Mordhau's messy multiplayer swordfights are a lot of fun, but sometimes you just want to reach out and stab one person in particular. Fortunately, developer Triternion agrees, as a major patch this Friday added an official one-on-one duelling mode to the game.

Rather than do things by halves, the duelling system has a persistent Elo ranking system (a competitive ranking system originally used for chess, and now commonly used by many esports games) meaning that players can compete to become the world's greatest stab-doer.

The ranking system is technically only in beta still, but once they've hammered any last kinks they plan on applying the system to three-on-three small team battles, too. Mordhau as professional esports? It could happen.

While duels are the biggest feature of the update (you can see the full patch notes here), there's a lot of other tweaks and improvements made. They've tweaked and slightly expanded the Crossroads map, fine-tuned cavalry (less powerful, but can now capture points while mounted) and made further tweaks to reduce griefing and make it easier to vote out problem players.

Probably the second most important change is a universal improvement to kicking, though. Kicks come out faster, have slightly longer range and cost less stamina. Most importantly, you can now kick people on ladders and laugh maniacally as they ragdoll helplessly to the ground. Who needs swords when you've got a boot?

Along with the launch of duels, the studio have outlined update plans for the coming months. There's two new maps coming and "ready very soon", a new play-mode called Invasion, offering an asymmetrical attack-and-defend style of play. The biggest deal, and what will likely keep Mordhau kicking well into 2020 and beyond is native mod support. An official software development kit is in the works, but won't be done for a while.

While you wait for the flood-gates to open on Mordhau modding, find someone and stab them. You'll get global kudos for it now.

Mordhau developers Triternion have posted an update discussing what they've been working on lately, and what they have planned for the future. Topping the list of post-release priorities are a couple of "fully-fledged" new maps, one a sprawling town and the other a Mediterranean-inspired castle keep, that will be playable in all game modes.

"Feitoria is a sprawling town and accompanying village that will alternate between crowded streets, chokepoints, and more open areas and will have an emphasis on verticality and interiors as well. Currently, progress is going well on Feitoria, and our level designer is working on optimization, interior/background polish, and configuring the map for game modes," Triternion wrote.

"Castello on the other hand, is a southern-European/ Mediterranean inspired castle keep and walled courtyards. It will have a similar feel to Grad, but with a more involved castle section, including portcullis control and close-quarters fighting. At the moment, Casello has begun its final art pass, along with some fine-tuning of the lighting and post-process effects."

The new maps are the priority right now but the developers said they are aware of issues with the existing maps, and will be working to tighten those up as well.

Ranked play is on the way, with six tiers ranging from Bronze to Elite, each divided into five ranks. Farther down the road is a new 64-player attack-and-defend mode that's still in the design stage. Triternion said it's working to ensure the mode works with all existing maps, "as our levels are designed to be usable in all game modes when possible," and there's currently no timeline on its launch beyond a very vague "in the future." Developers are also looking into ways to tweak the Frontline game mode to help reduce stalemates, but again, a schedule hasn't been set.

To help reduce toxicity and racism in the game, a client-side chat filter is also being worked on. Aside from maps, this may be Mordhau's highest-priority: As we reported earlier this month, Mordhau has a serious problem with racism and toxicity, and seems ill-prepared to deal with it.

"While muting players removes anything they’ve said, you can only do that after they’ve said it," Triternion said. "We plan on adding a filter that will automatically remove inappropriate or offensive messages before you have to see them, which will help to curb toxicity quite a bit."

Other in-the-works tools to help combat griefing include a more detailed vote-kick screen and a system to enable players to tell if someone is placing structures to disrupt gameplay. "We’re also looking into other ways to prevent griefing with toolboxes and firepots, to prevent players having to rely on votekick to deal with them in the first place," the developers wrote.

Triternion is also "well aware" of the demand for mod support, but it's attention is currently focused elsewhere. "At the moment, development is focused more around our short-term goals of increasing the amount of content that the base game provides and we’ll look into an SDK and mod support in the future," it wrote.

All of these changes and additions are in various stages of development, quite early in the process in some cases, and elements may ultimately be changed or canceled outright. There's also currently no timeline for any of it: "We focus more on ensuring they are up to our standards as opposed to setting hard deadlines," Triternion wrote, "so things will come when they're ready."

Content warning: Slurs and references to racist and sexist language.

Update 2: Triternion has published a statement reiterating that it won't be adding an option to toggle off non-white and female characters. Two developers told us that this 'feature' was a possibility, but Triternion is now calling it a misunderstanding, placing the blame on a lack of PR experience and "answering some questions in a misleading way". 

A gender toggle was apparently discussed, however, but the studio claims that this idea was dismissed because it would undermine player customisation. The two members of the studio we spoke with were apparently not informed about this, despite the team being small—there are only 11 of them—and the idea being thrown out shortly after launch. 

