Video Game / Mordhau

GET THOSE BASTAAAAAAAARDS!

Mordhau is a medieval melee multiplayer game developed by Triternion Studios. It's a Spiritual Successor to Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, specifically made by veterans of the game to correct upon its flaws and modernize it.

Players have access to a sizable arsenal of medieval weapons, shields and armor from multiple ages, each with its own stats and style. Combat consists of a variety of directional swings and stabs, which can be combined with parries, feints, ripostes, chambers and more, all of which can be combined in almost any manner conceivable. The combat system can be very difficult to pick up due to its complexity and lethality, but leads to even small skirmishes having their depth and some impressive, practically cinematic duels among skilled players.

It was released in April 29th 2019.

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Examples of Tropes in this Video Game

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Bladed weapons cannot cut through plate armors in real life. In fact, swords were mainly used as sidearms rather than primary ones. However, it would be very pointless having such a huge variety of weapons in the game if only 20% of it is viable.
  • The various two-handed swords are slower than they are in real life, and all the weapon attacks have various tells and telegraphs that would probably get you killed if you tried them on a real medieval battlefield. However, a game with realistic weapon speeds and no tells wouldn't be very fair or balanced, so the game deviates from real life to preserve Rule of Fun.
• All Swords Are the Same: Nope. Each of the dozen-or-so swords in the game have different stats and animations. Don't expect a longsword to handle exactly the same as a bastard sword.
• Anachronism Stew: The developers intentionally let the game's setting and time period vague so that players have more freedom with their customizations. This leads into situations like vikings fighting side-by-side with a knight in Gothic armor, wielding rapiers and zweihanders, against landsknechte with throwing axes, among other things. Correspondingly, players' making use of Virtual Paper Doll are able to reproduce characters from all sorts of settings and time periods.
• An Arm and a Leg: Sharp killing strikes are bound to remove a limb if they hit one. And stepping on a Bear Trap will kill you if you don't have leg armor by way of removing everything below the ankle.
• Anti-Cavalry: While polearms in general have the reach to at least try and counter cavalry, the Billhook in particular is made with this in mind, by way of it violently yanking the rider off their horse when it makes contact. The thus floored and heavily disoriented rider is usually easy prey after that.
• Armor Is Useless: Not in this game. Having good armor can mean the difference between dying from a single stab to taking dozens of hits without dying. Of course, wearing that much plate will slow your character's movement speed. However, actions such as weapon swing speeds are not influenced by this, meaning a fully-armored character wielding one weapon can attack and defend at the same rate as a lightly armored opponent with the same weapon. It also matters where you have armor - going without a helmet will leave you vulnerable to One-Hit Kill blows to the head, while bear traps will dismember anyone lacking leg armor.
• Artistic License – History: The equipment available in game is jumbled together from roughly 1000 years of history for the sake of variety. Apart from this, there are some minor inaccuracies here and there in regards to the equipment itself:
  • The visored barbute and its derivatives are based on erroneous Victorian reconstructions rather than actual historical armor.
  • The eye slits on the Flat Templar and Round Templar helmets are far too big compared to historical examples, a common error which most of the other in-game helmets actually avoid.
  • Painted armor pieces are among the most expensive and prestigious in the game, but in real life painted armor was usually mass-produced and cheap — paint could be used to hide imperfections, while removing the need for polishing. This meant that plain metal was seen as a mark of quality and personal status, due to the expense of maintaining it. However, custom-painted armor is seen by modern audiences as more distinctive, so the pieces are considered more valuable.
  • The in-game representation of the coat of plates has the plates bare on the outside of the garment, rather than having an extra layer of padding over them as in real life. A more accurate version was added in a later update, and two more variants were added in patch 18 and 25.
  • The Wedge Armet helmet is fictional, and was put into the game as a tribute to the Lawbringer class from For Honor.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Grad and Feitoria's second halves on Frontline mode take the best-scoring players of the blue team and reassign them to special classes representing the leaders the Free Guard are protecting - Grad has a commander and dungeon warden, while Feitoria has a trio of noblemen.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The latter half of Castello, Feitoria and Grad's Invasion mode sees the Iron Company players trying to kill the commander and warden (or in the case of Feitoria, the three nobles) of the besieged fortresses. Both are heavily armored and armed, have tons of health, and tower head-and-shoulders above their subordinates. Furthermore, both of these roles are handed to the two players of the Free Guard team who had the highest scores at the end of the match's first half, doubling as Asskicking Leads to Leadership.
