November 19th, a new indie game development studio, Donkey Crew, launched a Kickstarter campaign for PC game "Melee: Battlegrounds" - the spiritual successor to the popular Mount & Blade Warband mod cRPG. MBG is a First and Third Person view Medieval Action-RPG with strategy elements such as real time base building and social interaction including property ownership.
Meet hundreds of other players on epic medieval battlegrounds. Control your warrior in Third or First Person View, battling it out in a reaction-based combat system. Various game modes for different playstyles ensure that there's something for you: duel, round-based teambattles, castle assault, competitions and a huge sandbox where both teams build castles on the fly and conquer those to seize territory control.
- Medieval combat - The combat is intense, direct and personal. Every player brings their own style to the battlefield. Try to anticipate your foes’ actions – outmaneuver, outplay or outsmart them! The 360° attack/block system makes combat easy to learn, but impossible to master - there will always be something new to learn.
- Customize your character - There are no perfect weapons - you will have to figure out which one fits your playstyle the most. There are no predefined classes - pick whichever combination keeps you above ground and your foes six feet under.
- Upgrade your skills - Earn experience on the Battlegrounds. Unlock skills that allow you to enhance your fighting style and give you an advantage in combat. Use a clever combination of skills to strengthen your playstyle.
- Build Castles - Construct your own fortifications and castles with your team. Make sure you allocate your resources wisely, because building is only half of the fun...
- Use Siege Engines - The other half is wrecking them again. Take full control over Catapults, Trebuchets, Battering Rams, Siege Shields, Siege Towers, Ladders, Ballistas, Tunneling and a few crazy things you’ve probably never seen before. They sure were creative back then to get from point A to point B, especially with point B being walled in.
- Experience Massive Battles - The game can feature battles with over 200 players fighting against each other at the same time. Are you a lone wolf, or will you use the advantage of working as a team?
- Fight, Die, Learn - You will die – a lot. It’s part of the experience, so get used to it. A few of you may be gifted, but most will have to practice to become a renowned Battleground Warrior.
The bread and butter of Melee is combat. It's our number one priority – if the combat isn't good the game isn't good, and we want the game to be awesome!
First of all, physics! We've based the entire hit detection system on physics allowing for a very natural combat system where weapons can connect at any time during a swing.
The combat is very intuitive – easy to comprehend, but hard to master. You control your input with your mouse: flick to the right and your attack would go to the right, flick lower left and you'd perform a move at that angle. This is true for all 360 degrees. We believe this provides a very natural and fluid feel to the combat, and gives the player unrestricted freedom of movement.
Apart from that there will be many special moves to surprise your enemy – kick, nudge and shieldbash, to name a few and they all come with specific strengths and weaknesses.
The learning curve for using weapons can be compared to handling rifles in a first person shooter: aiming at someone is easy, but compensating for recoil and crosshair placement on a moving target is difficult. For melee weapons, it’s the same: you can just swing randomly at the enemy, but they may swiftly outplay you like that. Use timing, surprise them, quickly change your attack angle – you need to break their defense while maintaining your own.
However, being good at melee is not the only skill needed in combat; movement is key, awareness is key, and knowledge is key. When you are fighting alone against two foes, you can either let them surround you – or use one of them as cover against the other. That is just one of many examples, reading the battleground and understanding the dynamics of the situation is what keeps you alive.
Also, there are more ways to fight on the battlefield than simply wielding a sword.
Team work is not just a buzzword for us, it is a fundamental part of the game. No matter how good you are at fighting, you will need to work with your team to survive. We want to promote that in every fashion. You can form groups within a server which enables options for performing various commands such as formations, directed by the group leader, to enhance teamplay by creating features where two or more players can work together.
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.
Minimum requirements for MBG:
- Dual Core CPU
- Directx10 or 11 capable graphic card
- 4GB RAM
There will be a huge assortment of both weapons and armors available, enough to allow everyone to properly distinguish themselves on the battlefield. Look like a peasant, a knight, a commoner, or something entirely different.
Looks aren’t everything though. Wearing lighter armor results in faster movement but lower protection. There's always a trade-off and no perfect combination, so go for whichever way you find most fun or most effective in combat.
- Weapons - A variety of different weapons will be available in the game, allowing for you to truly specialize in many different forms of fighting, from using weapons with a shield or without, there'll be hundreds of different items ranging from swords to polearms, axes, maces, hammers, spears and more. Hammers and maces are more effective against heavier armored opponents, spears have good direct piercing damage and polearms are all-round good weapons, especially against those wielding a shield.
- Siegeequipment - Various siege equipment will be available in different game modes. From siege towers to battering rams, catapults and trebuchets, there'll be plenty of fun to tinker with for those who desire the life of a siege engineer. A frequent question we receive “is the siege equipment pre-placed or pre-scripted?” No, none of it is. It’s up to you to decide where and how to use them most efficiently.
We are the team behind the "cRPG" Mod, a Multiplayer Modification for Mount& & Blade Warband. chadz started working on it in 2010, and then more and more players joined him in developing the mod. For the last four years we have taken care of the mod and I think it’s fair to say we not only took care of the community, but that we are a part of it.
Now we are 17 people working on the game and while we might not be famous we certainly have the will, dedication and spirit to achieve something we all know requires sacrifice. We've been truly giving it everything in the last two years, working whenever we've been able to outside jobs. Some even made the ultimate sacrifice of moving back in with their parents to save additional funds! For us, this is not just a project, this is the dream game we want to play ourselves.
"Everything you can see in the Kickstarter video is the result of hard, hard work over the last two years. This was all achieved with a budget of 45.000$ - money that the cRPG community invested into this project in January 2013! Those funds were used to develop the engine, all models, animations, sounds, gameplay, and pretty much everything you see." - Florian Hofreither, Creator and Project Lead.
A heavy amount of work on the homemade engine has been performed which currently features movie making and modding, including real time cloud based features where two or more people can work together simultaneously when creating a map.
"Lots of stuff needs work, but the foundation is there – now it’s a matter of iteration and improvement. For that, we need to move to one place, get an office, and work together full time as a team. Working remotely only works for some time - at some point, you need to interact heavily and tie all ends together. We are at this point now and need your support!" - Florian.
Melee: Battlegrounds is scheduled to enter Alpha stage March 2015.