The toxic community will be addressed, Triternion says, but no plan to deal with racism in chat and on the forums has been proposed. "At the moment we are stretched thin with major important content additions," the statement reads, "and unfortunately we do not have the staff nor systems in-place to moderate everything to our intended level of standards".

You can read the full statement here.

Update: After this article was published, Triternion stated on Twitter that it does not have plans to include a setting which disables the appearance of "characters that aren’t white," and never did. This contradicts statements developers Mike Desrosiers and Andrew Geach made to PC Gamer last week and which we reported in this article.

During our interview, we asked, "Are there plans to increase, on the character creator side, the diversity of the characters players can create? You've talked in the past about adding female playable characters and changing character's skin tones ... is that something you guys are committed to doing?"

Desrosiers replied, "That goes back to a similar situation as the chat filters. Whatever stance we take officially, some group of people are going to be upset with us. And so, ideally we’d put the power in the players’ hands, and give them the option to enable and disable different things.

"There has been endless debates about it, and it attracts a lot of toxicity, a lot of stuff we’re not interested in attracting to the game itself, any more on top of what’s already present. But we’re definitely always looking at ways of expanding [our customisation]."

Later, after Geach explained how Triternion might go about creating new character customization options, such as female characters, black characters, and Middle Eastern characters, we asked, "So current thoughts on that, as Mike said, maybe adding that and then giving the option for players to disable it? Is that the current thinking?"

Geach replied, "Yeah, that seems to be the current thinking. It’s not set in stone, it depends how our community is in the future. Maybe if it calms down in the future, the game still has a lot of players, a lot of toxicity, a lot of racism, a lot of politics, everything, people argue in chat about all sorts of nonsense."

In April, another member of the Triternion team confirmed plans for a “simple client-side toggle” to let players “disable” female characters after they were added to Mordhau. This was partly to address the “valid” complaint that female characters would be unrealistic.

“We are still looking into adding female characters post release as was promised…The realism complaint is valid, so when we add them we might add a simple client-side toggle (for both female and male characters) which would let you disable them,” they said in a Steam discussion post.

The original article follows.

Original article: Nobody expected Mordhau to get this big—especially not the first-time developers who made it. What started as a janky fan project made for the competitive Chivalry: Medieval Warfare community has become one of the best multiplayer hack-and-slashers on PC, and it's sold more than a million copies. But for some players, Mordhau's fun combat has been tainted by a growing toxicity problem that sees racist, sexist and homophobic slurs thrown around in both the in-game chat and the official forums, seemingly without repercussions.

As an example, one of the forum’s most popular threads is titled ‘Post your kniggas,’ in which players share images of their character builds. The thread started in 2017 when Mordhau was in alpha, and has attracted more than 2,600 comments since. One of those comments says "step up my kniggas," another says "listen here, faggot." When one player questions the racism in the thread’s title, another responds: "you are gay."

In other forums, a thread with that title may be deleted on sight—but the Mordhau devs don't have a problem with it, or its contents. "It is one of our longest and oldest [threads], as well as among the most active threads on our forum, full of creative loadouts from our community," says Andrew Geach, speaking on behalf of the team. 

"As for the title itself, we as a team don’t find it racist or offensive, and considering the thread’s content, we find it even less so. We do understand however that some people may interpret it as being racist or inappropriate if taken out of context."

It’s clear that Mordhau's developers are unprepared and unwilling to meet the problem head-on, and some players have had enough. Alongside the posts described above sit those lamenting toxicity in the game. "Chat was today an overflowing septic tank of personal insults, racial slurs, and general vitriol and hate. Not a single person was kicked," says a post from this weekend. The same is true on the game’s subreddit, where toxicity is a common discussion topic. "There's such rampant racism in this game and it's really making me not want to play it," reads a post from last week.

Another reason for the problem is that there’s no way to directly report players in Mordhau—you have to take a screenshot, send it to the developers on the official Discord and hope for the best. You can vote to kick players during a match, but those votes often get lost in the heat of battle.

Community-run servers are, on the whole, friendlier places than the official servers, and some have active mods that punish abusive players on sight (click here for a few recommendations). Duel servers are generally pleasant, too.

Mordhau also suffers from a lack of moderators. Community manager Jax said last weekend that the team was "trying to improve our moderation, but we're a small team and there are a lot of you."

"I do apologize on behalf of the team for some of these... 'people' that are spouting off terrible things in game," Jax said in a forum post. "All I can say at this point in time is that we're working on improving the situation."

Geach says that any user caught using racist or sexist slurs is "pretty much banned on the spot". Around 300 users have been banned on the forums, and around 300 on Discord, for offences including racism. But the lack of moderators, combined with a misunderstanding about what constitutes racism and what doesn't, means that the developers are allowing even the most blatant offenders to persist.

