Mordhau

The game was released on 29 April 2019 for Windows via Steam. Versions for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S were released on 12 July 2023. The game was partially financed through a Kickstarter campaign in 2017, raising nearly $300,000.

• Title — Mordhau • Developer — Triternion • Engine — Unreal Engine 4 • Platforms — Windows PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 Xbox One Xbox Series X/S • Released — Windows 29 April 2019 PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S 12 July 2023 • Genre — Fighting, hack 'n' slash • Modes — Multiplayer • Publisher — Triternion

In Mordhau, players engage in hand-to-hand combat with medieval weapons such as swords, spears, shields, hammers, bows, siege weapons and more. When in close-quarters combat, players can defeat their opponents by utilizing techniques like directional strikes, stabbing, kicking, dodging, blocking, and parrying while watching their health and stamina bars. Players may ride horses in battle. The game can be played in either first person perspective or third person perspective.

Outside of gameplay, the player can edit and create mercenaries for most game modes. When creating or editing, the player can change their mercenary's body type, face, and voice for cosmetic purposes. Editing things like armor, weapons, and perks cost in-game points. Depending on what type of armor the player has it can affect the movement speed of the player like how wearing heavier armor will make the player move slower and cost more points, while there are only three levels of armor there are also cosmetic variations for armor. All weapons point values are roughly determined by the size of weapon as a light dagger would not be as costly as a heavy hammer. The perk system will grant the mercenary various passive abilities at the cost of points, which scale based on how ideally useful the perks are.

• Frontline: In this game mode, up to 64 players form into two teams. Each team starts with 1000 points, and competes with the other team to earn more points by fighting each other, capturing opposing territory and completing the team's objectives. For every enemy defeated, the other team loses a point. Capturing central or enemy territory reduces the opposing team's points. However, completing the team's objective will instantly end the game in favor of whichever team completed their objective. • Invasion: In this game mode, up to 64 players form into two teams, with one team acting as attackers and the other as defenders. The defenders must protect key objectives while the attackers must complete them to advance further. Once objectives are captured, the defenders must fall back to defend the next objective. The game is on a timer, which increases when the attackers secure an objective. The defenders win if the timer runs down to zero, while the attackers win if all objectives are completed within that time. • Battle Royale: In this game mode, 64 players compete against each other in a free-for-all match. When a player is defeated, they will lose the game and not spawn again. The last player standing will be the winner. At the start of the game, all players will spawn without weapons or armor. They must seek out chests containing equipment in order to increase their chance of survival. To avoid stalemates, a ring surrounds the entire map, and will slowly shrink to bring the players closer to each other. The game mode was, however taken down. • Horde: In this game mode, a small team of players is pitted against waves of computer-controlled enemies that will get increasingly harder each wave. Players will start with no weapons or armor, and their health will not regenerate normally. To regenerate health and earn weapons, the player must defeat the enemies and survive the round. Defeating an enemy will award the player a quarter of their health and currency. Completing a wave will refill the players health and award currency. Currency is used to purchase weapons and armor. All purchasable equipment is scattered all over the map, needing the player to have extensive knowledge of places like item locations. On April 29th, 2024, the horde game mode was updated to Demon Horde which took the original horde game mode and added an array of new weapons, maps, and enemies. The Demon Horde update also made changes to inventory systems and the horde skill tree. • Skirmish: This game is in the form of a team deathmatch; however, when a player is defeated, they will not spawn for the rest of the round. The last team standing will win the round. and play will continue until one team has won 7 rounds. As of the removal of Battle Royale, this mode is now available through the Brawl option of the fight menu • Deathmatch: This game mode has everyone fight against each other with no teams or in a free-for-all. The first player to score the target amount of kills will win the game. Many Deathmatch servers are duel-only (private) servers, where two players must emote at each other to initiate a duel, the emote used most often is the Flourish emote which is a basic sword twirl. Ever since the removal of Battle Royale, Deathmatch is available through the Brawl option of the fight menu • Team Deathmatch: This game mode is similar to deathmatch, except that the player will form two even teams and will compete for the most kills of players on the other team. As with Deathmatch and Skirmish, it is available through the Brawl option of the fight menu • Swordgame: This game mode is similar to deathmatch, except that each player will start with the same weapon and will change or improve to other weapons with each subsequent kill of an enemy, each new weapon is unlocked only by earning a kill with the weapon you most recently upgraded to. In order to win, a player must get a kill with each of the 20 weapons provided in the game mode.

The game was built using Unreal Engine 4. Marko Grgurovič, a Slovene PhD student of computer science at the University of Primorska, began development of Mordhau alone. With no experience in game development, Grgurovič had begun building a prototype in Unity called Project Slasher. After working on Project Slasher with another person for two years, the team decided to remake the entire project, as it was not up to their standards. During the next three years, Grgurovič was joined by other programmers, graphic designers, and animators from all over the world, many of whom enjoyed playing video games like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and wanted to make something similar. This led to them founding the company Triternion, and producing first versions. In this time period, the development team switched from using Unity to Unreal Engine, and renamed the project to Mordhau. In March 2017, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for development and achieved fundraising goals in less than 24 hours. The game was released on 29 April 2019 on Steam. It is scheduled to launch for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

Mordhau became a success, selling 200,000 copies in less than a week, then exceeding 500,000 copies sold by 7 May. It reached the top of the Steam sales charts. Triternion apologized after its servers could not sustain the massive influx of players. About a month after its release, Mordhau had sold 1 million copies; to celebrate, the developers released a new map alongside new weapons and cosmetics.