High tier Warband combat is all about animation abuse. You might think it's a good thing that you can't roflcopter stab in OKAM "cos realism !", but to me it feels like a restriction. Turn-rate is definitely slower and attack angles can only be adjusted marginally compared to Warband. I spent at least 100 hours on OKAM and did not once feel like the additional attack directions added any complexity to the game, because blocking was so easy anyway. Warband has some pretty bullshit feinting, but it has created a unique PvP experience that can be pretty complex at high levels.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Even cRPG felt restricted, slower and clunky compared to native in terms of feinting and how much you can abuse the animations. And OKAM went even more in that direction. More realistic I guess, more attack directions - nice, but they don't really bring anything of value for me. It was just as easy to block. But the cost of that was your movement and animations feeling stiff and controls being clunky. Almost like playing with input delay. Native combat just feels smoother, crispier and more responsive, more freedom with shaping and turning the animations the way you wanted. I played Jedi Outcast competitively many years ago, and in that game (same for JA) you have even more control over animations than Warband, there's some absolutely crazy shit you can pull off, you could almost completely shape your swings. I saw new combat styles being invented long after release. A lot of high skill competitive games work on that principle, actually - high speed, responsive combat with some form of abusing the mechanics and animations. For example Quake's strafe-jumping was actually a bug at first, but since it was so widely used they decided to keep it in.
That being said, I was ready to look past and play with OKAMs worse combat system for the open world and everything they promised in the trailer. But that's out of the question now.