• Awesome, but Impractical: On Grad defense, the Iron Guard's commander is a behemoth, easily able to cleave through hordes of enemies, and can take a fair share of damage to boot. Facing him in melee is a death sentence - he can damage through a parry, he can't be flinched, and you're likely to be swarmed by his allies as they rush to defend the objective. So what's the catch? He's slow. Incredibly slow - and with no cover aside from destructible fortifications, he can easily be overwhelmed by a rain of arrows and fire pots. Sure, those arrows deal minimal damage. But when the entire enemy team can freely pepper your giant self as you're boxed in by fire and blue knights? Those arrows start to become far more than just "annoying".
• Bad with the Bone: The Dungeon map has numerous human bones lying about, including tibias (one-handed), femurs (two-handed) and skulls (thrown). These weapons deal a surprising amount of damage, with the femur dealing damage comparable to the maul.
• Bear Trap: Players can lay bear traps. It will incapacitate and heavily injure the caught enemy, although they will outright kill any enemy with no leg armor, since it dismembers their feet instead.

• Bilingual Bonus: The Raider voice includes “Buaidh no bàs!” as a warcry - Scottish Gaelic for “Victory or death!” Another Raider line is "And I had you down for being glaikit." Glaikit being a Scots word meaning slow or stupid.
• Boom, Headshot!: Strikes to an unarmored head is almost always fatal. Heavier helmets will reduce the damage, but even then certain weapons can still kill in one hit.
• Cherry Tapping: One special emote while wielding a longsword has your character unscrew the pommel and throw it for minimal damage. You can also pick up and fling turds, which is actually capable of killing someone at minimal health. One achievement requires you to kill another player using the tutorial's training sword - a blunted blade that has the lowest damage stat of any melee weapon in the game. And in a more accidental and embarrassing manner, even thrown medkits cause a single point of damage, so it's not unknown for people to kill their heavily injured teammates with a thrown medkit.
• Confusion Fu: A vital skill for duelists, since being predictable will neuter your offense at best and usually get you killed. Duelists often have to resort to a repertoire of feints, morphing different attacks into one another and hitbox manipulation (drags, accels, footwork, targeting, etc.) to avoid damage and inflict it in turn. Slower weapons also have a variant in that it's very easy to mistime parries against them in the heat of battle; the maul and the heavy handaxe are especially guilty of this.
• Cool Helmet: There's a dazzling number of historically-accurate cranial coverings to chose from when customizing your mercenary, and some of them can become fairly ornate in design. The iconic greathelm is a popular choice, available in a variety of design styles and accessorized variants — including mantles, paint jobs and (as of Patch 18) bullhorn crests.
• Counter-Attack: There are many ways to perform this in game. Chambering is mirroring an enemy attack (i.e. left horizontal slash vs. right horizontal slash, or a stab vs. a stab) with the correct timing will deflect the opponent's attack while letting your strike go right through. Ripostes are a different style of counter, where you can follow a successful parry with a quicker, unfeintable swing/stab. It is also possible to dodge through various means, from stepping out of range to ducking under weapon strikes, to even leaning the camera to sway one's head and torso just out of harm's way. Such a dodge can allow you to attack while the enemy recovers.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • The only way for one-handed bladed weapons to defeat an armored opponent. Some, like the Cleaver and Arming Sword, are better at delivering those thousand cuts in a timely manner than others. Somewhat inverted for the Carving Knife, as it is without a doubt the fastest weapon in the game, and cuts remarkably quickly for very low damage; however, its attacks cannot interrupt an enemy, so it's very easy to knock a carving knife user aside by simply swinging your actual weapon into their face.
    • Downplayed as of patch 26, as the arming sword and bastard sword are now capable of killing a heavily armored opponent in three hits to the torso.
