Military Historian Breaks Down Medieval Weapons in Video Games | WIRED

hello my name is mike lodes and today i'm going to be taking a look at how medieval weapons and armor are portrayed in video games [Music] video games i'm going to take a look at today are kingdom come the witcher 4 honor mordau chivalry dark souls and mountain blade let's take a look at how swords are used in video games forging a sword kingdom come deliverance do it so what we see in this clip is the finishing stages the blade has already been made but what i like about this clip is these people clearly are taking care you know what you're doing high status swords they were made by alchemy it's an incredibly sophisticated process give it here and we'll put it all together where it goes slightly wrong is where he's putting the grip on at the end although it's true that you would heat the tang that's the little bit that comes up from the blade for the grip to go on what they're doing there is they've heated half the blade all that art all that care to get the proper spring temper will have been lost because they've heated it up and thrown it away and the other little technical problem is when they put the pommel on that's the bit that balances a sword at the end when they put that on they just plop it on well the the tang that should come through the pommel so there's a little bit sticking up and then you hammer that over and splay it out peen it out rivet it out and that's what holds everything secure and together this pommel would have fallen off as soon as they picked it up so little details are wrong but the feel of the thing is great it's magnificent one-handed versus two-handed use of the sword dark souls if you tap y when you're in a situation like this when you have a one-handed sword and a shield you switch to two-handed but blocking with the sword doesn't really block they kind of completely misunderstand how swords are used it doesn't block 100 of the damage that's just wrong putting two hands on will give you a more powerful stroke it does not in any way hinder your ability to defend with a sword when you're using a single-handed an arming sword with one hand and then clearly you're always going to favor your dominant arm because mostly that's going to be the stronger arm pens i know but mightier than the sword you don't ever block with a sword that's not how it's done i'm using a flat i knock it aside i'm keeping a flow so this idea of square blocking it may be easier for game developers to create that kind of action but it's not how it was done single-edged swords versus double-edged swords for honor well you know the first thing i've got to say about that clip is how good i thought the action was i mean the armor was distracting because it's so fantastically wrong but the body shapes the movements the positions they got in that was good it had quality there the advantage of a two-edged sword is if one edge is getting a little dull you can turn it around and you've got a second edge to use so it can be a considerable advantage on the battlefield that you're keeping one edge sharp the advantage of a single edge sword is usually that it's less expensive because you don't have to have such a sophisticated temper that is authentic as long as you're gripping tight enough the sword won't move and if it doesn't move it won't cut you so this person is not able to pull it through this person's hand because this person has taken it and they've turned it into a lever action removing the sword from their hand so those kind of blade grabbing disarms are authentic and they are possible but they require skill and knowledge and do not try this at home throwing a sword moored howl [Music] swords are extremely versatile weapons that's one of their advantages you can use them in all sorts of different ways a powerful man with a powerful thrust delivering a thrust to somebody's chest could almost stop a heart you can use it as a lever to unbalance your opponent you've got that great heavy pommel that great metal weight on the end and you can have deflected the sword and used the pommel to smash and punch why why would you throw it it is so stupid to throw away a weapon and it's not even the person has lots of other weapons i just can't get my head around the idea of somebody throwing a sword decapitation chivalry two so what we see here is clearly supposed to be a european medieval battlefield and so in that context you wouldn't see heads cut off in this way not least of all because they're wearing armor could a sword do it yeah you could do it if you were fighting an army of naked people you know the neck is one of the first areas to get protective equipment even if you've got nothing else you'd have a male collar or cough of some sort one of the ways in which armor defends you is by creating curved surfaces glancing surfaces and of course a body is always moving as well so you can never land a pure 90 degree strike you need enough edge just to bite in order to send that energy through and i don't believe heads fly like that decorated swords for honor it hungers for blood obviously the first thing to say about decoration it was only ever available to the wealthy to princes and kings but it was also much much more restrained than we see here it's called a flamboyant blade because it looks like flames what these sharp wavy edges do is constantly present a curved surface to the hand so it is impossible to grab it without cutting your hand open even if you were wearing a leather glove occasionally you will find one that has got some gilding on the cross guard or on the pommel but you really need to leave the blade as plain as possible because you don't want to compromise the integrity of the blade you don't want to chisel into it so that you can put a gold inlay you don't want to uh scroll and etch and pierce and punch or do anything to it that blade needs to perform to save your life leave it alone wearing a sword on your back the witcher 3 so here we see a really familiar trope which is that the sword being carried on the back in a european medieval setting it did not happen the type of sword they're using here looks similar to what we would call a medieval long sword which is a sword that you use with two hands would stand about that height you just can't actually get it out a sword of that length over the shoulder swords are worn in scabbards at the hip and outside swords very very very long swords are carried over the shoulder it's just that simple parries for honor so for this one we actually pushed as much as we can to cover the all the uh parts it all starts by getting the armor wrong by trying to give a sense of of bulk and therefore presumably menace they're amplifying the size of the armor went to those shoulders and making these creatures into these great sort of automatons who who move in a very awkward and lumbering way this idea of wide swings and opening yourself up and then you know 15 minutes later landing the blow it has nothing to do with reality