Melee: Battlegrounds Kickstarter (by cRPG devs) - UPDATED THREAD!

[glustrod]

The other way around: the old is now redundant

seriously 1) I hoped this would stay longer in General Discussion, I really think Bannerlord profits from this being successful 2) That the game has been announced on Kickstarter and needs your support deserves it's own thread.

 

[YourStepDad]

Woah, Zimke is working on this.

Looks hella good. Though I'm not too keen on some animations, while others look quite fancy. I guess it's a result of it being WIP.

 

[Meevar the Mighty]

Yeah, they were considered ready for Kickstarter, but a long way to go. You can see at the bottom of the page that animations are the biggest thing that they still have to work out.

The biggest challenge we are facing is to get the animations right. The animations you can see now are what we consider roughly 50% of the quality that we are aiming for - for that, we need to iterate them over and over again.

The difference to, for example, a first-person shooter is that the animations matter a lot more. Not only do they define where and how you get hit, they also define how far your swings are, how fast etc.

The quality of the animations makes or breaks the game, which is why a large focus will be directed towards that.

 

[Lezard]

Will up my pledge to Squire pack since I am a gentleman and a scholar.

 

[Kawee]

The second you go to Kickstarter, you have to make your product mass-appeal. That means you need to be media-savvy. Get the social media and the bloggers and what not to talk about you. Spread the word. If you're just going to raise money from within the community, it makes no sense.

cRPG could do it, if there is enough mass-appeal in their games, which given the gap of information in the gaming industry, there most certainly is a possibility. For example, many people still think War of the Rose is a one of a kind game, which they're partially correct, if they mean it's the worst game of the genre. There is a market for action RPG, and most of it is outside the M&B community,.

 

[SgtTeeh]

I feel like the combat as it stands looks like the sluggish, War of the Roses combat and less fast and fluid like MB.

One does not simply build a good combat system in a day. Mount & Blade took ages before it reached the quality of Warband's system now. It requires tweaking, tweaking and more tweaking. The current combat system is obviously basic but playable, I have played it and I assure you it beats War of the Roses already. However, the last half year they have mostly worked on the engine and creating a game that is in its entirety somewhat visually passable for the Kickstarter. They now have the groundwork for the entire game half finished, with nothing having received any of the polish of the tweaking that they will have the opportunity to do before a release in late 2015. According to chadz they are going to fully focus on making the combat good and go way past 'playable' in the next 3-5 months for an alpha release.

Just wanted to make the point as I suspect many in this community will immediately draw a comparison to the quality of the combat in Warband, while you should keep in mind that this game is just past its infancy, which is why it needs the Kickstarter in the first place.

 

[Mr.Milker]

You know, I quite like this. It's not like WotR, where some studio made a ripoff MtB-like game for backstabbing Paradox. This is modders who've been on here for a long time, who know the game they love.

Ideally this would focus on MP and Bannerlord would focus on SP. Anyway, variety is always good.

 

[Siegbert_von_Meklenburg]

I have played it and I assure you it beats War of the Roses already.

I concur. It plays nearly exactly like Warband besides sluggish animations which are clearly being worked on.

 

[Byrdi]

That is a game based on M&B game engine, just like .. I don't remember, there was a game about ships. Lol

They build their own engine from scratch:

What you can see in the video is our own, homemade engine. It was specifically designed and is still being optimized to do exactly what we need: large medieval battles. Due to the close proximity nature of Melee combat, we have found ways to optimize the netcode so it supports more than 200 players on one server

 

[Úlfheðinn]

@SgtTeeth

Yeah, that's a good point. Even Warband had some polishing to do in Beta and that was a game based on an already existing engine and tested combat system.

Frankly, given the things the devs managed with cRPG, I'm interested in seeing what the devs can do with an engine of their own design.

Either way it will only help M&B if there are other games in the genre that are of a similar depth and quality (so not WotR).

 

[YourStepDad]

I was never keen on cRPG and it's system, but that's mainly because everything felt like a masquerade rather than two cohesive armies of uniformity to at least SOME degree, but dang, this even has Zimke working on it. 

I must say it looks very promising, the only great downside to it all that I see are the animations and those are bound to get ironed out. Definitely getting this eventually.

