Broad Sword immerses you in the spectacle of large fantasy battles, where skilled troops and strategic decisions shape kingdoms. Command entire formations, leading your troops through relentless hack-and-slash encounters to conquer objectives, vanquish foes, and claim ultimate victory! Varied troop types offer distinct fighting styles and weapons, allowing for diverse playstyles. Will you anchor a battle line with spearmen, shatter defenses with mighty great swords, or rain arrows upon your enemies? Capture spawn points to gather your forces and secure objectives to obtain victory!
Greetings commanders!
Since the last update I’ve totally overhauled the action system to allow for more in depth combat mechanics and better game feel. The core combat system provides each unit with a primary, secondary, defensive, and commander ability. Most attacks have chainable combos as well. The new ability sets for each of the 5 core archetypes are as follows:
Sword and Shield - Emphasizes survivability and defensive skills while holding its own in combat.
Skirmisher - The skirmisher’s kit emphasizes mobility and hit and run tactics. Their melee attacks don’t slow them down as they dip in and out of combat with ease.
Great Weapons - A damaged focused build using massive weapons to dominate the battlefield
Pikemen - Another defensive class that uses long spears to keep threats at arm's length.
Archer - As a ranged focused class Archers thrive engaging targets from a distance.
In addition to the action system rework, formations have also had stances added to them allowing greater control over the troops you command. Currently you can choose between tight formations where your troops will maintain their position and mimic any abilities their commander performs, or a loose formation where they will find and independently engage targets near the formation. The current unit type and battlefield situation dictate the best option for any given moment. Pikemen for example benefit from maintaining a tight formation with spears extended while skirmishers benefit from piling in and flanking their targets.
Swordsmen fight independently while Pikemen stay in formation
There have been some visual updates as well like commander's attacks having a visible “swoosh” for better combat readability, animation updates, some UI cleanup along with archers finally having quivers.
Next Steps involve ongoing polish and refinement along with starting to build out additional game modes like a wave survival siege mode, or a map based grand campaign mode. The tutorial will need a revamp teaching the new and updated mechanics, but that will wait until the mechanics are more finalized and design locked.
That's it for now so make sure to try out the new update and wish list the game if you haven't yet.
Broadsword now features a playable tutorial, a VS mode with 5 fantasy races on 3 maps. Read the full update for more details and don't forget to Wishlist...
I'm happy to announce that the page for my first Steam game is now live! Make sure to wish list it to receive future updates including when the playable...
The playable alpha demo for my upcoming Steam game BroadSword gives you a battlefield level view of a large fantasy battle. Command formations of units...