One Mordhau player with more than 110 hours under his belt got in touch with me last week to flag a user who was constantly posting racist comments on the game's forums.

"We white people just can't have anything to ourselves, can we?" the user in question posted recently. "Now we can't even play our fucking video games in peace, without some nog like yourself screaming bloody murder over the lack of negroids." The user’s account is still active, and if you spend five minutes on the forums you’ll find many like them.

This is not just about a lack of resources—the developers are currently unwilling to take a hard stance against any toxicity. In a recent update, they added the option to mute players by clicking on them in chat, but in an interview before that update, they told me they didn’t want to add any sort of word filter, partly because "people might claim we’re censoring."

"We want to put the power in the players’ hands," said Mike Desrosiers, an artist who worked on the new mute function. "If we take an official stance and we put an official filter list on all the words in chat, people will, first, find a way around it, and it might catch innocent words, or people might claim we’re censoring. So we’d rather put the power in the player's hands." 

Similarly, when describing the team’s approach to banning players, Geach errs on the side of caution. "We do of course act on inappropriate posts or discussions when seen personally. That being said, we don't try to police our players too tightly. We allow for discussion on most topics, within reason." 

Other developers of competitive multiplayer games are happy to take a more hardline approach. Rainbow Six Siege aggressively filters slurs and has a manual moderation team, while Rocket League has a similar system. Many multiplayer games don’t police their chat that tightly, but most have fleshed-out reporting systems, which Mordhau does not.

With plans for playable female characters and a choice of ethnicity on the horizon (you can only create white male characters at the moment), I expect the vitriol to get worse. The Mordhau team seem to expect that too, and say their current plan is to let players 'disable' these new options if they want. "That goes back to a similar situation as the chat filters," Desrosiers says. "Whatever stance we take officially, some group of people are going to be upset with us. And so, ideally we’d put the power in the players’ hands, and give them the option to enable and disable different things.

"There has been endless debates about it, and it attracts a lot of toxicity, a lot of stuff we’re not interested in attracting to the game itself, any more on top of what’s already present. But we’re always looking to expand [our customisation]."

Geach says that if the team add "a Middle Eastern person or a female or a black person," they’d do it "properly."

"We’d put the real work into it, not just a band-aid to appease people. We’d dedicate artist time to new scalps, new texturing, it might come along with a larger content patch, so it’s not just shoehorned in."

Geach says giving players the option to disable characters that aren’t white and male "is not set in stone" and "depends how our community is in the future." 

"Maybe if it calms down... the game still has a lot of players, a lot of toxicity, a lot of racism, a lot of politics, everything, people argue in chat about all sorts of nonsense."

For now, toxicity in Mordhau is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Whenever the topic of female characters is raised on the forums, it sparks furious debate, with players often citing worries about historical accuracy. "When you're done adding females and naggers, can you add orcs and hobbits? It’s not supposed to be historically accurate after all... you see how the fucking slippery slope ruins everything yet?" reads one comment on a recent discussion.

Without a sea change in how the Mordhau developers police their chat and forums, comments like this will continue unchecked.

[Correction: This article originally attributed a quote regarding character customization to Andrew Geach, but it was said by Mike Desrosiers. It has been corrected.]

Five years ago, long-time Chivalry: Medieval Warfare player Marko Grgurovič began building a prototype for a new melee game in Unity. He had no development experience, and neither did the team he quickly assembled around him, some as young as 17. They weren’t paid for their time on Project Slasher, as the prototype was known, and they were spread across the globe, working remotely. It sounds like a million other hobbyist projects that start enthusiastically and then peter out. But this one didn't.

Mordhau shouldn’t have worked. And yet what started as a "single map with pretty janky mechanics and visuals" has, after five years of work, sold a million copies. 500,000 of those in the first week. 60,000 concurrent players were online during its first full weekend.

How did a team of first-time developers turn a passion project into an international sensation? And how does the group, some as young as 21, feel about their overnight success?

"I wasn't really expecting much, honestly," says environment artist Andrew Geach. "I wasn't really sure we'd finish the game. It was overwhelming at first, but as more and more people joined the team we got faster and faster, better and better."

None of the team had shipped a game before, but they had a passion for Chivalry, and a deep understanding of what made a melee game enjoyable. Geach, who joined straight from college, had played Chivalry for 800 hours—Mike Desrosiers, another artist, played on the top North American Chivalry team during high school, and clocked 2,500 hours, he tells me.

Their aim was simply to create something for Chivalry’s "tight-knit" competitive community, while building up development experience along the way. They wanted a melee game that was much alike Chivalry but more fun, more grounded, more readable to an onlooker.

"Chivalry was fairly fun to play at a high level [but] you see players doing all these spinning attacks, hitting you behind them, because that was just the most effective way to play," Desrosiers says. "We removed that very early on in Mordhau, in the Project Slasher prototype."

