Chivalry Medieval Warfare: Inventing a Genre

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:887228865863be9e19b60047763bdd04a6440d8d&dn=ChivalryDeadGameReview.webm&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.btorrent.xyz&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openwebtorrent.com&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.webtorrent.dev&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.empire-js.us%3A1337&xt=https://entropicdomain.net/torrent/ChivalryDeadGameReview.torrent

Bloodcurdling screams.

Deadly Swings.

And an endless brutal battle. Chivalry Medieval Warfare became an unexpected indie hit. Developed by Torn Banner Studios and a successor to the Half Life mod Age of Chivalry, this game’s legacy is far greater than it just being a flavour of the month kind of game; Really, it resembled the manifestation of an all new Genre.

The First Person Slasher

#

How is it like to play a game that uses concepts that are absolutely alien to you? The more experienced you are in playing videogames, the less likely you are to come across one such title, chances were though that if you played this obscure medieval game back in 2012, your world was rocked.

My first exposures to Chivalry Medieval Warfare likely were old YouTube videos, Criken especially comes to mind and Teripper, both channels I frequented rather often 12 years ago. Soon I would purchase the game myself on the 20th of December 2013 and I still remember how my first experiences with the game were like. While many quickly got to grips with Chivalry’s brutal gameplay and complicated combat tech, such as an Austrian friend of mine, I on the other hand got wrecked over and over again.

Quickly the image I had of the game that was manifesting in real time, kept souring. The community was one of the worst I had experienced at the time, the combat was much too difficult to get to grips with and the already cancerous community managed to drive me out of the genre completely, at least for a good half decade before I would revisit it again. But just what was so difficult about this game? And what did Medieval Warfare mean for the genre overall?

A New type of Swordplay

#

The secret lies in the swing of a sword!

When you make a swing, it isn’t just an instantaneous hit like it tends to be the case in other games that include swords. The blade travels through the air and can impact a player at any point of the animation, or a swing can be initiated but never reach the opponent if they happened to be faster than you and killed you dead before you could do the same to them. This was made possible with tracers, essentially invisible points that are present from shaft to tip and that get dragged along the sword during a swing. It was an ingenious idea, instead of a swordfight being won through mashing buttons, it is won through an exchange of blows, parries, blocks and feints a true fight to the bitter end.

While this gameplay element is a defining feature of a slasher, it was previously seen in other games such as Mount and Blade Warband or the Star Wars Jedi Knight series, games which are uncomparable to Chivalry not necessarily due to their similarities in mechanics, but more when it pertains to their competitive nature. While Multiplayer in both Jedi Academy and Mount and Blade Warband are a thing, Chivalry Medieval Warfare is a Multiplayer only title and on top of that one that is hypercompetitive and favours individual ability over collective strategy.

Arguably - at least in my experience - the best way to really improve in a game like Medieval Warfare and it’s successors is through one versus one duels. This is the only time a player is matched against another in a focused environment. Two players for themselves with only their knowledge and mechanical skill to their aid. Only here can you notice the many skill disparities. You die to moves you didn’t even see coming, you get read like a book and violated no matter what you do; If you didn’t make up your mind playing it’s regular gamemodes, you likely did the minute you lost a duel. You either licked blood and went on a tumultuous journey of self improvement, or you noticed that the time you needed to invest into this game was far too much for you to justify and ended things then and there.

In the end, Chivalry Medieval Warfare wasn’t just a duel game however and its safe to say that the majority of players picked this game up for the hack and slash carnage on the battlefields. This is where Chivalry shined for the casual player! Massive battles took place in 32 player lobbies, beautifully mapped locales were up to the player to litter in bodyparts and buckets of blood and Torn Banner graced this newly created genre with it’s very own mainstay gamemode: Team Objective.

A recurring Hit

#

This game mode is everything you imagine Medieval Warfare to be about. Savage battles, crimes against humanity before any suggestions ever left the city of Geneva and that combined with the most refined slasher gameplay that was available to us at the time. Team Objective worked so well as a gamemode mainly because players got an assortment of weapons and playstyles at their disposal, as Chivalry Medieval Warfare is one of the strictest games in the genre when it comes to playable classes, with the most freeform game in the genre so far being Mordhau, a game that allows the player to freely customize everything including perks, armour and weaponry, and the strictest game in terms of classes and loadouts being Mirage Arcane Warfare which emphasised team play and magical ability and in turn made weapon selection much less important as everyone only enters the battlefield with one primary weapon at their disposal. Yet, all games from Medieval to Arcane, share this one game mode and the core formula does not really change!