  • In Horde mode, all the enemies have access to an attack in which they pull out a turd and throw it at you, with no apparent limit. It does minimal damage, but they only start doing this when they can't reach your current location, which usually means you will be completely surrounded by angry enemies that will all start pelting you; it's not unheard of to end up lethally buried in crap in a matter of seconds.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: In the game Mordhau, you can, in fact, use a mordhau grip with longswords.
• Elite Mooks: Later waves of Horde mode have them.
  • Enemies with black armor are much tougher than common enemies. Their armor is even more durable than the toughest armor that players can use, and their weapons hit harder.
  • Ogres are very big, and they have a huge amount of health. Their weapon is a huge club, and they smash you really hard with it.
• Evil Laugh: Some of the voicesets' laughs can be pretty malevolent. Raider and Barbarian often sound absolutely bloodthirsty, and Cruel voices sound appropriately malevolent. The German voice added in the continental voice pack DLC is particularly rough and vicious.
• Excuse Plot: There is some kind of war, and two bands of mercenaries known as the Iron Company (Red) and the Free Guard (Blue) are fighting in it. The map Grad has a Lord on the blue side, who may be the one hiring the Free Guard to fight for him, but as far as the players are concerned, they're here to fight and get paid.
• Field of Blades: The Mountain map has several stuck swords on the snow. You can pull out and use them, but they are weaker than normal swords because they are broken and rusty.
• Fragile Speedster: Wearing little to no armor makes you vulnerable, but it also makes you faster.
• Friend or Foe?: Your attacks will hurt and kill your teammates too, and you'll suffer a point reduction as consequence. This is especially common when players use big weapons with wide swing arcs in packed melees. Siege weapons can also kill allies very easily if misused, particularly the catapult's area-of-effect projectiles. Probably because of this, a "Friendly" perk exists to make players with it deal less and take less damage from friendly fire. It was later removed along with the Tenacious perk from the perk list and instead implemented into the game automatically.
• Glass Cannon: Any low-armored player with a high-damage weapon is this. Notable examples include the maul and the zweihander, and certain polearms; many powerful weapons have high point costs that leave less room for armor and perks.
• Gone Horribly Right: A downplayed meta example. The game was met with such success that the developers could not anticipate this many players joining their server, causing it to pretty much melt down for several days after launch.
• Hammer Hilt:
  • Half-swording can be done with greatswords and zweihänders to make stabbing and blocking easier and make sure swings don't get caught in a corridor's walls.
  • The titular mordhau technique done with longswords and estocs, and as usual involves grabbing the sword by the blade and smashing people's faces in with the pommel and crossguard — practical when fighting someone with tier-3 heavy armor that'll shrug off a blade.
• Heal Thyself: Bandages are a cheap way to regain your health, if you can't wait for the Regenerating Health to kick in (or, in Horde mode, if you can't risk playing offensively to regen through damage-dealing). Medic bags are even more effective and can be thrown on the ground to be shared with other players.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Not wearing a helmet will let your character appear more distinctive on the battlefield, but a well-placed blow from any weapon will lob your head right off. In fact, several of the most sought-after items in game are helmets, which players wear as a point of pride as well as protection.
  • This trope also applies to protective visors - Helmets with their visors pulled up to show the character's face are only counted as medium armor, while the exact same helmet with the visor pulled down is counted as heavy armor for the more complete protection it provides.
• Horse Archer: With the exception of crossbows, all missile weapons are perfectly usable on horseback. Unfortunately, the damage of your missiles is not improved by your horse's momentum, and the fact that mounted characters are locked into facing forward makes any kind of Parthian shot impossible.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon:
  • The titular mordhau grip, which involves your character holding a longsword by its blade and hitting enemies with the pommel or crossguard. Especially useful against heavily-armored enemies, as blunt strikes go through armor better than cuts or thrusts. This is actually a case of Truth in Television: the mordhau is a real technique that was taught in several schools of fencing, such as the German Lichtenauer or the Italian Fiore styles.
  • Similarly, greatswords and the even larger zweihanders allow for half-swording, holding the sword by its blade half-way like a spear to facilitate stabbing. This stance also allows greatswords to be used in narrow areas more efficiently, as shorter swings are less likely to get caught on obstacles such as walls and doorways.
• Infernal Retaliation: There's an achievement for killing an enemy while you've been set on fire.
