With Christmas coming, Mordhau players can now pick up some exclusive Christmas-themed weaponry. Triternion released the holiday patch on December 18. The patch is a mixture of holiday items and less-festive weaponry updates.
First, the festive stuff: Players can choose to equip a candy cane staff (it functions like a wooden club), a throwable Christmas ornament (which is a repurposed firebomb), and a large Christmas present box (a repurposed med kit). The horses have been decorated with reindeer antlers and a glowing red nose, and it now snows in the main menu.
When I reviewed Mordhau, one of my favorite aspects of the game was how it allows players to customize their characters to an impressive degree. With the holiday spirit in mind, I spent some time and created a Battle Santa.
The festive designs don’t change the gameplay, and many players have opted to ignore the festive weaponry altogether. I can’t blame them, to be honest, the candy cane weapon doesn’t hit very hard, and unless you cover your battle Santa in armor (and lose some of the holiday cheer in the process) he’s going to feel like he’s built with paper mache in combat.
Outside of the festivities, the patch introduced some updates for Mordhau’s usual weapons. The maul received a Norse-style skin, the arming sword received three fancy “basket hilt” skins and the bardiche (a spear-type weapon) received a nasty looking skin called the “Brute.”
Perhaps the biggest change the patch introduced involves shields. Holding shields in one hand now makes your character studier, though slower. By holding down the alternate weapon ability button (“R”), players can raise their shields at the cost of movement speed and resist the disarming effects of kick attacks that were once kryptonite to shield users.
Additionally, some shields can now be thrown. Prepare for endless Captain America jokes for the next few weeks.
Other updates the patch introduced are that engineers can now build fire pits that ignite projectiles (fire arrows are a thing now), map objective updates, new maps being added to invasion modes, and spears can now force horses to stop dead in their tracks. For the complete patch notes, check out the Mordhau updates page on Steam.
