I’ve made it no secret that I have a serious thing for Mount & Blade: Warband. A lot of us here do, and if you don’t yet and have access to a PC or Mac, I’d recommend picking it up when it’s on sale some time and looking past the weird graphics and playing the damned thing. It’s incredible, it really is. It has spawned a lot of copycats over the years, kind of making melee combat games a big deal.
Now we live in a world where Chivalry and Kingdom Come had successful Kickstarter campaigns and now a new contender enters the ring by the way of Melee: Battlegrounds. Melee: Battlegrounds is by a relatively new team of developers when it comes to creating a full game, but they’ve worked together in the past on the Mount & Blade: Warband mod cRPG. cRPG is one of the more popular Warband mods and lets you build up your character online in a way that the game didn’t allow for previously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxFaOat2_HU
It’s a huge task to go from modding to creating a new game from the ground up, but that is exactly what they’ve done. The game is still a work-in-progress at this point, but the footage that they’ve released and the scope seem to be pretty admirable. If it seems a lot like Warband to you, that is probably not that crazy, but they are aiming at making the combat system even more involved by having 360 degree attacking and blocking as opposed to four directions like in Warband.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1bumEUe1Zk
Also, the Stronghold mode looks amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFjlp3nnJgg
Check out the Kickstarter and decide for yourself if it is worthy of your hard earned money. You can read more about the game on melee.org.