing like a robot the same way every time. That is hard to control/animate so it makes sense to extend the hitbox down the shaft a bit.
I think it could be an interesting mechanic, just would need a lot of testing and good hit collision, maybe. I think it would be something more interesting on polearms only though.
For my own suggestions, I wish they could come up with a way to reduce feint spam, like the modern pro feint spam. I remember playing around with it and concluding that it's really hard to do effectively and a great skill but it made the game into something I didn't want to look at. I honestly don't know how to correct it though unless you introduce some heavy block lag in the animation department, which would break some fundamentals, but maybe there is a solution out there, or just something we have to live with.
A more subtle suggestion would be to add an interrupt when you bump into someone that has been holding their attack for a few seconds. There was always a weird stalemate when someone has their weapon held chambered and your weapon is in the block position, you both kinda have to stand there until the attacker lets go of his attack. You can sorta slip away or twitch your block to force an attack but it is still a sort of awkward stalemate.
I'd love to see a ton of improvements to mounted combat, I'm really excited if they can do a lot there as I feel it is a really unexplored area of combat that could do with a lot of change or new mechanics.
I think deep down for on foot combat I think different attack stances for different weapon types would be the biggest change to combat that would keep the combat as excellent as it is now while introducing a ton of variety and new angles to discover.
Also more love for shield use, a way to make it more actively interesting. It should still be easy to use but perhaps have some benefits for direction blocking (like was attempted to add more durability to your shield when direction blocked).
Anyway, I know tl;dr post, but if you read this part its that taleworlds came up with all the mechanics that actually made this melee game as good as it is, and were open to experiments and player feedback in their open beta of warband. I have no doubt when they turn their focus on bannerlord combat they will pick up where they left off.
