June 21, 2019 by Paul Curtin
While the battle royale genre has taken over the video game industry, for years, there has been another popular niche genre on PC involving large-scale player vs. player battles… but instead of using guns to slay your foes, players use swords, shields, horses, and anything else they can find on medieval battlefields.
Since 2012, two games have been at war to reign supreme for this medieval brawler player base: Mount & Blade: Warband and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. The former featuring hilarious 200+ player battles and the latter focusing on more refined 64-player combat.
Despite putting up a good fight, over time, the player base for Chivalry moved on to other games citing the game’s numerous bugs and unfair combat as reason for their departure, while Mount & Blade still remains in Steam’s top 50 most played games to this day.
More recently, fans of the original Chivalry created what many players consider the game’s spiritual successor, Mordhau, which currently ranks in Steam’s top 25 most played games. And now, the original creators of Chivalry at Torn Banner Studios are back with the official sequel, Chivalry 2.
We got a chance to sit down with the devs who explained that they’ve revamped the combat to allow for more dynamic fights and fixed previous exploits that caused players to give up on their first game.
In addition to better basic melee combat, players will also for the first time be able to ride horses and interact more with objects on the battlefield. As the trailer teases, even chickens can now be used as weapons, which the developers joked is perfect for those looking to just have fun playing their game drunk.
Although the devs are not upping the player limit per match and sticking to 64-player battles, they explained at this year’s E3 that there will be more advanced multi-stage objective maps which will allow for even more epic team-based action — like what you would find in big-budget films and TV shows like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.
With most of the player base gone on Steam, Torn Banner has made the controversial decision to release the game first on the Epic Game Store. Considering that Chivalry’s highest recorded player counts were during Steam Summer Sales when the game was heavily discounted, their choice could pay off and it’ll be interesting to see how Chivalry 2 does when it comes to Steam a year after its Early 2020 release date on PC.
