by
Was your favorite part of Mount and Blade the combat? Did you want it to just be a little bit… less absolutely terrible? My friend, you should get acquainted with…
*cough* …that’s “Chivalry: Medieval Warfare…” in case you didn’t know. I know it’s super small in the picture.
Lepcis has a saying that I’m growing rather fond of. “Dark Souls ruined this game for me.” It shocked me when I realized that Dark Souls as a series has been the exclusive title I’ve played over the last 10 years when it came to desiring a metal-clanking sword swinging frenzy of life or death. Sure there have been a few exceptions (Mount and Blade obviously) but most of those exclusions had some other facet of gameplay driving the ship forward (Mount and Blade’s kajillion other medieval simulations, also obviously). Chivalry seems like a great game but… I found it all to be a bit simple. It’s as if I’ve picked up a childhood toy, fondly fiddled with it for a bit, reminisced about good times but then quickly put it down, desiring to move on to something else.
For those of you playing at home, Chivalry is a multiplayer medieval combat game with your various come-to-be-normal FPS game modes. You choose from four classes, customize each of the classes’ 3 pieces of equipment from a decent selection of weapons and tools and then land in the middle of an arena where two sides duke it out to the death, Dark Ages style. Combat is relatively “simple;” you have about 4 different kinds of swings, a dash (a quick hop), a sprint, a block and a few special abilities depending on your class. As far as Team/Death/Capture the Flag-match games go, I’ve definitely seen worse. The first game mode I played was one-life only, which I am always a fan of.
Plenty of the game’s flavor and design choices are amusing as well. The knights automatically scream and shout when performing certain actions (most noticeably sprinting with weapon in hand) which creates some nice (if a bit hilarious at times) battle choruses leading up to a conflict. The four classes are distinct enough that they all seem to hold an important merit, with no class seeming to be obviously over or underpowered. (I’ve heard that the game gets brutal after you graduate from the < level 15 servers but that’s true of almost any game of these natures). The maps were well-detailed and designed with interesting twists and turns and there were landmarks that made everything look pretty.
In spite of all these things, I just didn’t feel particularly inspired by the game. “Dark Souls ruined this game for me,” comes to mind. It all just felt so simple. Being no stranger to strategy games, nor FPS games nor multiplayer games, my strategy (on a full server to boot) was just to stick with my buddies and fight as a team, covering them when they were in trouble or running into the middle of them if someone was on my tail. Overall though, things just felt too… dare I say, easy. (Maybe that’s the months of Netrunner talking too, I don’t know.) If I was young and had a ton of time on my hands, sure I’d probably play this. Little me would have killed to get to play a game like this. As it stands now, the game seems like a lot of fun but just not something really deep enough that I feel motivated to commit myself to.
It is apparent from just a few games that the focus of the game is combat. Certainly, that’s understandable if not expected from a medieval multiplayer game but I wonder sometimes if we shouldn’t strive to push multiplayer combat games beyond the simple circle and dance of “click to murder everyone.” Even in one-life mode, there’s not much to be lost from dying since the game is just all about… well, killing people. If you aren’t dying, you’re probably not killing people, and if you aren’t killing people you might ask yourself why you’re playing the game at all. That being said, it’s the same sort of struggle we see in every FPS multiplayer game and even though it’s nice to see it in a different form aside from ultra-grueling facade-like realism with iconic World War guns and weapons, it’s still just the same ol’ same ol’.
I once played a game with a similar premise called “King Arthur’s Gold.” Far from a perfect game, KAG created some of the most fun and unique multiplayer battle experiences I’d ever encountered–because combat was only a part of valid choices when it came to winning a match. Engineering was a large part of the game–an engineer could build weapons, bombs, walls, traps, vehicles and other wacky structures to aid their team. Heck, if you really wanted to take the offensive, you could build an automatic wood chopper and run around the battle field carrying it, trying to “catch” your enemies as they fell from a massive wall that you built to slow them down.
What if there was something like that in Chivalry? What if buildings, rocks and walls were destructible? What if engineer was a class, designed around aiding their party through non-combative means? What if instead of “kill everyone” the objective was for one side to defend a fortress while the other assaulted it? What if you had to “protect the King” or “kidnap the princess?” What if there were multiple objectives like “break into the treasury” or “discover the secret room” or “chop down all these trees?” I feel that the FPS combat scene really needs to start thinking creatively if it wants to survive. Oh heck, who am I kidding. As long as there are kids and adults alike whose peak life goal is to no scope headshot-teabag the digital avatar of a complete stranger from half-way across the country, I guess it never will. As it stands, I recommend Chivalry at Tier 2–it’s just unlikely that I’ll be spending much time playing it.
