Getting melee combat in a first person perspective to feel right can be a tricky thing. Very few games out there have actually done it correctly. Techland, the developers behind Hellraid, are taking this fact to heart and are putting a lot of work into how combat works in their first person game.

The team consulted with the ARMA Association who specialize in recreating medieval European sword fighting techniques. There are a lot of intricacies that go into swinging a sword and the team wanted to learn as much as they could.

Although watching how sword fighting actually works helped Techland immensely, some things wouldn't translate well to a video game and they had to strike a balance between realism and something that is playable. The animations for these moves aren't motion captured and needed an animator to manually create them.

Hellraid will be released for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this year.

//www.youtube.com/embed/jM-lrTroIMw