First-person melee combat is notoriously difficult to get right, so Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer Warhorse Studios has a lot of work to do considering that roughly half the medieval RPG involves hitting peasants with swords.
A new developer diary video covers the team’s efforts to create a more reactive, realistic combat system than games like Skyrim, where you simply wipe your sword against a mudcrab until it falls over.
”We’ve made a lot of prototypes, but nothing worked,” says combat programmer Peter Man. ”The hardest part was that there were too many combinations, requiring a huge amount of combat moves. We realised we had to base the system on physics, and procedural animation. We’ve developed special algorithms that help the animation to solve problems with the collision of weapons. That allowed us to drastically reduce the number of animations needed”
Enemies in the game have thirty-six different zones you can strike, and the game rewards timing and accuracy, allowing the player to perform special skill moves if they string the right number of attacks together. Hard to tell how it plays from a gameplay demo, of course, but it looks like a step up from most attempts at a first-person melee system.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is expected out nexy year, but you can sign up for the game’s Alpha on the official website.
