Mordhau has fascinated thousands of players. The enormous success of the indie game on Steam and Twitch was not at all foreseeable at the beginning. The developers talk about where Mordhau actually comes from and why it is now so popular.
This is the story of Mordhau: Mordhau is an action game set in the medieval period developed by the indie studio Triternion. It has been in development since 2017, when it was announced as a Kickstarter project.
In the interview with PCGamer, Mordhau’s head Marko Grgurovič talked about how Mordhau actually came into being. The basis was probably Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, with which Mordhau is often compared.
Grgurovič was an avid Chivalry player, but wanted a game that fixed the small issues he noticed in Chivalry.
For his project, he gathered developers from all over the world, including Germany, who worked on the game from home and communicated via Discord and Slack.
Mordhau started as “a single map with terrible mechanics and visuals.” Now it is a massive hit on Twitch and on Steam.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, the inspiration for Mordhau
What influence did Chivalry have on the development of Mordhau? Many of the developers that Grgurovič gathered were also Chivalry players. Two of the environment artists, Andrew Geach and Mike Desrosiers, invested particularly a lot of time in the game.
According to PCGamer, Geach had already spent 800 hours in Chivalry at the time of the interview. Desrosiers even over 2500 according to his own statements.
Despite all the enthusiasm for Chivalry, their goal was to ensure that their new project, then under the name “Project Slasher”, should be better.
This is what should improve Mordhau: The developers were particularly disturbed by the combat system in Chivalry. Some bugs and exploits made the combat system uncomfortable, especially at a high level.
Players often executed attacks through rapid circles and attacked “behind” their character. The calculation of the swings caused them to hit their target sooner, which left little fun for the opponent.
What was the goal of Mordhau? As the ultimate goal, Mordhau was supposed to exactly address the community that enjoyed the challenging system of Chivalry, without delivering such a messy combat system.
The first goal was therefore to remove this issue. However, to ensure that the game did not become too easy, there are new mechanics in Mordhau, such as:
- Ripostes
- Attack Angles
- Movements
How successful is Mordhau now?
This is how the release went for Mordhau: Mordhau was able to record a peak of over 60,000 players simultaneously on Steam shortly after release (via steamcharts). Since then, this number has fallen somewhat, but for the developers, Mordhau is still a hit:
I didn’t really expect much, to be honest. I wasn’t even sure we would finish the game.
Andrew Geach
Mordhau has sold over a million copies, half of them alone in the first week after release. The rush was so huge at the beginning that the servers could not cope.
For the small indie team, these are sufficient revenues to now also work on the game’s service.
What comes next in Mordhau?
New features coming: In the interview, the developers also talked a bit about the upcoming features. Not all of them are already in development, but ideas already exist, such as:
- The new map “Castillo” with its own siege mode
- Separate duel servers for ranked matches
- Special maps for duels and ranked duels
The developers have not revealed when exactly new content can be expected.
If you want to get into Mordhau yourself, we have some tips for you here:
