Hi everyone,
More and more people are asking us how the land battles and the melee system as a whole will look like in Feral Blue. It's an important question indeed, because poor fencing can turn any boarding fight into a formal routine or just pure hell. Here's what we think.
It would be easier to describe what kind of melee system we do not want. Back when we were high school students and played the pirated version of Mortal Kombat on Sega, the most ingenious tactic was considered to be cornering your opponent and then torturing him with sweeps (in our team, only our designer Alexander used to do this, and we despise him for that). This is an example of a pretty poor melee system, and we don't want to let players blindly buttonmash their way to victory. Same thing with 'kiting' — when your character can indefinitely fall back and attack the enemy at the same time.
On the other hand, we've had experience working with the Mount & Blade engine. It does have a good fencing system, but it might be a bit too intricate for our project. After all, the fencing system is at the very base of M&B, while we're focusing more on naval combat and ship management. We shouldn't lose focus of our efforts trying to do everything at once and better than anyone. Doing a rhythm-based game with blinking warning icons above the enemies is not something we want to do either — quite possibly a simply system with a couple strike types and blocks will be enough.
We can't wait to put the alpha version out in the wild — to understand how viable our ideas are. And what about you — what's your opinion on fencing in games? Can you name some good examples — where was this implemented extremely well?