• Joke Character:
  • Picking the Peasant perk restricts your gear selection to farming tools and other Improvised Weapons a medieval serf would likely have access to. On top of that, the only armor a peasant mercenary can wear is a one-point helmet (i.e: a hat) of their choice.
  • Introduced in patch 19 are the Tank and Dwarf perks, the first perks that visibly affect your character's appearance. While the Tank perk is perfectly viable, the Dwarf perk gives you a significantly smaller hitbox in exchange for taking much more damage than normal. Furthermore, Dwarfs are fairly slow, making the perk a general hindrance. This doesn't prevent you from seeing the numerous players in any given match who run around the battlefield as midgets. Further still, players can combine both Tank and Dwarf to make themselves incredibly slow, a good bit shorter, and still take 10% more damage from being hit.
• Joke Item: There are several unorthodox weapons, and there are achievements tied to killing people with most of them:
  • The lute. You can use it as a regular instrument, or flip it around and cave someone's skull in.
  • The shawm. Like the lute, it can be used to play music, or it can be thrown like a javelin.
  • Rocks, which can be thrown as projectiles and are capable of killing people with tiny amounts of damage. A variant is the horse turd, which is dropped by horses and is used as the primary ranged attack of Horde Mode enemies.
  • Characters with the Peasant perk (itself a Joke Character) can arm themselves with a Frying Pan of Doom as a blunt weapon.
  • The training sword, a blunt-edged blade which is the weakest proper weapon in the entire game.
  • The Mountain map is host to several rusted and broken swords embedded in the snow, which can be grabbed by players and swung around as very weak melee weapons.
  • The carving knife. Without a doubt the fastest weapon in the game, but its hits cannot interrupt an opponent's swings, meaning anyone who tries to apply Death of a Thousand Cuts will likely get their head knocked off before they reach cut number three. The only way it can quickly kill someone is by throwing it into a person's head, which kills a person without a helmet instantly.
  • The map "Crossroads" features carrots hidden in the grass that can be used as melee weapons. They function similarly to the carving knife, but are the only weapon in the game that deals zero damage with certain attacks (stabs to the head and swings to the legs). Hilariously, they can be couched like a lance on horseback, where they can actually kill an opponent.
• Kill It with Fire: The fire bomb can set the ground ablaze, dealing rapidly accumulating damage in that area for about ten seconds.
  • The fire urn is a special throwable available only in Horde mode which covers three times as much ground as the fire bomb with its fire effect, and for a longer time.
  • The toolbox can be used to build a firepit that allows archers to light their arrows on fire. Catapults boulders can also be lit on fire.
• Large and in Charge: The Commander and Warden of Grad, the three nobles of Feitoria, and the two nobles of Castello stand head-and-shoulders taller than the Free Guard mercenaries fighting to protect them.
• Large Ham: Pretty much everyone; every voiceset available for your builds gets some pretty bombastic voice commands. The default keybinding even reserves a button for warcries.
  "Dodge THIS you bastaaAAAAAAARD!"
  "You're terrible! LOOK MEN, LOOK HOW TERRIBLE HE IS!"
  "Fathom this you imbecile: I'M. ON. YOUR. SIDE!"
  "AAH, BUGGER OFF YE SACK OF SHYTE!"
  "YOUR SKULL, IS EVEN SOFTER THAN YOUR BELLY!"
  "YOUR BONES ARE SOFTER THAN A NEWBORN CHILD'S!"
• Lethal Joke Character: If you're really good at defending yourself by parrying, Mercenaries with the peasant perk easily can become this. They can't wear any real armor, but their weapons can deal a surprising amount of damage. Namely, the Scythe is extremely lethal against lightly armored opponents, but does little against medium armor and next-to-nothing against heavy armor. Meanwhile, the sledgehammer is by far the slowest weapon in the game, does mediocre damage, and unlike the maul cannot be thrown, but it will completely drain an opponent’s stamina in just a few hits, and its slow speed ends up making it quite unpredictable.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • The training sword. Pathetic damage - but chambers cost no stamina. Meet every attack with a chamber, disarm your opponent, and kill them either with their own weapon or cutting them down with a weapon purposely built not to kill. Surpisingly effective, as feints and, to a lesser degree, morphs, are easily countered by going for the chamber.