Asymmetry is at the core of a good Team Objective map. When Agatha pushes, Mason defend. When Mason pillages, Agatha protects and when one penetrates a castle, the other has to scramble to protect the king with their lives. With a roughly equal team composition, this game mode can be a real challenge for either team. The coolest aspect of Team Objective also is the journey through the map the player experiences. You don’t just see the interior of a castle, no, you fight your way to it and actively invade it! And really, while future games have varied their objectives a little bit, Medieval Warfare for the most part established every major objective that could be had from the get go.

• You got payload escorts
• Capturing controlpoints
• Physically breaking through gates
• Slaying peasants
• Vandalizing enemy property
• And Assassinating player controlled VIPs

Unlike many shooters in the ego-perspective, Chivalry offered something drastically different in the multiplayer realm, essentially self contained stories, not just an excuse to go on a killing spree, something which every succeeding slasher tried to capture yet again with varying success. With Medieval Warfares quite sizable scale, especially for the time, came versatile tools to aid in combat such as firebombs, deployable cover, throwing knives and more!

From Knight to Peasant

#

The players are as asymmetrical as the teams are, with different classes having different levels of protection, weaponry and movement speeds. The Man at Arms is nimble and quick, having the ability to duck and weave around attacks and getting fast attacks in, but could be easily killed off.

The Knight is a versatile class that has good range and is slower, he has an affinity for defense while not sacrificing much on his offensive capabilities.

Vanguards however are the most dangerous class to the casual player. They have tremendous reach, can build up a lot of speed and can unleash a devastating leap attack out of a sprint, a class you would have seen very often on the battlefield!

And lastly, we got the certified pain in the ass, the Archer. The squishiest fighter in the game, but also one of the most lethal ones, as ranged weapons are for the most part unblockable and cannot reliably be parried.

As to who you should pick? I can’t really make that judgement call for you! Yet there are risks and perks to the choices you make. The Man at Arms as an example is really quick and great to use for one handed weapons, but if matched against a Knight faces an increased challenge, as his armour isn’t as tough as the Knight’s, well… It honestly doesn’t matter who you pick initially if you are facing veterans because they will very quickly rearrange your teeth, especially because of some more controversial combat abilities that came as a consequence to Medieval Warfare’s novel swordplay mechanics.

Bugs or features? The pitfalls of Swing Manipulation as it exists in Chivalry

#

Wether these are bugs or features, kind of depends on your outlook I guess, but given that to this day animation abuse tends to be a problem in the slasher genre, I personally would side on the side of the following aspects of the game being largely bugs, and not the good kind like bunny hopping.

What I’m talking about is the extremes of swing manipulation and the ways Chivalry and maybe even all other games in the genre, have an issue with it. While Medieval Warfare pushed this swordplay into the mainstream a bit, it also showed how not to implement such a system at the same time.

Physics.

#

For one, even if the animation appears slow on the receiving end, a normal slash, an accelerated one and a dragged one, the latter meaning one that is slower, do the same amount of damage. This is true for all slashers I am aware of, and it does not make any sense. This is due to the fact that this is an animation based hit detection system and not one rooted in physics.

Other games you may be aware of, like Half Sword and Exanima, are games that have swing manipulation at their core, but in a different sense. These games are actually physics based, meaning that weight and momentum are real factors to take into account. If you were to drag in a game like that damage would either be reduced or wouldn’t even occur in the first place. Since the physical element isn’t taken into account in the average slasher, players have to contend with some of these confusing elements, which would only really make sense in the realm of lightsabre duels.

Animation Intricacies

#

There are some more issues to talk about though. Medieval Warfare was especially broken due to not just the physical element missing, but also due to where and how animations start.

The root of the problem also is a strength of the game. Because a swing can be manipulated as it is happening, it means that a player can effectively react to another players actions. No matter where they move, you can adjust your swing, and even more importantly in teamplay situations is that you can swing around friends, as team damage mitigation is as important as actually hitting your opponents in team fight scenarios. This is the case thanks to two systems working in lockstep with each other.

If you were to take a horizontal swing, the animation starts at a certain point and ends at another, which might be what you would see in any other game with swords, just that at any point of the animation, no matter where you stand, the swing can damage you. If an opponent crouches low you can aim down mid swing and still hit him. If he jumps up, you can react and angle your swing above. What is happening here is that the movement of the mouse affects the player character’s rotation and pivot of the body from the waist up. This is a great system! Yet how extremely you can manipulate those swings introduces the animation abuse problems that Medieval Warfare is infamous for.

If you for instance were to look up at the sky and start an overhead swing, the blade would start it’s path at the bottom on the floor and go up into the air. That swing can actually hit you from below if you were standing behind the attacker. The second element to any attack is where many problems arise, as you can make the animation cover a much wider space than was likely intended. and in turn make an animation look absolutely ridiculous.