That instantly lowered the skill ceiling—and the team instantly raised it back up, adding extra angles of attack, different body movements, and new mechanics such as chambering, which is when you mirror your enemy’s attack just before they strike. Their approach, and the reason Desrosiers says the combat has been such a big hit, was to build from the "top down," designing the combat around top-tier players before making it fun for beginners. 

As the original team continued to perfect the mechanics, they brought on new staff to flesh out the rest of the game, including Geach, who worked on map design. They initially wanted to put 64 players into huge maps with scattered control points, like in Battlefield’s conquest mode. Some points would have "miniature sieges," Geach says: one might be a castle in the middle of the map that two teams fight over.

They built maps around this principle, but eventually decided it was taking too long to travel between control points, and that players would be too spread out. So they pivoted to a more linear mode called Frontlines, now Mordhau’s headline mode, in which teams capture a series of points one after the other. Rather than start again with the maps, they "Frankensteined" existing maps to fit that structure.

On individual maps, Geach says his approach is always to "start realistic, and then I start thinking about making it fun for both teams." Grad, which Geach thinks is Mordhau’s best map, started with a castle that was difficult to capture because it had very few routes in for attackers. The team gradually added ladders, holes in the walls, a separate dungeon and various doors, iterating until it felt more balanced.

Remote control

Between the maps and the core combat, Mordhau was slowly but surely taking shape. That in itself is remarkable when you consider how the team worked: Desrosiers and Geach are both from Canada, but other members of the 10-strong team are in Austria, Germany, Poland and Slovenia, communicating through Slack and Discord. 

One of the problems with this system is that it’s difficult to get feedback because the rest of the team only see the final version of your work, says Geach. "In a real office your manager or overseer would walk by and see what you're working on and offer advice. We're a bit slow that way, so work would definitely speed up in a physical space." Clear, upfront discussion about what you’re about to work on is therefore essential, he says.

It can also be hard to motivate yourself when you’re disconnected from your team, but Geach says that seeing everyone else's great work would inspire him. "Every patch we released I'd get freshly reinvigorated to keep working, or every time I play with our alpha players. I still do that now, taking a break and duelling for 20 minutes, and then I'm super motivated for another few hours."

Creating a game that you actually want to play also keeps morale high. "Everyone has played a game before that they really enjoy, and they just wish they could change one or two things about it," Desrosiers says. "We're in that position where we play that game and make those changes ourselves, and it's really liberating."

Without that passion, Mordhau would’ve fallen apart. The team weren’t paid for most of its lifespan, and many of them, including Geach, had at least part-time jobs, working on it evenings and weekends. Retaining staff was difficult, and many developers came and went. The money the team got from its 2017 Kickstarter campaign, however, allowed some of them to work full-time, and Mordhau’s success means they can now all work on it without any distractions.

It’s a level of success that none of them expected. "To say the launch was overwhelming would be an understatement," Desrosiers says. "Our estimates from the Steam wishlists had us looking at 10-12,000 players, and we peaked at 60,000 by the weekend. To experience this project’s growth from this tiny underground prototype into this worldwide hit, is an indescribable feeling."

Unfortunately, it’s a feeling the team couldn’t enjoy at launch because their servers were overloaded. "It was kind of scary joining a server and seeing everyone have 300 ping, just lagging around on launch day, and just telling everybody we’re working on it, we’re trying our best," he says. 

It was "extremely stressful," especially for the game’s two programmers, who were trying to "contain the already happening explosions, looking through code to see if there were any optimisations, calling the server company to tell them, hey, we need all of your servers, we have too many players."

Now the initial rush is over, Desrosiers has had time to reflect—he says starting the project with a group of young, remote developers was a "huge risk" that has now paid off. He attributes Mordhau’s success to the polished combat, refined by years and years of testing by top-tier Chivalry players and newcomers alike, and the power the game gives players to express themselves, whether that’s via their fighting style, the clothes and armour they wear, or their use of voice chat lines, which makes it feel more "personal" than other multiplayer games. "It makes their player character a reflection of their personality."

For the team personally, Mordhau has been life-changing. Desrosiers, who was just 17 when he started on Project Slasher, says: "For most of us in the team, it was sink or swim, we had one, good solid shot to make a popular game, a game we all wanted to sink thousands of hours into, and hopefully be in a dream position early in our lives and careers. Luckily it worked out, and luckily we are in this position."

Geach similarly says Mordhau was his dream game, something he acknowledges most developers only get to do after they’ve "grinded" for 10 or more years.

"For me, it’s like: Now what?"

Roadmap to success

Before they look to the future, Triternion must focus on Mordhau’s present. Like any multiplayer game nowadays, fans demand constant updates, and the developers feel under even more pressure now than they did before launch. In Desrosiers' words, Mordhau was a "golden egg" that has hatched into a "baby golden goose, and it’s up to us to keep it alive and nurture it."