  • The carrots found on Crossroads. They suffer the same drawbacks as the carving knife, and can't even deal damage with certain attacks. However, you can build and repair fortifications with them (and they're more effective at it than any other tool), and you can couch them on horseback the same way as a polearm or lance. Yes, you can use a carrot to run down and skewer enemies no less effectively than with a spear.
• Life Drain: The Bloodlust perk rapidly heals a player to full health after killing an enemy in melee. Without the perk, killing an enemy in melee grants 25 HP, helping to reward successful kills and keep players fighting for longer. In Horde Mode, this is the primary way players heal.
• Literal Disarming: If you have the Flesh Wound perk, it's possible to have your arm cut off and keep fighting for a few seconds.
• Limited Loadout: You can have up to three weapons or items at a time, with the fourth slot reserved for your bare fists.
• Lodged-Blade Recycling: You can reuse swords, arrows, and throwing axes that lodged into characters. Pulling out lodged weapons from still-living characters will never hurt them, and doing this to an enemy player happens to be an achievement.
• Low Fantasy: Ogres and goblins exist in the Horde mode, establishing that certain fantasy elements exist in the world, although while the goblin does look like a traditional fantasy creature, the 'ogres' take the form of oversized human models.
• Man on Fire: Stepping into an open flame, such as those created by a fire bomb, will set your character on fire for a few seconds and deal damage over time. You can get an achievement by killing someone while still on fire.
• Mighty Glacier: An inevitability of wearing both heavy armor and heavy armament. Your footwork will be suboptimal, and you won't get too many swings in, but the enemy is going to have to put a lot of effort into taking you down if they didn't bring something blunt and heavy, giving you more chances to take them down.
• Molotov Cocktail: Firebombs are a medieval version, likely based off of the Greek Fire used by the Byzantine Empire. The effect is the same, setting a small chunk of terrain on fire and burning people alive.
• Money Sink: Unlocking some of weapon skins or armor pieces takes a ridiculous amount of gold, sometimes ranging in the tens of thousands. For comparison, unlocking weapons themselves only needs 300 to 500 gold. Although, given that there are no microtransactions in the game, the only thing required of the player is to fight in battles and earn their battle pay.
• Never My Fault: The Raider and Cruel personalities:
  Raider (Sorry): "Have you seen the size of this fucking sword? Of course you're gonna get clobbered if you stand next to me ya tit!"
  Cruel (Retreat): "Your incompetence has routed us! Fall back!"
  Cruel (Sorry): "It wasn't me, it was him!"
  Cruel (Sorry): "You DARE get in MY way?!"
• Nintendo Hard: The sheer complexity and high skill ceiling inevitably means that, even when you have players willing to tutor you for a while, you should expect to get your ass kicked for a long, long while in both Frontline and in duels before you start catching up.
• No Fair Cheating: Horde mode enemies can't jump and don't have great pathfinding, which means there are places in a given map they cannot reach. Hiding in one of those places, however, may under certain circumstances lead to them pelting you with minimal-damage turds until you get back down or die. They almost never do this otherwise, despite apparently having an infinite supply of crap.
• Off with His Head!: Unsurprisingly common, what with all the swords and axes being swung around in a typical match. Having this happen to yourself three times in a single match is an achievement.
• One-Hit Kill: A strike from the maul can deliver instant death to any enemy if it hit them in the head. The attack speed of it is quite slow, though. Being hit by a catapult or ballista is also as appropriately lethal as you'd expect.
• One-Hit Polykill: Possible with big enough weapons, though a little hard without getting wrecked in the first place by the fact you're either outnumbered or about to hit an ally. Killing two enemies with a single swing of a melee weapon is an achievement. Ballistae, for their part, do it all the time; they go right through people and don't stop until they hit terrain, no matter how many body parts they skewer on the way.
• Only a Flesh Wound: The appropriately-named Flesh Wound perk enables your character to survive for five seconds after taking a fatal blow. As the game notes, limb integrity during this time is not guaranteed.
• Parrying Bullets: A well-timed parry or strike can swat a projectile out of the air. Doing the latter even nets you an achievement.
  • Even bullets shot from the 1411 handgun can be parried.
• Percussive Maintenance: Engineers build things from the ground up and fix them just by hitting them with their smithing hammers.
