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Everything in mordhau is an upgrade to chivalry. The game looks soo amazing. The combat is so fluent. We even have ranking and devs that care about ablancing the weapons. They made an awesome job. When the community is crying for maps they release the best map ever with tons of new features. There is actually not much to complain about. But something always feels off. People say the objectives and maps in chivalry were better. But i don't think so.
Chivalry had waaay more broken objectives than mordhau. Most of the time the Attackers won. Actually they almost always did. But now in mordhau it is suddenly super important that the maps and objectives are balanced out that its a 50:50 chance for both sides. this will never happen. People whine that Blue always wins or that the last objective is almost never defendable. But we had the same in chivalry if not even worse. So i do not think its the 'imbalance' of the map that makes this feel weird.
I think what people are actually complain about without knowing is that whatever you do you don't really have an impact on the outcome of the game. Back in chiv if you had a player with a k/d of 64-5 in your team, you won. Just that simple. No one could stop some monster like that. In mordhau it doesn't seem like it matters what you do. You loose control. And that feels weird in a game that puts so much effort in giving and fine tuning control. I can kill 6 people at once with a catapult every ten seconds and have no impact on the game. Blue will almost always win anyway. There can also be a monster with a 64-5 kd on my team and that wouldn't change much. Because of the high number of players you will always have a constant stream of knights joining the battle field and only little fluctuations will change the actual game progression. A stone in the path form spawn to the pbjective has more impact on the outcome then me with my 6 people cata kills.
Because of that the devs are in a vicious cycle where they try to balance the map with moving spawns 10 meters to the front or back. And this has way more massive weight on the outcome of the map. Normally player skill would determine the outcome but since there are soo many crowded areas, players just walk in the meat grinder, kill a few in about 10 seconds before being back stabbed anyway. It doesn't even matter if you kill 5 or none because they would have been dead in 10 secs by the next guy. You basically just steal the kills but not prevent or cause them.
Mordhau is improving on chivalry by allowing 64 player servers as default. But i think this is a mistake. 64 players is too much. You get constantly back stabbed and meat grinded. There is no real pause or strategy to be had. No need because the battle is filled with a constant flow of new bodies. Killing enemies does not open a gap in their defense. Because behind that 3 guys you just killed are 5 more coming. 3 meters apart and already swinging. Even if you kill those too there will be more of them. A constant flow. Flanking makes no sense too. Because why fight far away from the objective? What do you achieve by winning a duel far away from the objective? Yes, one player might have to wait 10 seconds to spawn back in and you get a small rush but the objective is so crowded that people step on their toes already.
Back in chiv times, there was a modded 64 player server. It always had bad ping. Like 100 instead of 30. Which was really really bad in chiv. Way worse than in mordhau. But people joined because it was the only one and it seemed like a good improvement. But there you had the same problems. Constant back stabbing. No fight really mattered. It was just mass destruction with fire pots and meat grinder areas.
on the other hand, if you joined a server with only 12v12 you really got your ass handed to you if just one player was better than the rest. Because now the players actually determined who would win. It was based on the player skills and not on the length of the path between spawn and objective.
I played mordhau late at night and was on a server with just one other guy. He gladly didn't leave and we played invasion against each other. It was barely working but it was fun because we were more or less equally skilled. Then more players joined which broke the balance. 2 vs 3 was more broken than 1v1 for example. When we had about 5v5 to 10v10 on the server the objectives seemed to really matter. suddenly it was important to hold one spot and to survive longer. One guy missing or being killed was a huge deal and the battle could shift from one side to the other really dynamicly. Even broken maps and objectives feeled more balanced because it was the actual fighting that determined who would stay to win. Even if one team needed to run 10 meters more from spawn to the objective.
People would also start to wait for each other to form up. You had this flocking of teammates and people were more engaged in the objectives. Because they didn't happen on their own randomly.
This is why i think we need more variation on player counts for the servers. I know 64 players sounds way better than 32 or 16 players but i think the depth and fun of the game gets washed out with those high player numbers.
PS:
In addition there is nothing more taxing on the fps than player count. i can run the game on any settings at 144hz with 10v10 players but a full 32v32 is going to be 90 fps.
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