Kotaku
Little known fact about me, I spent a big chunk of high school and college fencing. I wasn't great, but I was good enough to go to the Junior Olympics in two weapons and qualify for Nationals in all three. I also taught introductory lessons at Johns Hopkins.
I mention this because Peter Molyneux's speech about next-gen fighting today in Leipzig has gotten me all hot and bothered. According to 1Up he started talking about the idea of bringing the concept of parries and realistic fencing into a nex-gen fight system.
What a fantastic idea. Modern fencing is, of course, not fatal, it's not even really dangerous. Because of that there are a bunch of rules created to force fencers to behave as they might if facing the point end of an epee, sabre or foil.
Basically this means that if you are attacked (except in sabre, my personal favorite weapon), you must defend before counter-attacking. Sounds familiar? It's basically the same rule set that Street Fighter is built around.
If someone pokes a foil at you, you must parry it and then counter-attack, typically. This goes back and forth until someone lands a blow because they are fast, tricky or have more endurance... basically.
If you applied something like this to a nex-gen fighting system, you'd end up with an entire game, wrap it in a role-playing or action game and you'd end up with something no one has really seen before.
It sounds like Molyneux's team is on the right track. What I'd love to see is a game that uses the different buttons as different parries and counters. While foil fencing has eight parries, you could get away with just four. And you could get away with just three parries with the sabre.
Can you imagine using a Wii-mote to deliver authentic slashes with a cyber sabre? Modern sabre's actually use a sensor to make sure the whipping action of a slash is powerful enough to count, this could totally work.
