I do like that style of combat, where you have to block and strike from specific angles for the best results. War of the Roses had a similar system but it was pretty clunky.

Equally though it would be nice to see people being able to fight as blocks of men when armies come together, rather than just a clusterfuck of people duelling each other. Will have to leave that to Caspian and the team on how to achieve that. :)

Also the Samurai slashing at the knight would do nothing IRL, really hoping that in CoE slashing attacks with a sword are next to useless against an armoured opponent.

I'm going to move this to General Discussion as it doesn't need to be here in EA.

Yeah I agree that a samurai slash to armor like that would be ineffective especially on the head on strong parts but even with CoE I wonder how they are going to do third person and have targeting for weak points in armor and lethal blows. In FH you are third person so they use a soft target system which is why samurai are allowed to do that to knights. You can't target weak or exposed spots so instead they just increase the knights health pool for balance.

I am excited to see how CoE does it or if they will use the FH and just increase health pools. I prefer the former but they gotta do what they gotta do.

From the duels we saw at PAX it looks like CoE might head down a similar path. But as we have skill trees etc perhaps the more you train the more likely your character will automatically thrust at a weak point rather at their body in general.

So you could have two players of the exact same skill, but if one of the characters has trained in combat its whole life and they have an armoured duel then it will naturally thrust towards weak points, whereas the untrained character will just thrust and hit weak points by chance.

That way it still comes down to player skill, you still need to be commanding the character to attack from a certain direction using a certain 'style' of combat, but training the character means it'll help a lot when it comes to high-skill fights.

That or just take a massive polearm... ;)

I like For Honor's combat but I don't think that is the direction they (SbS) are headed with the combat.

Tbh I'm not too fussed however it turns out, as long as it's realistic.

The only thing I dislike about it so far, from what we saw at PAX, were that some of the attacks left lines of glowing light in the air when they power attack and stuff. I think I wouldn't have backed the game if I'd seen that before pledging, but I can live with it now. :P The game can't be exactly as we all want.

Posted By Barghest at 08:42 AM - Mon Dec 19 2016

Tbh I'm not too fussed however it turns out, as long as it's realistic.

The only thing I dislike about it so far, from what we saw at PAX, were that some of the attacks left lines of glowing light in the air when they power attack and stuff. I think I wouldn't have backed the game if I'd seen that before pledging, but I can live with it now. :P The game can't be exactly as we all want.

Maybe the could replace the glowing light on parries with a sword clashing spark and power attacks with like a wind slashing on the attack animation. That way the aesthetic feel of them are still there but they are inline with the game and don't break immersion as bad.

A lot of what makes For Honor's combat look so good is the animation quality. They use a technique called Motion Matching where the system interprets what the player's inputs, then pulls the most appropriate frames from a backlog of uncut mocap data. The end result is game that looks buttery smooth in motion. Some more details on that in this thread: https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/16108/i-found-some-great-animation-tech

As for it's relation to CoE, I'm not entirely sure if that's where they want to take the combat system. I haven't read anything specific about how they plan to tackle it, but I imagine fights would have to last a little longer, since death has real consequences in this game,

Well that video linked by the OP looked like it was on console using a gamepad, how would that combat style be achieved with keyboard and mouse when many keys will be for other things? cos keep in mind with the pad your left thumb is used to move about, all your fingers are all free to push whatever buttons you need and for that particular game one thumb is used to choose the direction of the attack to determine the attack and buttons determine if it's light or heavy, with the keyboard and mouse it's not quite as easy, especially if your mouse isn't a gaming mouse with multiple buttons. Your left hand is stuck mainly with directioning and the odd other button and your right hand is stuck on the mouse for looking about and attacking. IMO, CoE will have a system whereby you can choose certain types of attack moves and queue them up into a unique attack style and you can attach that attack style to whatever button you want be it a keyboard button or mouse button, so you might have 2 or 3 buttons that launch a custom attack movement. SO as an example, you might make it so your left mouse button performs an upwards heavy attack, or you might decide to set it to do a left to right quick slash, then the right mouse button might be set to do a stabbing move.

Posted By SoulSpark at 6:27 PM - Sat Jan 14 2017

Well that video linked by the OP looked like it was on console using a gamepad, how would that combat style be achieved with keyboard and mouse when many keys will be for other things?

I played in the NDA removed tests and it worked well with mouse and keyboard. It was kinda you're typical Mount and Blade but more weighty and buttons in places I forget to use. I believe holding shift was your left trigger and your Q and E were you cancels and tackle/grapple respectively.

All they have to do for a good and exciting pvp combat system is to be able to strike three ways and block three ways , left ,right and middle . Add parry timers (for a "perfect" block) that if done correctly can be followed up by an extra quick parry counter attack , and also have regular blocks that can be done by blocking in the correct direction of an incoming swing , but unlike a parry it will only block damage and not provide a quick counter attack .

This is all combat pulled from Mortal Online and it's an extremely addictive and simplistic combat mechanism that can work in any game with swords , but it works better in first person to be honest but can still work in third person .

Devs should look at modeling combat system after mortal onlines .

Posted By Barghest at 08:07 AM - Mon Dec 19 2016

Equally though it would be nice to see people being able to fight as blocks of men when armies come together, rather than just a clusterfuck of people duelling each other. Will have to leave that to Caspian and the team on how to achieve that. :)

Life is feudal tried something like that. They had formation buffs that applied to anyone within the proper formation. However, I'm not entirely sure how well it played out, since I've never played it. M&B has communities around the concept of formation fighting, but I've never thought them more efficient than clusterfuck dueling.

I would love to see massive, organic formation fights in CoE, but I'm not sure it will ever be the most efficient form of combat in the game. I would love to hear some ideas though. NPC blobs perhaps?