Posted 21 August 2012 - 06:18 PM
Alright so here is the scoop on M&B (Warband) vs. War of The Roses vs. Chivalry and keep in mind that my experience with Chivalry is a year old and it was from an alpha.
Mount and Blade is of course a 3rd person action RPG that has had many iterations over the past years. In terms of combat, it's a moderately based third person combat which relies heavily on direction based (up,down,left,right) attacking, direction based blocking, archery, and mounted variants. The only physics modeling in M&B games is gravity.
War of The Roses is essentially the natural evolution of Mount and Blade. Imagine Mount and Blade with an extremely detailed physics engine where the mass of your weapon, the momentum of your players model (whether it be body momentum or swinging momentum), and the type of weapon you used actually mattered and were taken into account. if I hold W to move forward and start to pick up forward momentum and swing my sword vertically, the force of my body and the power of that swing are actually taken into account. Hitting opponents with the wooden hilt of a weapon does hardly any damage, and the customization of my character down to the very type of shape of weapon is entirely critical to success. Now imagine this system with archery and mounted combat, and an armor system that actually has WORKING shields and armor. If you're a heavily armored soldier with a helmet you can even press V to pull down your visor. It will block 80% of your vision, but you'll take a hell of a lot more damage to the head and will potentially save yourself from an arrow to the dome. I say that WoTR is the natural evolution of M&B because it is incredibly skill based but it also has an excellent leveling system with VERY deep customization.....like a level of customization that people have never had in any melee game. Did I mention that it has horrifically brutal executions seen in first person of the player being executed, genuine teamplay mechanics, and a pretty graphics engine?
Alright so now I've got you all worked up on how good War of The Roses is at being Mount and Blade 2.0 and you're saying to yourself "Oh well that's great, but what if I prefer first person shooters and faster combat than Mount and Blade?" If you are saying that, you're in luck my friends....because the name of that game is Chivalry.
Chivalry started out as a free Halflife 2 mod (which you can actually download and play through Steam, today) and is being released as a completely 100% remade game on Unreal Engine 3. It's an incredibly brutal first person melee/archery game that is as fast as any other modern shooter but also has some very skill based directional attack and block combat like M&B/WoTR. It also features decapitations and dismemberment, and focuses on attack & defend maps. I haven't played it for a year, but I'm definitely buying it, as you can tell from this thread.
In the end, I can easily see myself playing both WoTR and Chivarly on a daily basis. They are both incredibly different and meet entirely different gaming styles.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler - Albert Einstein