Floaty combat

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Now before I go any further, a disclaimer. I play mainly SP and couldn't care less about multiplayer (I'll go so far as to say it is detremental to the games overall quality)

With that out of the way, watching some videos of combat, the one thing that always felt off and kind jumps out at me even more now, (as the game look more immersive with better graphics) is how there is no momentum to player movement.
If you look at MP combat, everyone is constanlty moving around like a headles chicken, changing direction instantly. No one fights like that in RL, primarily because you can't change movement instantly.

Adding momentum, a slowdown when changing movement direction would fix that and make combat less spastic looking.
 
Haha, it really looks like a headless chicken fight, I agree with this analogy. I have played the beta for many hours. Even though it is quite fun, the movement mechanics in a fight do not seem realistic, as you stated. In fact, you don't actually realize it unless you watch some combat videos.
 
This was apparent in the early videos, and has never been addressed. You can't hit a target easily at medium range because the NPCs keep changing direction instantly, back and forth, and that was already obvious at times in Warband. It looks even worse in Bannerlord. There is zero "momentum". The NPC that's backing away from you suddenly switches, without slowing first, to charging forward and clips THROUGH you to get behind you. The term "swivel-hips" has been used to describe the instant change of direction without pivoting the upper body, although the problem clearly isn't limited to that, since it can make instant changes with or without pivoting the body to match the legs.
 
Now before I go any further, a disclaimer. I play mainly SP and couldn't care less about multiplayer (I'll go so far as to say it is detremental to the games overall quality)

With that out of the way, watching some videos of combat, the one thing that always felt off and kind jumps out at me even more now, (as the game look more immersive with better graphics) is how there is no momentum to player movement.
If you look at MP combat, everyone is constanlty moving around like a headles chicken, changing direction instantly. No one fights like that in RL, primarily because you can't change movement instantly.

Adding momentum, a slowdown when changing movement direction would fix that and make combat less spastic looking.

what you say is not entirely correct.
The variation in the momentum of an object of mass M moving at speed M is all the more rapid the greater the force applied to the center of mass of that object.
This means that if the force expressed by these men's legs is large enough, the change in the direction of their speed can occur in a very short time.
if P is momentum and F the force.
d / dt P = F
in finite values:
DP / DT = F
therefore DT = DP / F
note that once DP has been set, the time needed to pass from initial P to final P is reduced with an increase in F.

Rather I think that the "chicken effect" is not due to the speed with which the momentum passes from one value to another, but mostly from the animations that fail to make this effect evident.

If, for example, at a sudden movement in the opposite direction there was an animation that made evident the effort of the legs and the displacement of the center of gravity of the body in order to "push with the legs" in the opposite direction, then the "chicken effect" would be less obvious.

It is a problem of animations that do not reflect dynamics more than dynamics per se.
 
There is a fundamental problem with trying to make player animations look good, which is that people react to a turn or movement before it has actually happened, but in a game the players want to be able to react instantly. You can never tell the computer that a player is about to make a movement before it has actually happened. You can barely even do this with the AI. So you get jolty movements as the animation system is trying to keep up with the player inputs.

As an example, imagine you have to make a sharp turn while running. Before you actually stop your legs are scrambling around and your whole body starts to lean back. By the time you're at a complete stop you might have been doing this for about a second. There simply isn't a way to have responsive movement without delaying player inputs for that entire second while the slowing down animation finishes.
In multiplayer it's just something you have to accept.
 
The game already has a fairly long buildup or decrease of speed for a player-ridden horse, and turns while moving aren't instantaneous by any means. The player character and the NPCs should have a rate at which they speed up, slow down, or change direction. The player is still limited by mouse, keyboard, or controller movement, so they can't pivot 180 degrees almost instantly. The NPCs can, and do.
 
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