Hi Jaax, pasting my comment from another thread. Would love to hear your thoughts, and the community's. Since it's a lot, tho, I understand if you don't have the time. (Ignore the thing about the SDK, I'm sure you've heard it enough.)
The player base will never be back to massive levels, because the majority of those 2-3k players are melee gods who curbstomp noobs 24/7. It'd take a massive influx of new players, so vets became an oddity on the battlefield and not the rule.
That said, here are my suggestions. Most directed to noobs. Us vets only need more content:
- A robust, fun tutorial that explains accels, drags, flinching, initiative, etc.
- Multiple new maps, ofc. Especially maps that allowed to explore overlooked mechanics, like a flat map for horses (not crossroads, I mean spawning on a horse). Would also be fun to have a map with a range-focused phase.
- Stop balancing everything around 2h 3/3/3 gameplay. Held block for shields were fine, there are tons of ways to balance it. Make them breakable, make them drain stamina when held, etc. If necessary, make different rules/stats for Ranked and pubs.
- Differentiate weapons. If shields become breakable, make axes do more damage against them. Allow spears to make spearwall. Make daggers to a lot of backstab damage. Maybe add some special attacks a la Chiv 2 that vary per weapon (carefully balanced).
- More PVE content. Look how popular modded Horde servers are while still having to deal with braindead NPC AI. I don't think that Triternion realises they have a goldfield of a combat system here: new players love the combat until they get wrecked by vets. There's nothing like it. PVE content solves that. (Imagine a Skyrim-like game with Mordhau's combat system.)
- THE f**kING SDK LUVS, this would likely solve a lot of issues.
- Related to above: make fan maps/modes competitions and include them in official rotation.
- Occasional modifiers/events to freshen up old maps, like everybody spawning with a carving knife for a while, half gravity, black knight mode, shit like that. As long as it wasn't uber frequent, it could be fun.
- Visual variation within maps, aka weather, night-time, etc. Make it part of gameplay, even, like rain making certain parts of the map muddy and slowing movement/making horses stuck. A sudden blizzard f**king up visibility for archers. For the upcoming Eastern Inv patch, standing in certain parts of the map reducing your stam due to heat. Gimmicks like that to favour positioning.
- Lore. I know this seems stupid, but a minimal amount of lore, contextualisation for the scenes helps give the game its own identity. Not that Mordhau needs help on the meme department. (Pst, devs, I'm a professional writer, hmu baes.)
- More voicelines (I know this is in the works), ideally with different accents. As long as they don't fall in Chiv 2 overproduced cringe, the more the merrier.
- Elements of cooperative gameplay. I'm admittedly stumped on this one. Chiv 2 has the knockdown mechanic, which is fine, but not sure how well it would work here.
- After whichever, if any, of these are done, make the game free on Epic for a week or something (tho I reckon it's not that easy). At the very least, a free weekend followed by a massive discount.
Edit: Cheers for the gold.
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