"I’d say it’s more serious now," Geach adds. "There’s more pressure, people are begging for maps on our Discord and social media. The pressure of keeping up with the modern gaming environment with these live service game… you have to continue development, it’s expected, and the pace that’s expected is pretty fast, but we’re a small team, and generally it can be somewhat slow."

Geach is working on a map called Castello that is designed for Siege-style matches framed as attack vs. defence, rather than the back-and-forth of Frontlines. Attackers will have to fight their way into a fortified castle with multiple gatehouses, climbing "at least two or three floors" to reach the inner keep. 

Geach is "sure" a dedicated Siege mode with trebuchets and battering rams will arrive at some point in the future, but it’s not in the works at the moment. Alongside Castello, the team are working on another Frontlines map called Feitoria, a "very large, very dense castle environment with villages, a docks area and tall castle walls."

Alongside maps, the team is working on ranked duel servers, which is proving tricky. Currently, duel servers are open to all, and you indicate your readiness to duel by twirling your sword in someone else’s direction. If you want, you can simply jump in and chat to other players without fighting, as many do. "The reason it works well in these types of games, Jedi Academy, Warband, Mordhau, Chivalry, is because you’re face-to-face with all these other people," Desrosiers says. 

"You get to see the player expression these people bring in how they fight and how they dress. It’s kind of tricky to think of a good ranked version of that mode, because you’d lose that sense of community [if] it’s just you and your opponent in a little arena. Win or lose, you back out, re-queue and join another little arena against one person. It’s a little less personal."

But what you lose in community will be gained in the feeling of climbing a ranking ladder, and being able to brag about your success, he says. Currently, the team is working on the foundation of the mode, which will see multiple duels happen on a single small map, but each pair will only be able to see their opponent. When that’s working, the team will build in different variations, such as best of three, best of five, and even expanding duels to 3v3 matchups. 

That will come with new maps, too. They'll first retrofit existing maps to competitive duels but Geach says "It would be nice to have intimate maps. You could essentially go crazy as an artist, you don’t have to worry about issues with a GPU, you can be a bit more expressive with your art." He floats the idea of a "ship in a storm" for a duel map, where "the ship would be rocking, maybe it’s on fire."

Geach and Desrosiers haven't lost the drive they had when they first started learning how to make a game. Geach says they constantly have "crazy discussions" about new features, or even new games they’d like to make. But in every case, "it always comes back to what we need to focus on now." While most of the games industry was focused on the forward-looking announcements at E3, they were busy launching their first new map.

Medieval combat game Mordhau was instantly a smash, rocketing onto Steam's most played list immediately after launch in April, and the developers report today that Mordhau has sold 1 million copies. For Mordhau fans, there's a great way to celebrate that impressive milestone: with an update that includes a new map and new weapons, including mortars.

The map is called Crossroads, intended for large scale battles with horses, the newly added mortars, and an objective in the center of the map for players to fight over. Also added to the mix in the update are javelins and heavy hand axes. The axes can also be used as repair hammers for fixing structures (by turning them around and using the blunt side, of course). 

The update also includes new armor paints, balance changes, and other tweaks to gameplay, combat, and equipment. You can read the full list of changes here.

If you're just getting started with Mordhau, we've got a guide to its best weapons and to some weird but kick-ass character builds. Steven can also give you tips on how to win at Mordhau by being an utter bastard.

Nestled within the mayhem of Mordhau’s clashing metal is a beautiful ballet of blades, and we'll help you pick out your dancing shoes with this Mordhau tier list. Weapon stats matter, but they're only part of the story. There's no single best tool for the job: Combat in Mordhau is a physics puzzle where your creativity and feel for a weapon will determine how you land a hit. Use this guide to get a feel for what weapons excel in various scenarios, and as you play you’ll find your own preferences will develop alongside your skills.

Before you read:

In addition to showing you which weapons are the best and worst, each entry also comes with a handy stat sheet that helps you compare stats like damage and timing. Explanations for those stats are found in the section below the tier list, if you need them, along with some handy tips about how to build your own mercenary. Use the table of contents to skip to these sections. 

These top-tier weapons each bring a special little something to combat.

These weapons are still a great pick but sometimes are outmatched or have specific flaws.

You may find a favorite here, but these fall short of the mark.

Suitable only as door stops and paperweights.

In Mordhau, weapon damage varies against different armor levels and body parts, and many weapons have alternate modes that change how they’re handled (or just let you chuck them at people and hope for the best). But there’s a lot more to the weapons, and I’m going to cover some of those stats here.

Damage & Armor is split up into head hits, body hits, and leg hits based on where your weapon connects. The level of armor is ranked from unarmored (0) to heavily armored (3) and will be based on what your target is wearing on that body part. You’ll learn quickly why going unarmored is incredibly dangerous in Mordhau. 

