Having played the single player it's really highlighted some of the big problems in the multiplayer part of the game. Armour is just totally busted vs 1 handed weapons. You get stuck in a tournament vs a hero unit with decent armour and all you have is a 1 handed wet noodle doing 2 damage per swing. How does this translate to MP? Well instead of in Warband where not only is armour considerably less effective but where you can only unlock it after several successful rounds, players can now spawn in high tier armour in the first round (and often multiple times a round). Having to hit people 50 times with a 1h weapon is not fun at all, especially considering how much more awkward it's been made having to hit the sweet spots.
Axes are total dross. They seem to barely effect shields, even when using a 2h axe it takes an insane length of time to break them. The shields are incredibly tough which doesn't really make up for the fact that they cover half of your body and archers can just foot shot you with impunity.
The class system is poor. We've said it in alpha, we said it in beta and it seems a common theme in early access. It's fixed absolutely nothing it set out to fix. We've got perks instead of an equipment system. What do the perks do? Add different equipment, except there's no real meaningful tradeoff as it's pretty much a binary choice if you want a spear and a shield (If you're playing vs anyone good then you cannot play without these). Skirmish is a fundamentally flawed and uncompetitive game mode which builds no excitement and often ends in utterly drab fashion mid-fight. Add on top of that the fact that Archers and Cavalry can now spawn first round with massive suits of armour and polearms and the solution to snowballing you've created is just making the annoying stuff happen from round 1. Snowballing was never as big a deal as was made out, you only need to look at the apex of Warband multiplayer to see that isn't the case. The final of Warband Native League took place on the weekend and a fully armoured up Swadia deathball got merked by round 1 equipment vaegirs. This has failed to fix a non-existent problem and more than that has made it 10x worse.
Siege is fun enough for what it is. It does a good job of masking many of the combat's problems because of its chaotic nature.
I've got no idea why the game was released before we had the ability to test the combat properly in a duel mode. The movement is somewhat improved but the blocking is still "stance based" and therefor unresponsive at times and the ability to clutch block vs multiple opponents has been removed. This is another element of skillbased fighting removed from the franchise.
There's been a couple of moves in the right direction but we're in dire need of custom servers for proper testing.
Axes are total dross. They seem to barely effect shields, even when using a 2h axe it takes an insane length of time to break them. The shields are incredibly tough which doesn't really make up for the fact that they cover half of your body and archers can just foot shot you with impunity.
The class system is poor. We've said it in alpha, we said it in beta and it seems a common theme in early access. It's fixed absolutely nothing it set out to fix. We've got perks instead of an equipment system. What do the perks do? Add different equipment, except there's no real meaningful tradeoff as it's pretty much a binary choice if you want a spear and a shield (If you're playing vs anyone good then you cannot play without these). Skirmish is a fundamentally flawed and uncompetitive game mode which builds no excitement and often ends in utterly drab fashion mid-fight. Add on top of that the fact that Archers and Cavalry can now spawn first round with massive suits of armour and polearms and the solution to snowballing you've created is just making the annoying stuff happen from round 1. Snowballing was never as big a deal as was made out, you only need to look at the apex of Warband multiplayer to see that isn't the case. The final of Warband Native League took place on the weekend and a fully armoured up Swadia deathball got merked by round 1 equipment vaegirs. This has failed to fix a non-existent problem and more than that has made it 10x worse.
Siege is fun enough for what it is. It does a good job of masking many of the combat's problems because of its chaotic nature.
I've got no idea why the game was released before we had the ability to test the combat properly in a duel mode. The movement is somewhat improved but the blocking is still "stance based" and therefor unresponsive at times and the ability to clutch block vs multiple opponents has been removed. This is another element of skillbased fighting removed from the franchise.
There's been a couple of moves in the right direction but we're in dire need of custom servers for proper testing.
