Melee: Battlegrounds Kickstarter - Realistic Medieval Combat
Heya TWC!
Melee: Battlegrounds has just launched their kickstarter campaign, and I'd be happy if you guys would pop over for a look. Melee: Battlegrounds is a multiplayer-focused medieval combat game similar to Mount&Blade, War of the Roses and Chivalry. The game will feature large-scale medieval battles with over 200 players per server.
The game is being developed by a new studio that previously worked on a mod for Mount&Blade: Warband called cRPG. cRPG has consistently been one of the best and most popular multiplayer mods for M&B: Warband. Melee: Battlegrounds has been in development for two years and kicked in to high gear with a larger team last year. I'll post a brief summary of the games features below, although if you want more information you'll have to go to the Kickstarter page:
Combat:
The game features a similar, but further developed, combat system to that of Mount&Blade with a 360 degree combat system, weapon collision and other things like kick, nudge and shieldbash.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
The combat is 100% skill-based where the only reason you die is because someone outplayed you.
Equipment:
What differentiates cRPG from the M&B: Warband is the persistant nature of your character. In cRPG as in Melee: Battlegrounds you will be able to buy better gear, gear that looks different and create your own unique character and style. Everything from horse archery to heavy landsknecht to lightly armored spearman is possible all with their own drawbacks and advantages. Armor makes you more resistant, but slower and fighting against a more skilled lightly armored guy will get you killed. There is no right way to play.
The game will feature siege equipment as well for sieges, in the form of ladders, catapults and siege towers.
Game modes:
Modding:
Battle
No respawns - one life only, while facing 100 or more enemies together with your team. It’s tense.
Conquest
Attack and hold tactical points of interest to win this game.
Duel
Practice, Ranks or Bets - Measure your skills one vs one, or set up group vs group duels. This is the ideal gamemode to hone your skills in and get feedback from other players.
Siege
Use the available siege equipment to assault a castle and conquer it by taking over sections of it. Maps will typically feature multiple stages as the battle progresses, and attackers will be able to assault multiple sections at a time, improving the replayability.
Stronghold
In Stronghold we are bringing in elements from the RTS genre - build and design fortifications and castles to protect your team, while holding resource points to allow your team access to advanced weapons, armors and horses. Rounds are typically longer in this mode, and offer great variety due to team decisions and choice of strategy.
The team come from a background of modders and they are therefore supporting modding as much as possible. Here's what is said on the kickstarter page:
We come from a modder’s background. For us moddability is not just something nice to have, it’s something we fully embrace. That’s why we intend on working very closely with the modding community and making sure as little as possible is hardcoded in our engine. The SDK is based on the C# Language (implemented via Mono) and super easy to code with. All game mode related code will be released to the modding community which means you can either adapt, tweak, or change our code or do the whole thing from scratch. If you shold run into any limits with the engine, talk to us, we’ll listen and do whatever is possible within our means. We know how tedious it can be having to work around small simple problems by applying huge hacks, so we’ve designed the engine to be as easy to modify as possible without making you code the basics from scratch.
Want to code the killer bunny from Monty Python? No problem! A dual-axe wielding laser shooting viking on jetpacks? Easy! A full blown strategy game, a dragon riding game, a medieval farming simulator, a physics based golf game, a mage duel competition, literally anything you can think of, you can mod it.
We plan to release the SDK for everyone together with the alpha release.
If this sounds like your thing, I'd be thrilled if you could go over to their kickstarter page and check it out. They've put a ton of work into this. They are asking for a relatively modest 130 000$.
Progress on the game so far:
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask me, or you can even ask the developers themselves at their irc chat: http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=melee
There's usually someone around who can answer the question if the developers are busy.
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