Member
Alright, so this has been bugging me since the first closed beta (I wasn't part of that but I saw plenty of footage.)
Most of the weapon and armour designs in this game are spot-on. I mean, it's a little ridiculous to have half the Raider class almost completely unarmoured with big horned helmets. but you know what? I get it. That's fantasy. People think "viking" and they see a big burly bare-chested dude with ram-skull horns on his helmet. I dig it...
But good god do the Warden's longswords annoy me, for one reason: They are almost perfect, but they're way too damn thick!
Considering all the attention to detail in this game in making the weapons look more-or-less realistic (especially things like the katana, naginata and the battleaxes) the Warden's longsword looks less like a sword and more like a giant club. They're the right length and the right shape but they're about four times thicker than they should be.
Real longswords are usually no thicker than a half-inch at their thickest point (close to the guard) and average out around a quarter-inch around the middle. The tips of longswords are sometimes thin enough to be used as scalpels. And considering the rest of the weapons in the game look a lot closer to their real-life counterparts, the Warden's giant foam LARP sword looks very out of place.
Please, somebody on the modelling team, thin out those longsword blades? Just a little bit? These are swords for crying out loud! Not bludgeoning sticks! You couldn't swing one of those lumps of steel around with any real control, let alone actually cut anything with them!
Here's what I mean:
Please, Ubisoft. Stop issuing your wardens with foam LARP swords.
Senior Member
Don't bother, me and others brought it up countless times, all you get is other people whining how there is no reason to complain and how it's great that way. Don't ask, I have no clue.
Member
Never going to see it? I main Warden, so I see this literally all the time while I'm playing...Originally Posted by Sky-Sweeper Go to original post
As for "realistic" vs "cartoony". I would understand that argument... If the other classes also played by those rules.
Literally every other weapon in this game - From the Nodachis, Katanas, Battleaxes, Spears, Naginata, even the damn Flails, they're all realistically proportioned! All the weapons look almost exactly like their real-life counterparts! Even the Peacekeeper's Arming Sword and Dagger are properly proportioned with the right width blade.
The Warden is the only one who has an improperly proportioned weapon. So even if you prefer the bigger, less realistic designs, they still look out of place!
Either give everybody stupidly huge, ludicrous fantasy weapons, or give them all realistically proportioned ones. Don't give all the classes realistic items and then dump a single one with foam LARP swords. It just looks dumb and out of place.
Not to mention that the swords only problem is the thickness of the blade. Everything else about them is realistic! The length, shape, design, hilt length, sword width, guard width, blade details, they're all 100% accurate... except for the thickness. Which just makes that one unusual detail stand out all the more.
Member
it's to make the sword easier to see when in game and fighting.
If you make models too thin they can disappear because of lack of resolution and how AA computes the pixels.
So i doubt it's because they don't know it should be thinner...
Do you got any examples of the other weapons you say have proper porportions? Like ingame footage vs real ones?
It could also be that the thickness of those weapons already being thick enough to make them readable in-game.
Member
@Longswords are too thick
No woman has ever said that.
Member
I don't buy the whole "they need to be that thick to read properly on-screen" because, once again, none of the other swords in the game look like that and they all read just fine. But seeing as you bought up the Peacekeeper's sword, here's a quick comparison:Originally Posted by K-mori Go to original post
See the difference in thickness? The Peacekeeper's sword actually looks like a sharp blade for cutting, but you'd need to stack at least 5 of them on top of eachother to even come close to the thickness of the Warden's sword.
For reference, the Warden has a "longsword" Here's a few pictures of what a real longsword looks like, thickness wise:
Compare that to the image of the Warden above there, and you'll see what I mean by "too thick"
Regarding the other classes, though, here's a quick run down of their weapons compared to the real-life comparisons:
Not showing the spear classes simply because there aren't any good pictures of the full spears in use. But rest assured, those are all pretty accurate, too.
What makes this even more baffling, however, is that in the very first For Honor trailer, the longswords they show the knights using look perfect!
Hell, look at this pre-alpha footage they showed off, even in this we can see the longsword's thickness looking a lot more realistic than they do in the current build!
But somewhere in the transition from alpha to beta, some idiot on the design team who I can only assume has never seen a real sword before, decided to turn the sleek, sharp longswords into ugly, fat clubs. And frankly the more I look into it, the more annoying it becomes.
Member
my point was to see the thickness of the others ingame compared to their real-life counterpart.
I was merely suggesting a reason for why they might be to thick...
On those pictures I can't really see if the nodachi or katana has the right thickness to them or not which you claim they are.
and no I don't buy the "they don't know how they look so they went from this that LOOKED RIGHT (which shows they know how thick they are supposed to be) to this ugly thing".
if Warden just angled that sword in the last pic so the edge is facing the camera it would look like it would be too thin...
Not saying the thickness that exist now is right either, they could probably make them smaller, but that last pic would probably be too thin even if it's correct in their real-life counterpart.
Games have different barriers than real-life when it comes to thickness...
If you play on low resolution and use AA that sword in the last pic would most likely disappear... and having swords readable in ALL resolution and AA settings outweighs realism.
Member
I thought different skins have different thickness
but yeah, they are too thick.
Member
Again, if it's a readability issue for lower-resolutions... Why is the Warden the only one who is affected? Of the 9 currently playable classes, more than half of them use a sword of some kind. And yet 4 of those have swords that look much closer to their real-life counterparts. Only the Warden is affected by the "foam LARP sword" syndrome. Why is their sword readability somehow more important than the others? Sure, you could make the argument that the Warlord's primarily going to be using their shield, and the Peacekeeper dual wields, but both the Kensei and Orochi are sword-only classes, just like Warden, and yet their weapons look far more accurately sized.Originally Posted by K-mori Go to original post
Now, I'm in agreement that keeping them thick enough to be readable is important, but with the Warden they have over-compensated to such an insane degree that they've actively made the sword look non-functional! They didn't even give it a distal-taper to try and help the look, they just gave them a big, fat, uniformly thick metal club and said "oh, sure, that's a totally usable sword."
Also, I just have to point out that when you're actually fighting in For Honor, you're going to be looking more at your enemies movements and the direction of the "incoming attack!" arrows than you are at their actual weapon. And even on low resolutions, you should be able to see a thinner sword that close up.
If your resolution is so low and so poor that somebody's weapon literally vanishes if they turn it sideways, then I suspect you've got bigger readability issues than people's weapons: Like, for instance, the in-game text.
Ultimately, I do get that from a technical standpoint they need to keep them "visible". And I'm fine with that. But my problem is that they've already gotten it right on four separate occasions! Only the Warden has a stupidly thick sword, and there is zero reason or justification for it.
Member
Visibility argument doesn't hold much water as :
a- Other heroes in game have much more slender weapons
b- Properly proportion swords were made in many games such as Mount&Blade series and even Witcher to a degree. They are visible just fine.
Nodachi and katana are pretty thin in game, much closer to real life counterparts than Warden's L(arp)ongsword is. Also disappointing is the fact that Katana, Nodachi and Naginata are all pristince looking without a chip or burr on their blades, shined to perfection, wherease the Knight and Viking weapons are a thick mass with cracks and chips all around.
Choices like these are very disappointing for me.