Torn Banner’s Failure

#

The last piece of this shit sandwich is the fact that your swing can’t really be interrupted once it was initiated, you basically slice through enemies like they’re warm butter, and further techniques like ripostes or chambering weren’t invented yet, so the only thing you as a defender can do, is parry the attacks at the right time.

Medieval Warfare has a click to parry system, so you need to anticipate an attack and parry at the right time while looking at the right direction. This is why animation abuse is so popular, to win a duel you want to obfuscate your movement as much as possible so that an enemy doesn’t even have a chance to react it. As a noob this convoluted combat was the bane of my existence and game developers including Torn Banner, agree.

Failure to address key game issues – This one we hear about the most, and we simply agree it was our biggest mistake. As time and player experience progressed, the combat on Chivalry’s servers began a downward trend. Players began to discover novel ways of abusing and manipulating the Real-Time Strikes system (“Dragging”) which especially at higher skill levels resulted in animation issues that made the combat difficult to read and frustrating to fight against. These moves were effective enough to become part of the meta of the game and changed the experience, making it confusing and annoying for most players. We should have fixed it, and never did. This was due to a mixture of originally underestimating how much of an issue it was and failing to listen to the right voices in the community.

_{From Torn Banner’s Article “ Reflecting on Chivalry: Medieval Warfare"}

This issue was rather quickly followed up with a sense of abandonment, as Torn Banner diverted their focus on their next game Mirage: Arcane Warfare, a game that was extensively covered on the channel before.

The animation abuse never was fixed which led to the player base distilling itself into a hardcore audience, alienating everyone else out of the genre, a problem a spiritual successor of Medieval Warfare which was developed by Medieval Warfare competitive players would soon face itself. This story wasn’t all doom and gloom though however, as Torn Banner did support Chivalry for an extended period of time.

We should also emphasize that despite not addressing some of the core issues as noted above, we did continue to fully support Chivalry for over 3 years. We added a substantial amount of free content and upwards of 40 significant patches, long after it was profitable for us to do so.

_{From Torn Banner’s Article “ Reflecting on Chivalry: Medieval Warfare"}

There aren’t only negatives though!

#

In the end, also on the combat front, it’s not like everything sucked! The combat actually can be a whole lot of fun, especially if the players are somewhat evenly matched, or if you play amidst the chaos of a populated server.

In many ways, its better to compare your average slasher game to a fighting game rather than your average FPS, as we have enough tools in our belt that form a captivating tango between two or more combatants.

• Footsies for one are a thing in this game. Just where you position yourself on the battlefield and how you weave in and out of combat is an important factor.
• Stamina is a thing in Medieval Warfare, and it is the system that prevents brainless buttonmashing from occurring, effectively punishing a masher by making him run out of energy and stop him from attcking effectively.
• Kicking also is a thing in this game to break blocks and can be an unexpected element to your combat style.
• Evasion is done via movement and how you pivot your character. For instance you can duck a swing by crouching and looking down at the ground to pivot your player character under the swords.
• Blocking also is an active skill, as you only have a small window of time during which you press to parry and you need to block into the direction the swing is coming from.
• Through swing manipulation bodily awareness is king, and often times you are required to look away from your opponent in order to initiate an effective accelleration or drag. This of course introduces some risk aswell, as you cannot see your opponent all of the time.
• And there are likely elements to the combat I may be overlooking due to my inexperience in this game!

So in spite of some issues, the game still is very much worth playing, especially to observe how many similarities the game has with more up to date slashers to this day. In the end, if you peel back the layers, the core is still Medieval Warfare.

Many Servers are still up for the game, yet it undeniably is much less active nowadays since the sunsetting of Medieval Warfares servers in 2024.

_{Sunsetting announcement by Torn Banner Studios}

What does this mean for the playability of the game?

#

Nothing, really. After going strong for 12 years, Chivalry Medieval Warfare got dozens of servers that are still up, so if you were to buy the game today, the difference in playability would essentially be indiscernible.

Another perk to Medieval Warfare also is its moddability. Due to modding tools having been made available over a decade ago and many maps having been created, there is a sea of content out there ready to be explored. You can host your own servers too, or play offline against bots, even if they aren’t all that great that is better than nothing.

Undeniably though, the player numbers have been stagnating. There is a daily pulse of players coming in, so the game isn’t completely vacant, but this can mean that it at times becomes hard to find a proper match for Medieval Warfare, let alone the DLC Deadliest Warrior which we will be taking a look at very soon too. Maybe this is the signal for you to reinstall the game and explore it once again! Despite it’s issues, I believe it is still an incredible game filled with beautifully handcrafted maps, exciting combat and gameplay that was innovative for the time and that still is challenging to this day.

Thank you for reading, and maybe we will see each other on the battlefields of Chivalry!

14/10/2025 Edit - Added WebTorrent Distribution.