Blackrose Arts, an indie developer working on the upcoming Valhall, received some new gameplay footage. The latest gameplay preview outlines some of the developments the game has made while being crowdfunded through IndieGoGo.

The 10 minute preview starts with a brief snippet of the Siege Mode, and the Battle Royale Mode. Later into the video they talk about the combat 2.0 mechanics, where they explain that the combat is based player movements. The left mouse button attacks, but depending on where you move the mouse will determine which angle you strike, very similar to Mount & Blade.

You can dodge or evade attacks using the direction evading mechanic, or you can run and slide and stab enemies, too, which is pretty cool. So far the game also looks like it’s completely free of any kind of Social Justice Warrior politics. You can check out the new combat mechanics below.

The game also sports a more realistic archery mechanic for long range combat. There are no aiming cross-hairs for the bows. You’ll have to manually aim using your own judgment. You’ll have to judge the distance by using the ability to pull back the arrow, which will determine how much power you’ll apply to the shot.

And to further help keep PvP fair, they’ve removed any kind of third-person peeking. So you won’t be able to hide in a house and peek around corners to get snipe kills.

They also decided to modify the health and stamina relationship by tying the two together, which means that the lower your life is the lower your stamina will be. And lowered stamina means you won’t be able to run very fast or very far. This was done to prevent players who are low on health from running away and constantly hiding. You have to either stay and finish the fight or die like a coward.

One thing I thought was neat was that they recognize that utilizing prepackaged assets and photogrammetry was the cheaper alternative to getting certain scenarios built and rendered as fast as possible. The utilization of photogrammetry is two-fold: First, it cuts down on manually drawing assets, which in turn saves the team a lot of time and money. Second, it gives the game a high-end, photorealistic look.

The initial alpha testing will be closed off only to backers, and it will have a strict NDA on it. The purpose is so that the team can work with the community to refine the gameplay and polish up the mechanics. They’ll start with the Siege Mode first and then eventually work on perfecting and optimizing the Battle Royale Mode. Once the basics are done they have plans on putting the game into Early Access on Steam, where it will spend another five through seven months in development before finally releasing in full.

You can learn more about the developmental efforts being put into Valhall by visiting the IndieGoGo page or by checking out the Steam store page.