Length is quite simply how long the weapon is when swung. Since Mordhau uses weapon physics to determine hits, a long weapon means you don’t have to be as close to your opponent to hit him, which is obviously a good thing in many cases.

Windup is the amount of time it takes to begin the ‘damaging’ part of your swing, essentially the amount of time between when you click and when the magic happens. Release is how long the ‘damaging’ part of your swing lasts, which should match the animation you see for the swing. This is when you need to hit your opponent, and also when you want to do more advanced things like performing a drag or accel.

Recover is the largely static amount of time you need to wait after your Release finishes before you can start another attack. Combo is the amount of time before your next Release if you begin another attack during your previous one. This is a great way to keep the pressure up and avoid the Recover window.Stop on Hit determines whether or not your weapon will stop when it delivers a hit, or if it will continue on and potentially hit another target. Weapons with blades generally pass through things they hit while blunt weapons do not. Block View Tolerances are measured in degrees of view from your cursor, and keeping your opponent’s attack inside this window will determine whether or not a parry will be successful. So far they’re fairly static.Projectile Speed is a measure of how fast a thrown or fired weapon moves, with higher being quicker, whereas Gravity Scale shows how much a thrown or fired weapon will drop, with lower numbers going further with less drop. Draw is the amount of time it takes after you click and hold to be ready to release your shot, and Reload is the cool down period after you’ve done so before you can start a new shot. 

When you have a few games under your belt (and a small bag of gold to spend), your goal should be to create your own character. First, obviously, you have to spend some time getting fashion conscious with the many choices of clothes, emblems, colors, and accessories—just don’t spend all your gold on it right away.

As you begin to build up gold, it's well worth experimenting with different looks for your armor. With all the cosmetic options available, you can easily be deceptive with your armor. There’s value in being a 3 armor body who looks like a 1 armor body—it can mislead opponents into using alt-modes on a weapon that are less effective (or neglecting using one that would be more effective). All warfare relies on deception, even the kind that relies on selecting the right scarf to look like a peasant.

Once you’re done playing dress up with your fresh-faced recruit, there are a lot of excellent choices in the armory. Core to this is going to be your primary weapon, as its points cost is going to determine how much you have left for perks, armor, and backup weapons. I’d recommend picking up something that felt comfortable when you were playing the defaults. Things like the Maul, Executioner’s Sword, Spear, or Pole-Axe are a great if you felt comfortable with big heavy two handers, and something like a Short Spear, Mace, Arming Sword, or Rapier is a good choice if you want to use a shield, or have more points to play with.I like to look at Perks next, while mentally assuming 5-8 points for armor. Things like Friendly (reducing friendly fire damage both ways), and Fireproof (reducing fire damage by 80%) can be amazing ways to spend your final point. You’ll have to plan more for Dodge (giving you a short hop to dodge attacks), or Bloodlust (refreshes you to full health after kills).Usually the last few points (if you somehow have any left) are a great spot to put Throwing Axes, Fire Bombs, or even a Medic Bag or Bandage.  

One of my favourite things about multiplayer melee game Mordhau is its character creator. Rather than push you towards a set playstyle, it gives you a bunch of points to spend how you please, shared between armor, perks, weapons and consumables.

It’s a flexible system: if you wanted, you could create a heavily armored brute who only throws smoke bombs, or a fist fighter who restores health with every fatal right hook. But if you want to craft a playstyle that’s genuinely useful and won’t get boring after five rounds, it’s hard to know where to start. 

Forget the sword and board. I’ve come up with five unconventional builds for both beginners and advanced players—they might not look like the most efficient, but they’re all fun to play and can genuinely have a big impact on any battle. Most of them are designed for Frontline, Mordhau’s main team-based mode, although some will work in duels too.

Check out our Mordhau tips for more general advice on mastering the medieval combat.

The front line Engineer

Bring the hammer down

Equipment:

• Armor: 2 head, 3 torso
• Blacksmith Hammer
• Greatsword
• Perks: Wrecker, Smith

The default engineer class bores me. Carrying the toolbox lets you build spikes and wooden walls but limits your firepower. If you ditch it you can free up points for weapons and armor while keeping the Blacksmith Hammer to construct defences around control points. This puts you directly on the front line, where you’ll see more action. 

Your armor and Greatsword make you a strong brawler, and you can switch between whacking on walls and lopping off heads whenever enemies get close. The Smith perk lets you build defences faster than usual, and you can repair a wall more quickly than a group of attackers can break it down, cancelling them out (see clip above). 

The Wrecker perk comes in handy when you’ve pushed an enemy force back: You’ll deal extra damage to the other team’s structures, so you should lead the charge and smash down their defences. Your team can then flood through the gap.

