Behind all the salt and whining there is a small kernel of truth here. There are some problems with the game, mainly in pacing and story that make henry’s potato like state infuriating. You have to slog through a good ~60 hours in unmodded getting your stats up and you better choose one weapon 90% of the time and stick to it.
Think to the intro
you are being trained in swordsmanship by the notbandit
…and yet you can’t swing a sword 4 times without getting winded. or block. or anything. You literally suck.
There is an incongruity here. Especially when later game your first sword master is not a particularly easy sparring match. he knows what he’s doing but somehow couldn’t impart the skill Bernard beats into you during the second “tutorial” fight ,literally a day later, training to unlock master strikes. Needing to do go to bernard specifically to learn masterstrikes in and of itself is poor game design.
you are a blacksmith by trade
…and you are as weak as a little girl. (literally weaker. In a womans lot you kick more ass as Johanka during the fight than henry does. SHE can at least kill a fucking Cuman)
My notes: Henry should have been 10. They should all have been children. If anything for realism, since all these sitcom 35 year old teenagers would have several kids, people like capon wouldn’t be opining being a youth ward while shaving, and runt is not a BBEG stat wise to the point the intro has to have an auto lose failsafe in case someone learned the blade and can defeat him and his goons despite garbage stats. Runt would be unbeatable at Henry’s skill level (yet ingame pretty easily clipped in the head fight2 a WEEK or two later in game continuity after auto winning for the game to happen) if Henry was 10. It’s written like this. It’s paced like this. Everything from the juvenile games your friends are playing when they should have professions and families of their own to the coyish tension with Johanka is written around them being 10-13. Henry could suck as a kid. Henry could lose to runt as a kid. Henry could still have his Pyrrhic victory later with it’s impact increased significantly by time and the buildup compared to it’s payoff in the grander scheme of the story. Makes me think they didn’t want to make the models or hire/pitch shift voice actors for child characters for the 2 hour intro for budget reasons but were locked into the story structure.
If in the first intro you were a kid, you can timewipe to Henry as the henry we know (18ish) with the change of his 1 in swordplay now equivalent to 5. Or 10 even, since you still suck 99% at 5 stats just 1% less. It fast tracks the game, makes the combat system accessible, gets you into the quest train confident enough in your abilities to be able to 1v1 a guy in a gambeson and not die . You’ve been in the service of radzig of kobila training as a man at arms (and sheltered from a handwaved couple years of succession war.)
The new framing of Ok to excellent regarding personal stats solve the problem of how quickly henry becomes a l33t warrior. With a time wipe to explain basic competence you can go from “as good as a medium tier stat’d AI 1 on 1” to “well trained swordsman” without it seeming ridiculous when thought about for more than a second. Think about the pace of the story. The number of day-night cycles of grind. It might be 30+ hours of bandit hunting and main quest avoiding to get your speech, gear, wealth, and combat stats up but in the game itself you’ve gone from probably stealing food to 20k grochen of armor and weapon on your person in a month or less.
Now to the combat. It’s aggravating as a Hema practitioner. It takes just enough from real life to be infuriating. The combos should be mirrored horizontally and vertically and they might actually get used. 3 and 4 move combos are impossible to pull off when enemies will perfect block or masterstrike at the STAT level you might actually need a combo to break their defense. The second you get the clench master perk and a strength level over 15 combat changes from tedious and unfun to repeatedly stunlocking an enemy and striking him as he’s winded and rapidly wounded, finally getting some much needed power fantasy as you can batter the opponent around the ring or drive him into the dirt after waylaying you on the road.
Tethering is a terrible system compared to M&B, chivalry medieval warfare, mordhau, war of the roses, etc. For all the “realism in combat” this is the only game out of that list that does not have directional blocking. The tethering fucks up your combos and fucks up distance constantly. 1 v multiple even with enemy threading is a cheap mess where you have to constantly circle strafe backwards until you start poisoning weapons or using your horse.
Mounted combat is terrible and obviously a nearly cut system if not for the functional need of horses. Horses can’t charge over people and you can’t attack with any fineness, just thrusting vaguely in the general down right direction. and it can one shot a man in maille and a millainese brigandine, making it literally the only way to reliably kill bandits in heavy armor. Your other option is a 10 minute fight with your armor getting dented to hell and back trying to pick him to death with thrusts or bashes, barring a deus ex machina from a perk like headbasher and shotgunning a half dozen combat potions (Very historical, perk or skyrim poison and potions as a necessity of head on combat.) Not to mention all the dying if he has an equally armed friend. All making combat in the late game around Skalitz incredebly risky… unless you are mounted with a longsword near a patch of open ground. 30 hail mary charge-thrusts later with ~2 landed and they’ll be as dead as your gear isn’t in need of 3000 grochen of repairs.
As for the open battles, the tethering yoyo’s you everywhere as your target moves and pulls you with it. You might end up behind the enemy lines from one of the useless masterstrike combos the AI throws, free to stab enemies to death as they’re locked to your ally in front of them. You might get rubberbanded around or your person could back up out of reach with a new enemy in front of him but not in front of your sword point. It’s a mess. AI also prefers to fight AI with the way they lock on one enemy, meaning in Band of bastards and all the big battles you can stand at a flank and stab an enemy tethered to another NPC. If they switch to you, the tethered NPC on your side stabs him instead of you. Rinse and repeat with the infinite troop supply of the setpiece battles. (Band of Bastards at least adds stakes, making any loss an actual problem and grounds for a new run. +1 for the parts of the DLC that worked and the sweet bascinet.)
Perfect combat system in my opinion:
4 quadrant 2 hit combos opening up a chain strike if you keep up the pattern (thrust cut, cut thrust, high right to low left, etc.)
directional blocking exactly like every other medieval game but with a quicktime button to countercut which hits the opponent if they don’t counter your counter causing a small guardbreak/stun paired with clenches that result in halfswording and the winner sliding a weapon point under the helmet/into the armpit applying the bleed effect or a historical low health cinematic auto kill (leg grapple+dagger through the eye slit, sword point going 6" under a helmet and the enemy dropping, etc. Could give a very real reason to wear maille under plate for more than the defensive bonus. defense against getting bleed effected by halfswording)
TLDR: the first 50% of the grind for stats shouldn’t exist. The combat tethering and swordplay system isn’t as in depth as it pretends and what it does to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack is sadly inferior to the genre standard directional combat system. There is a reason why stat only savegames and total rebalances are the most popular mods on the nexus.