• Point Build System: Creating a custom mercenary gives you a total of 16 points to be distributed between perks, weapons, and armor choices.
• Primitive Clubs: The Heavy Branch and Club are simple branches of one- and two-handed size, respectively, available only to Peasant builds. They are more effective than one'd think, and some players enjoy making full-on caveman builds dressed in the most ragged clothing available beat armored knights into submission.
• Purposely Overpowered: The 1411 handgun is very powerful given the medieval setting, because it's a firearm. It's also a admin-exclusive spawn, so the average game likely won't see it.
• Ragdoll Physics: A minor, but attractive selling point is the heavy ragdolling of corpses. Strike someone with a maul full-on, and they'll fly a foot or two into the ground. Hit someone on horseback hard enough to kill however, and be prepared to see some ridiculous aerial stunts. And if siege weaponry is involved, things get sillier.
• Scratch Damage: Even very weak weapons like carving knives or training swords can deal some damage to fully armored knights.
• Shoot the Bullet: It's possible to deflect an incoming catapult projectile by shooting it with an arrow. Tests are still being done to see if it's possible to deflect arrows with arrows.
• Shout-Out: Several.
  • The "Flesh Wound" perk is obvious one for the black knight of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
  • Kicking the enemy to make them fall to death will earn you the achievement "This isn't Sparta".
  • Killing two enemies in one stroke from a melee weapon will earn you the achievement "Guts".
  • As promised during the trailer, you can unscrew your sword's pommel and throw it at your weakened opponent to end him rightly.
• Sickening "Crunch!": If a player kills with a headshot, a metallic crunch will sound out. This happens even if performed with a ranged weapon, against a target far away enough that the player shouldn't be able to hear the result. Meanwhile, the maul is uniquely capable of delivering a One-Hit Kill by reducing someone's head, helmet and all, to a chunky red paste. The resulting splatter is notorious among the playerbase for being quite loud and distinctive.
• Siege Engines: You can use catapults to throw stone projectiles afar. Thrown rocks cause AoE damage. There's also ballistae, in both the large map-based and small engineer-built varieties; both put a lot of hurt on anyone they hit.
• Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: The game system lets you thrust with hammers and axes, or slash with spears and thrusting swords. Obviously this is far from the most effective use of the weapon.
• Smoke Out: Smoke bombs can be used to hide yourself and allies from ranged attacks.
• Spikes of Doom: People with toolboxes can lay these down, oriented diagonally in a direction and made out of sharpened logs. Running into these is going to hurt, and the faster you run into them the more they hurt; sprinting or galloping into them is almost always fatal.
• Stance System: Pressing the R button lets you access an alternate grip mode for certain weapons. In most cases, the alternate grip shortens the weapon's reach in exchange for faster attacks. Exceptions include bastard swords, which switch from one-handed to two-handed grip, while longswords can access the aforementioned mordhau grip, and Greatswords can be carried half-sworded to increase stabbing effectiveness; the Heavy Handaxe can also be turned around to use its hammer side, the Billhook can be set to push or pull on a stab and do the opposite on a swing, and the more swing-appropriate polearms can be flipped around to access the other side's weapon. Averted with most one-handed weapons, which are thrown instead.
• Take That!: One available voice line is “And they say chivalry is dead!”, a not-so-subtle jab at Chivalry: Medieval Warfare’s dwindling playerbase.
• Taunt Button: You can choose and perform various taunts from taunt menu. Also, there is a dedicated key for shouting battle cries.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: It deals a good amount of damage, at the very least, provided you can actually land it.
• Truth in Television: The spear-and-shield combo is hated by many players for being hard to counter, but the combo is really that good in real life. The spear is not only better at penetrating armor, but it's also far easier to use and has a longer reach than most swords. Couple that with a shield and you have an extremely deadly warrior that can defend himself just as well.
• Unbreakable Weapons: Weapons in this game will never break. This can become quite ridiculous on some occasions, especially when you are parrying Zweihänder strikes with your wooden quarterstaff.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Anyone going without a helmet will find themselves dying from a single strike to the head an awful lot.
  • Swinging wildly in a crowded melee tends to result in you striking and even killing teammates, while doing so in tight quarters will likely get your weapon caught on walls and other obstacles.