The mauled Assassin

The backline bastard

Equipment:

• No armor
• Maul
• Smoke bomb x 2
• Perks: Acrobat, Cat, Rat and Rush

Quick, nimble, and able to smash skulls in one swing, this build is perfect for zipping around enemy backlines, picking off archers and other stragglers. With zero armor to slow you down you can bounce from unsuspecting target to unsuspecting target, and the Rat perk dampens your footsteps so they won’t hear you coming.

You’d normally expect an assassin to carry daggers or a short sword, but it’s better to equip the slow-swinging maul, which will kill all enemies in one strike to the head. 

Nearby enemies will spot you if you miss, so make sure you have an escape route planned out. Remember that enemies get a speed boost if they chase you and keep their cursor on your body—try to play around buildings or other objects that will break line of sight. Use your smoke bombs in sticky spots to slip away undetected.

This build isn’t useful in contested mid-fights, but I like switching to it when my team has been pushed back to our spawn. If you can slip round the side of your enemies then they won’t think to check behind them. It’s also especially good on Grad, where you can hide behind buildings and haystacks, you sneaky bastard.

The big ol' Archer

Stab, then swap to your bow

Equipment:

• Armor: 2 head, 2 torso
• Recurve bow
• Messer (or your favourite five-point weapon)
• No perks

Archers don’t have to cower on the back lines. With this build you can both hang out at mid-range hitting headshots and push forward into the front lines to support your teammates. With a balance of armor and speed, you can go where you’re needed most: If you see an ally battling two opponents, wade in with your Messer. If enemies are holding strong in a choke point, pull out your bow and thin them out. You won’t deal lots of damage, but chipping away at enemies will help your allies, and I often lead my team in assists when I use this build.

In more open fights, you can walk around with your sword out to fool the enemy team. When an opponent comes sprinting towards you, quickly swap to your bow to soften them up. They won’t expect it, especially if you make your character look like a melee expert. Pile on the pounds in the character creator and pick a scary helmet. A cheap tactic, maybe, but we all know that chivalry is dead. 

The ultimate Battle Medic

The heartbeat of your team

Equipment:

• Armor: 3 head, 3 torso, 1 legs
• Medic Bag x 3
• Perks: Friendly, Fireproof, Tenacious
• No weapons

Running into battle brandishing a cloth sack sounds silly, but you’ll nearly always pass a sword or spear on your way to the front. When you see one you want, throw down your first medic bag and pick up the weapon. The bag will act as a healing station for retreating allies.

After that, your job is to place your bags in spots that allies can reach, but enemies can’t. Behind structures or buildings is a safe bet, and will protect your team from arrows while they’re healing. Sticking one in the middle of a control point is usually a bad idea unless you’re actively pushing the enemy off the point and want to keep the momentum rolling.

Using this build will nearly always put you near the top of the leaderboard—Medic Bags are fairly rare in Frontline mode, and your team will jump on any they see. The bags vanish after they’ve healed a certain amount so you should keep returning to supply bins to stock up, giving your team a constant stream of HP. Heavy armor and the Tenacious perk should keep you alive, as long as you’re not too aggressive. 

The Short Spear Soldier

Expert tosser

Equipment: 

• Armor: 1 head, 1 torso
• Short Spear x 3
• Perks: Huntsman

The Short Spear is my favourite weapon in Mordhau. Its quick stabs are surprisingly powerful: One thrust to the head can end an unarmored foe. Best of all, you can throw it javelin-style by pressing R and it’ll deal even more damage.

With this build, you should play tucked in behind heavily-armored allies, picking off flankers and retreating foes. Because you’re close to your targets you won’t miss many throws: Don’t get too greedy with headshots, because hitting their chest will often be enough. Just remember to retrieve your spears after you throw them, and always keep hold of one for hand-to-hand combat. If you see a teammate getting double-teamed, dive in.

Mordhau sadly doesn’t have Jarate, but you can grab the Hunstman perk to boost your damage against archers. Focus on any that are being a nuisance.

If you’ve come up with an enjoyable, unconventional build, tell me about it in the comments below.

Around 2,000 players were banned from Mordhau this week for using third party software to cheat, but the developer is now overturning some of them. The ban announcement was quickly followed by players claiming they were innocent, not surprisingly, but in this case there were apparently some false positives.

"We are revoking some bans that have been part of this wave," a forum update reads. "Most of the bans revoked are false positives, some of the bans we are revoking are legitimate, so some cheaters will slip through the net this time as we are on the side of caution. We are monitoring the situation and will be adjusting our detection."

Bans that are "blatantly obvious" will stay in place, while players who have been affected but still can't access the game can email the developer or post on the Mordhau forums to get let back into the melee brawls. 

The ban doesn't include all third-party applications, so don't worry if you use things like the brilliant lute bot or other mods that don't give you an advantage. 

Cheers, PCGamesN. 