the art of sword fighting is constantly keeping yourself covered they weren't lumbering slow fools they were martial artists athletes lightning fast reflexes who had a system a fighting style that was immensely sophisticated next let's take a look at axes throwing an axe mordow what we see here is two types of acts a larger axe that he's using with two hands he takes out a smaller axe which he uses to throw looking at the armor and the clothing it looks to be more kind of late medieval and both of those axes shown are from a much much much earlier medieval period from the sort of frankish saxon viking period the axes of the later medieval period what known as battle axes were predominantly a horseman's weapon they're not for throwing the pollacks for honor they carry the most versatile weapon ever invented the pole axe first the narrator is calling it a polax instead of a pollax there were such things as pole arms and a whole family of weapons that are that are on long poles but the pollacks p o double l axe is what knights called this slightly shorter pole arm the pollax was between sort of four and and five foot in height not not a super long pole arm it it's very much a weapon that nights when they were fighting on foot this was their favorite weapon it was substantial and at the top end it had an axe head and a hammer head you know this was a great chunk of metal so that could land a fearsome bow on top of that was a spike and most importantly at the bottom was this steel spike a secret of their order the peak and it was that end that you did most of your fighting with and when they arrive pray that you one of the great advantages of the polax is it has reach and you can really work a close distance at long distance and when you get in there you can use that shaft as a lever they're doing it here and that is right that is straight out of the manuals that you get that in there you get it behind their legs it's the right spirit of the thing let's see how bows and arrows are portrayed in video games the crossbow mount and blade one of the cunning things about this clip is they don't show you how the crossbow is being loaded so we have this really rather unrealistic rate of shooting there was a thing called a belt and claw where a claw hung from a belt and you went down and hooked that under the thing and you had your your foot in the thing and you used your whole back to strain and your legs and your thighs were straining to pull that string back and and hook it behind the trigger it certainly couldn't be done as quickly as in this clip loading and aiming chivalry there are two stages to preparing that longbow to shoot the first one is what we call knocking that's the you know the little notch at the end of the arrow and getting that fitted to the string in this clip the speed of getting the arrow onto the string was credible that that i could shoot that fast maybe even a little faster [Music] what takes longer is the second stage the drawing back you're drawing a long bow from your feet to your neck every muscle is engaged in pulling that string back and you pull it back here behind the ear a longbow is a powerful weapon 180 pounds maybe even 200 pounds draw weight the amount it takes to pull that string back this is a massive athletic endeavor that has to be repeated over and over again so there are questions of stamina although we don't see very much of him we can see part of his archer's equipment which is a leather bracer on the inside of his left forearm and what it's for is it's for string slap as the string comes through it just can catch that arm just get a snap if you've got a 150 180 200 pound longbow i can assure you that string slap you never want to pull that bow back again flaming arrows chivalry two so it looks great doesn't it we see these incendiary arrows like lightning strikes streaming across the sky my experience with flaming arrows is they don't stay alight in the sky looking quite so wonderful as that but they do work and they did exist does it have any practical military function and is it real well you certainly wouldn't use them in an open battlefield like that because it's pointless what are you going to do set individual people a light as a bonus because you've already killed them with your arrow you would use them in sieges and in terror raids fire has always been a dreadful awful terror weapon let's look at some other medieval weapons that are popular in video games spears mordhow the advantage of a spear is its reach if you've got cavalry coming towards you you can extend and you know you can go for the horse the disadvantage of a spear is its reach there's that much of weapon on the end of a stick once you've extended and thrust that if the person gets inside that point it's easy to either cleave your thin wooden shaft with with their sword or their axe or to get hold of that spear and wrench it out of your hand once he's inside the point the spear is useless mace chivalry macy's is a general blunt force weapon were widespread on the medieval battlefield what we see here when they call it a mace it's more like a morning star which is a kind of a two-handed mace with spikes on which came in a little bit later something that all armor had in common is it deflected blows it gave a skidding surface it's very difficult to get that energy into the man underneath unless you can get a microsecond of bite so that's really what the spikes before they look really grisly and play into our idea of medieval brutality but all they're for is for grabbing hold of the target in order to deliver the energy through the armor flail for honor their flail is as dangerous to the wielder as it is to the enemy i mean the idea is it's the same as a mace it's a blunt force trauma weapon but its disadvantage is having struck the chain goes limp and comes down you have to prepare it with relatively wide strokes we really have no strong evidence that it was ever a real thing we do have evidence however that it was thought of throughout the medieval period military engineers and artists and designers produced military manuals sometimes however you find a diamond in the rough leonardo da vinci was one of a long line of designers of military machines a lot of the machines and ideas in here never happened daggers dark souls the dagger uses very little stamina so you can attack many times over before depleting your stamina even if you have low endurance so daggers were pretty much a universal weapon on the medieval battlefield everybody carried a dagger clearly a weapon of last resort it's a weapon of close hand-to-hand fighting what i found extraordinary on this clip is where the narration said do note that the range is short i just wanted a shout on his ear well let go of one hand and you'll double your reach because obviously you've got limited reach if you're working like that but you know i've now got double the extension it's about how you use what you have it's a one-handed weapon it's not a two-handed weapon now we're going