  • While you can perform swings and thrusts with any weapon, many weapons are better suited for one technique. Stabbing somebody with the flat head of an axe, for instance, will do negligible damage.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted. Players can pick up and equip weapons from dead enemies freely, and the Scavenger perk causes slain enemies to drop all of their items instead of just the one they were wielding upon death.
  • Played straight for boss enemies of Horde mode. They have exclusive weapons like "Great Maul" or "Ogre Club", but you can't pick up them. Other enemies use perfectly normal weapons that you can use, but you still need to find and buy them; their corpses won't drop them, even if all you want is some peasant's scythe.
• Utility Weapon: Weapons like the mallet or blacksmith's hammer can be used to repair defenses.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can brutally dismember bodies of dead enemies to pieces with your weapon.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The character customization system lets you dress your character with period-appropriate clothing, alter their body shape, and even sculpt their facial features.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: There are many weapons in Mordhau available for players, and they have diffrent traits.
  • Axe: Varies from small throwing axes to massive pole axes (for when you can't pick between a spear, an axe, or a hammer). In general, axes deal massive amounts of damage on swings at the cost of pathetic thrusting attacks, and are particularly good at hacking structures apart.
  • BFS: Greatswords and Zweihanders are among the most damaging weapons in the game, offset by their low attack speed and impracticality in close-quarters. Executioner Swords are lesser examples, in that they're not as big but have added weight that makes their slashes deadlier (and better at armor-piercing), in exchange for having a blunt tip.
  • Carry a Big Stick: You can use maces in this game. Mercenaries with the "peasant" perk can use a heavy branch from a tree as their primitive bludgeon.
  • Frying Pan of Doom: Mercenaries with the "peasant" perk can choose a frying pan as their weapon. It acts like a club.
  • Good Old Fisticuffs: When nothing else is available, you can always fall back on your fists. It actually deals noticeable damage, more so if you pick the appropriate perk, and you can hold your guard up infinitely like a shield (even if it won't actually block a real weapon).
  • Hooks and Crooks: While the billhook is mostly a normal polearm, that hook on one end is a useful bonus that will help pull infantry around during certain attacks and, more importantly, yank cavalry riders right off their horses if you catch them right.
  • Javelin Thrower: The javelins are stronger throwing weapon. They have only two charges per equip and take a long time to throw, but hit hard.
  • Jousting Lance: Useless on-foot, but when mounted on a horse, a strike from a couched lance is often enough to kill in one hit.
  • Emergency Weapon: You can equip the carving knife which as stated earlier is Joke Item that's great only at Death of a Thousand Cuts. There's also throwing knives as ranged weapon. They are especially good against unarmored opponents.
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Having a shield is a large boon for survivalbility, as you can hold your block instead of having a strict timing window as in parrying. Crafty opponents can simply strike around the shield, however, and you can only use one-handed weapon along with it. Ranged characters can also carry Deployable Cover in the form of pavises.
  • Machete Mayhem: Falchions, essentially a medieval machete with a crossguard, is available as a weapon.
  • Royal Rapier: Usable as a basic thrusting sword alongside the estoc, its two-handed cousin. Subverted in that any kind of character can use them (even if they're dressed as a dirt-poor peasant), and that the default class who wields the rapier is the rogueish Scoundrel.
  • Swiss-Army Weapon: The Heavy Handaxe has both a sharp side, for chopping up the unarmored and hacking structures apart, and a hammer side, for the heavily plated enemies and the occasional quick repair. And a point at the top, to make it properly stabby.
  • Sinister Scythe: Farming scythes are available for mercenaries with the "peasant" perk. It's a surprisingly deadly weapon, but loses effectiveness against more armored targets.
  • Sinister Scimitar: Added in the first half of the Eastern Invasion update is the scimitar, a wickedly fast one-handed slashing sword that cuts through unarmored and lightly armored flesh like butter.
• Weapon Twirling: For most weapons, using the Flourish emote will have your character giving the weapon a spin. Most often seen in duel servers before the official duels were implemented; players would flourish at each other to declare a duel.
• You Fight Like a Cow: Each voice pack has a pool of insults that you can hurl through the voice command menu.

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