 

[Heskeytime]

@SgtTeeth

Yeah, that's a good point. Even Warband had some polishing to do in Beta and that was a game based on an already existing engine and tested combat system.

Frankly, given the things the devs managed with cRPG, I'm interested in seeing what the devs can do with an engine of their own design.

Either way it will only help M&B if there are other games in the genre that are of a similar depth and quality (so not WotR).

^ agree x100, as gamers who (presumably) all liked Warband and were excited to play it, we want as much competition as possible to keep the top dogs innovative. I've certainly been disappointed every other time a game claims to be inspired by Mount & Blade but then deliver something that appears to totally miss the point of what made Warband so special.

Not only will it keep them innovative but it gives us the freedom to choose. If you wanted a First Person Shooter as a consumer you have so much choice, if the new COD or Halo is a disappointment you have other avenues or games with similar or subjectively better mechanics to play, whereas if Bannerlord is a let-down i suspect that many of us would just play it anyway or return to Warband, because the market is still lacking anything with combat even remotely as good as Warband.

To me that's the distinction, Melee Battlegrounds is only Warband in the same logic as every First Person Shooter is COD. The engine is entirely new, and fortunately you cant copyright a whole genre otherwise we'd be stuck with very few games to choose from.

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

[me=Pharaoh X Llandy]casts Merge Topics[/me]

No point having two of them when I can just mash 'em together into one super-topic.

 

[Heskeytime]

[me=Pharaoh X Llandy]casts Merge Topics[/me]

No point having two of them when I can just mash 'em together into one super-topic.

If only we could find the person who made the first post to get them to update it rather than the OP being a link to an extremely out-of-date page with the actual current topic being roughly 4 pages in xD i suspect that was the point of the new topic

 

[Madhal]

Looks good. Best wishes...

 

[glustrod]

If only we could find the person who made the first post to get them to update it rather than the OP being a link to an extremely out-of-date page with the actual current topic being roughly 4 pages in xD i suspect that was the point of the new topic

yup, makes absolutely no sense right now, with the title from my topic but no link to the kickstarter page or the video...

 

[Úlfheðinn]

A mod or admin can just edit the op...


Edit: I've pmed a global moderator about updating the OP, so please stop making new threads.

I know we all want the game to get attention and we are all excited, but on these forums it's a rule not to make new threads unless it is absolutely necessary (i.e. there isn't a thread that covers the game, topic, etc.) and users are expected to respect this.

Edit 2: Original post has been updated. 

 

[Temuzu]

[me=Pharaoh X Llandy]casts Merge Topics[/me]

No point having two of them when I can just mash 'em together into one super-topic.

If only we could find the person who made the first post to get them to update it rather than the OP being a link to an extremely out-of-date page with the actual current topic being roughly 4 pages in xD i suspect that was the point of the new topic

Make me xD

 

[Banok]

's gona b gud!

I was already hoping bonerlord would be campaign focused, rather than multiplayer anyway. Co-op campaign and miles better AI is all I really want from taleworlds.

 

[Reapy]

Well backed it!

Looks interesting enough. They have done some good things with cRPG over the years I think and stuck to it, which I think is a good enough demonstration of work ethic such that they will complete and deliver something playable. cRPG might have started out a bit lopsided with big problems, but I think it sort of morphed into something good, though I haven't played it in forever, and that is another +1 for the devs to be able to recognize problems in their gameplay and correct it.

I'm not sure i'm sold on 360 combat, but may be interesting. I am going to guess they will use the same idea kingdom's rise was going for with how close you were to the swing direction will determine the 'level' of the block, the imperfect, perfect, and fail.

It seems interesting on the surface, but I wonder when players manage to perfectly align their blocks (in the video they said players wouldn't, which I don't believe, players they will, we are all nuts)  if the game will give enough tools to fool people. I'd hate it to just be a stamina bar that determines it rather than actual player input failure.

I also remember when a lot of m&b servers switched to 100+ player counts the smooth gameplay I remember disappeared because of server lag. It was playable, but felt a bit sluggish and unresponsive at times. The game worked 'fine' but wasn't 'great'. I hope they are able to test their servers and combat under this kind of load in alpha/beta to ensure the combat feels right.

Anyway, I like the competition here, something for taleworlds to think about for real, and hopefully both can learn from one another so we have more and more great medieval melee games.