Mordhau isn’t really set up to be fair. Its marquee PvP modes, Frontline and Battle Royale, both pit disorganized, flailing hordes of buff battle boys against each other. It is brutal, chaotic, and often hilarious. But that chaos can also be frustrating when you’re just trying to enjoy a fair fight. Steven’s guide to playing Mordhau like a bastard is all about how to adapt to Mordhau’s unfair battlefield, but I’m after a purer, more idealistic Mordhau. I want honorable fights unblemished by rogues looking for easy kills. I thought I was out of luck, but then I found my people—the wholesome folk of Mordhau’s duel servers.

Duel servers are a truly wonderful respite from the rest of Mordhau. The servers rotate through a pool of smaller maps suited to lower player counts, and stepping into the open is a feast for the eyes—a landscape of people beating the snot out of each other in organized private duels. Some are watching others fight, waiting for the chance to challenge the winner. Others are adding to the drama of a brawl with some lute music.

“Duel” isn’t a special mode within the game, though it definitely should be. Mordhau players quickly began renting custom servers to set up their own rulesets for dueling. Within just a few days, a proper subculture had formed around a few constant rules: 1v1 duels, no RDM (random deathmatch). Challenges are handed out nonverbally using the “flourish” emote. If your opponent flourishes back, the duel has been accepted, and the battle begins. After a fight, duelists crouch to let challengers know they need time to heal before the next bout. 

We're now a few weeks after launch, and there are always plenty of duel servers running near capacity.

The duel server social experience is the polar opposite of a match of Frontline. Not only do people largely respect the rules of honor (lest they be banned), but they're just nice. I’ve played against so many polite combatants. Even if I’ve just brained an opponent with the hilt of my sword, they still drop a “gf” (good fight) in the chat and even commend me on my chambering skills.

That politeness extends to how duels are fought, too. In Mordhau, mismanaging your stamina to zero forces you to drop your weapon. Usually, this is the opportune moment for another fighter to take an easy kill shot. Stamina management is part of Mordhau’s meta, so it’s fair enough to expect a swift death in the chaos of battle. One time on a duel server, instead of taking off my head with his executioner's blade, my opponent stood still and waited for me to pick up my sword.

I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t want to win that way. They wanted a 100 percent even fight. That is some next-level honor. In our second bout, I came out on top. The win felt a little hollow after he'd had me dead to rights, but I made sure to thank him for his honor.

Duel servers have really helped me hone my general fighting skills. Private 1v1 fights are where I practice different fighting styles and weapons I haven’t mastered yet, getting used to their animations outside the confusion of bigger battles. But duels can also be brutal. In every server, there are at least one or two players far better than everyone else.

They know how to drill right into my mind. They can bait out a foolish attack, punish it with a brutal headshot, and immediately fake their next hit to finish me off. It’s useful to have a quiet space to fight better players and learn their ways. But hey, if I don’t feel like losing eleven humiliating duels in a row, the beauty is that I never have to fight them. Duels require consent from both parties, so I can pick my fights carefully.

Protected by the server’s rules, I've noticed players feel free to try new things and embrace the roleplay. My favorite interaction was only a few nights ago, when I found someone had cordoned off a small corner of the map into a micro arena using the game’s builder class. Pieces of player-made cover lined the perimeter of the fighting area, and a man in a black and white-striped referee uniform was officiating 1v1 fights. Lined up outside of the ring were eager fighters waiting to take on whoever came out on top. Naturally, I jumped in line.

We peered through gaps in the wall to watch the fights unfold. When it was finally my turn, I was up against an intimidating level 31 halberd user who had won the past four fights with barely a scratch. The body of the last challenger, a sword user like me, was still warm at my feet. The ref called on our flourishes to ready up and banged their staff on the ground to launch the duel. I put up a good fight, even got a solid hit in, but the brute successfully baited a badly-timed block from me and I eventually took a fatal hit to the chest.

With emotes, the small crowd of spectators cheered and laughed for my foe’s victory. As I respawned, though, chat gave me a nice little ego boost. A few people said it was a great fight, and that I “almost had them!”

This is my perfect little corner of Mordhau.

Mordhau player MiZiikE has detailed a way to escape the bounds of the Contraband map. It's a harmless trick (which is somewhat contested in the Reddit thread, but it'll probably be patched out anyway) that wouldn't be very notable if it didn't create a beautiful opportunity to confuse unaware players.

It turns out that the virtual camera which provides the scenery behind Mordhau's character select screen exists within the map, in that out-of-bounds area. That's not surprising—if you've modded anything you know these sensible tricks are common—but it does mean that, should you successfully escape the play area, you can hang out in that character select screen playing Despacito.

(If you're wondering how to play songs on the lute easily, there's a bot for that. Chris tried it out, but didn't have much success inspiring his team with Yakety Sax.)

Now play Free Bird.