to talk about tactics taking over a village kingdom come deliverance this clip had the the element of surprise and you know for any attack on a village to be successful it needs an element of surprise [Music] of course if you're attacking with an army of that size there's not going to be any surprise you would hear them from miles away you would see the clouds of dust from miles away so raiding parties would be small you wouldn't need more than 20 30 men to raid a village like that they'd use incendiary arrows they would gallop through with flaming torches and drop them in the buildings [Music] [Applause] you don't need a big army to attack a small village you do need surprise firebomb weapons for honor did we get 12 of these bombs like that's it's pretty excessive different raider they had clay pots which they filled with what was really greek fire which was a secret recipe developed in 670 or so by a man named kalinikos and this was an incredible flammable substance that that just kept on burning could even burn on water there take that sir but running around the battlefield with a flammable pot is a pretty dangerous business it's not like pulling the pin on a grenade where you know exactly the moment you're gonna throw it they really need to be deployed from a fixed position and best used in a ranged weapon like festival or with a great siege engine like a trebuchet circle formation mountain blade bannerlord in certain cavalry situations a circle formation is exactly what you need especially if you're outnumbered the scots called it the children in fact they pioneered that technique so much i would suggest against uh an artillery attack with an arrow storm the bowmen only have to range slightly differently and they've got the backs of the people undefended with their shields at the other side of the circle well it's like come and get me shoot me in the back i wouldn't choose a circle that size because there's so much room in the middle you could get quite a lot of horsemen smashing through the line of two that you've got there and they could wreak havoc round the backs of of the other troops don't periodically keep breaking your formation otherwise there's no point in having it fighting on horseback mount and blade bannerlord cavalry can be used in two main ways you have heavy cavalry smashing into a massive troops for the impact charge and you have light cavalry with swords or bows or even light lance's skirmishing or raiding or or just hurrying troops on the battlefield here we're seeing versatile light cavalry skirmishing the weapon of first strike for the horsemen is the lance the long lance over your back that's the cavalry charge but it's a one strike weapon [Music] it's one kebab each and you're done its greatest benefit is not just the speed of delivering attacks it's the ability to pull back and come again it's that ability on a horse that you couldn't even begin to match with a man on foot you know the stamina of a horse to do those repeated attacks that's really where it gives you the edge let's look at defensive weapons shield shapes mordhow today i wanted to talk about shields in mortal the earliest type shown in in this clip is the kite shield you can easily block pretty much anything in front of you a sort of norman style shield from the sort of century by the 12th century it already gone out so it has a very limited time period to a very specific culture the kite shield is a much larger shield that pretty much envelops the entire body from head to your shins gradually that shield gets shorter and more compact as armor for the lower leg gets better and you end up with what's called the heater shield very good for protecting the upper torso especially when you're on horseback and you need that extra layer of protection to withstand the extraordinary force of being struck with a lance by a man on horseback moving on to the perry shields we have the target the buckler the taj a round shield this one is specifically a kind of scots weapon it's it's smaller than the viking round shield it had you know more maneuverability rather than just blocking with your weapon you simply block with your shield the highland scots were famous for their charge running in their kilts across the heather you don't want something clumsy you want something light but they're facing arrows that's what shields are for they're for facing arrow storms the buckler and the targe have very minor differences between them but functioning exactly the same in terms of size they have the exact same block radius the type of shield that is used almost exclusively for hand to hand fighting is the buckler this was a specialist little shield round shield completely faced with steel a little steel fist you use it like a fist you punch the enemies weapons away a sword's coming in here you punch it away very skillful but very fast flowing way of fighting the final shield in mordhau is the pavice the pavise complete polar opposite of the buckler the pavise is a static shield it just sits there it can be placed down pretty much anywhere on a flat surface or even rough terrain it's what crossbowman carried on their backs set up on the battlefield because they had to shelter behind something to work the claw mechanism of loading their bows it was a question of different shields for different fields but they all had a different purpose armor mordhow the most important thing about armor is that it gives you as much protection as possible the second most important thing about armor is that it allows you to fight as well as possible what i love about this clip is that it starts with a knight running whilst wearing armor that is a reality a knight would be able to run to sprint in armor boosika one of the generals of the french army at agincourt he was known to go for a mile run in his armor every morning the dropkick is probably a little bit fantastical but armor was designed for the fighting man the way we see a sword slicing through armour that's just plain fantasy it's fine as fantasy but it's certainly not a reality so there's a lot of different types of armor plate armor the type we're seeing here a second skin of metal an exoskeleton of metal where the night became a walking work of art and it was tailored to precision so that every joint articulated the most vulnerable points are those articulation points so if you're raising your sword to strike then that is more vulnerable than the bit covered with a plate but they had things called bezejews which which are little metal disks they have solutions to these problems so there is this constant trade-off between weight articulation and protection [Music] that has been extremely interesting to me as a dull old historian to look at how these weapons are represented in video games what's exciting about video games today is it's often the first hook the first lure to get young minds interested in history and history is exciting and we mustn't lose the excitement just because of a few details that might not be right

