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Slovenia-based indie studio Triternion are working on an ambitious yet promising medieval warfare simulator of sorts, and its focused entirely on bloody multiplayer combat. Titled simply Mordhau, the game focuses on massive-scale battles where there’s lots of blood, and lots of weapons.

The game’s battles range in scale from one-versus-one duels, all the way to huge, open-environment battles with up to 64 players. Naturally, the larger battles include frivolous things like siege engines, horses, and naturally – castles to besiege and eventually, storm into.

Featured above, you can view a gameplay trailer for the game, which gives a nice overview of the various forms of combat you can expect in the action game. The team describes the combat as “skill-based” and “free-flowing” that is “easy to learn, but hard to master.

Here are the game’s key features:

• Freedom of choice
  Create your suit of armor: pick from gloves, arms, shoulders, chest pieces, legs, boots, helmets, and more. Color each piece to your liking and select a metal tint. Be anything from a viking to a crusader, or even a sharpshooting archer.
• Skill-based melee combat
  Chain your attacks into combos, punish your opponents with quick counters, push them away with kicks, trick them with feints, grip your polearm closer to the head, use real halfswording techniques — and much, much more.
• Endless customization
  Smith your sword out of individual pieces: pick from blades, crossguards and grips. Want a mace instead? No problem, pick your head and handle and choose the wood type. There are thousands of possible combinations.
• Always varied battles
  Our combat system is designed for fights ranging from duels all the way to large open battles of up to 64 players with castles to be stormed, and fields to be covered in blood.

The game is being constructed within Unreal Engine 4, and was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter.

Its name is a German word, that literally translates to “murder-stroke” or “murder-strike,” a fighting style where you invert a sword and smash your opponent’s head in with its pommel or crossguard. Yep, that happens in the game too (if you watched the trailer you’d get a little hint of that).

Mordhau is still in early development, however the plan is to release the game for PC via Steam sometime next year. Other operating systems and platforms could follow, but there are no plans currently. For now, make sure to check out the game’s official website.

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