Artems Masterstrikes Preview

Greetings fellow warriors! A sword comes down at you, and instead of stepping back you cut straight into it. One motion knocks the attack aside and lands your own blow before your opponent can recover. The old German fencing masters had a name for strikes like that: Meisterhäue, the master strikes. You didn’t pick them up on a battlefield. You learned them in a fencing school, from a master who taught them to the students he thought were ready.

Artems Masterstrikes adds an enhanced counter system to melee combat. Read your opponent’s attack, answer it at the right moment, and your character turns it aside and strikes back in one fluid exchange. There are around 30 different masterstrikes and over 200 new animations, each animated on both fighters. The AI uses them too, so the lord you’re dueling can do it to you just as well.

You won’t start out knowing them, though. There’s a new scene, built by Hart, where the masterstrike master runs his training grounds. (It's a unique settlement that can be placed by yourself too, ensuring maximum compatibility with mods that change the campaign map!)

Setting the scene

It’s also a good place to fill out your ranks. Mercenaries hang around there, ready to be hired.

Learning the technique

The master teaches in two stages, and neither of them is a purchase. You don’t hand over denars and walk away knowing a technique - you have to perform it in front of him. He talks you through all of it, and he tells you when you get it wrong.

Reach 100 with a weapon style and he’ll teach you its masterstrikes. The perk screen will tell you when you’re ready - the perks at that skill level now mention that a master can teach you.

The first lesson. He hands you a practice weapon, tells you to come at him, and then masterstrikes you — so the first time you see the technique, it’s being done to you. After that it’s your turn. He attacks slowly, one direction at a time, with an on-screen prompt showing which way to block. Land three and the lesson is done. You can’t lose and you can’t break anything; miss the timing and he tells you what went wrong and comes again.

The second lesson. At 175 in that same weapon skill you can come back for the killmoves, and this one isn’t a drill. He fetches a looter from the pen and tells you to beat him down honestly. The technique hasn’t changed - what you’re learning is when to use it. Counter the looter while he still has fight left in him and you’ll get an ordinary masterstrike and a remark from the master. Wear him down first, and the next counter you land finishes him.

If you lock onto an opponent, you get a readout of the exchange. It starts as a plain dot while you’re circling. The moment the window opens and a masterstrike is possible, the dot becomes a green shield. Land it and the shield flares yellow behind it. Anyone who played the first Kingdom Come will recognise the idea immediately.

You don’t have to lock on. Masterstrikes work perfectly well without it, and in a melee you often can’t spare the attention. But while you’re still learning the timing, watching that shield appear is the fastest way to internalise when the window actually opens.

Everything you learn is saved per weapon class, so one-handed and two-handed are tracked separately and carry across your campaign.

Everything can be tuned in the MCM. If you’re running Cinematic Combat, its own masterstrike options switch off automatically once Artems Masterstrikes is loaded, so the two never get in each other’s way.

Let me know what you think in the comment section below, more soon!