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,321,732

Rating: 4.9341402 out of 5

Keywords: medieval weapons, mike loades, military historian, military, historian, medieval weapons video games, video games weapons, video game realism, mordhau, witcher 3 swords, witcher 3 armor, game over(analyzed), medieval weapon, medieval swords, medieval armor, medieval helmet, medieval weapons wired, video games medieval weapons, wired medieval weapons, dark souls medieval sword, medieval sword, bows in games, video game bow, for honor realistic, for honor, over, wired

Id: RFFs_LW7iOM

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Admiral_Akdov]

Who uses a circle formation against archers? That isn't the game being inaccurate. That is the player being a dummy

[u/reverendfixxxer]

I always love seeing Mike Loades talking about what he's passionate about.

[u/Indercarnive]

Shout out to Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Absolutely fantastic game.

[u/boomership]

This is the first time I've seen a historian not ripping a new hole into every inaccurate detail in a fantacy for example. And showing what he likes about them.

[u/sulta]

It'd be interesting to see his reaction to Havel's Greatshield, the Dragon King Greataxe or the Catarina Armor Set.

[u/doobiedave]

Time Commanders was awesome, and Mike Loades was great in it.

[u/GreenTru]

Thumbnail says "FOR HONOR (2017)" but the game screenshot is Chivalry: Medieval Warfare.. weird.

[u/ishtar_the_move]

I recommend video from this channel such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZUgxWLfCwY.

[u/CyberWaffle]

Unrelated to the content but I was really surprised by the bad mic audio. They must’ve had a different mic setup for this one because their other videos are top notch.