You tried to make the metal there look like brushed metal, like factory-worked metal. Swords are forged with hammers, not cut from a solid block of steel.
The hammers make round circular marks on the metal, but these are covered by other hammer-strikes as the smith tries to smooth them all out. There are lots of very tiny dents left in there, often shaped like crescents or horse-shoes. These are very small and you can't see them normally (if the smith could see them he'd hammer them flat), but during the tempering process or when the blade rusts or when it gets dirty those small shapes will gather dirt or moisture faster, and they'll be visibly darker than the rest of the shape.
Often there are also tiny holes in the hand-forged metal. I think there might be charcoal residue in there, which gets burned or washed away as the blade is finished up after the forging. I'm pretty sure that hand-forged items can be made without those holes, just as they could be made without any hammer marks. However, as you want to make the metal look like hand-forged stuff, you want to put in those imperfect details.
Here's an extreme example:
http://www.unfinishedman.com/luneburg-b ... hen-knife/
Here's an example of what a normal knife that wasn't intentionally exaggerated might look, but it's still crudely finished. With good polishing most of the marks would go away.
http://www.aceros-de-hispania.com/battl ... er-pef1429
Hand-forged stuff can have the perpendicular "brushed" lines, but only when a file or a whetstone has been used on it. On swords, this usually only happens for the sharpened edges, not for the flat of the blade, not for the handguard, not for the handle. Look at the dice, the one on the right has file-marks:
http://www.kusudaknives.com/blog/
Also look at how small those items in the last link are. Compare them to the wood grain behind them. Those are TINY marks. Look at the wood grain and imagine how small those dice would be. On a sword with a 1024x or 2048x sized texture, those file-marks would be too small to be visible in the texture! The smallest dots and grooves would also be too small. You'd have to work on the bigger blemishes and beauty marks.
Modern galvanized metal has polygonal shapes in it, like so:
http://www.deviantart.com/art/Brushed-m ... e-80120537
Modern brushed metal has small lines all (usually) going to the same direction:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... _metal.jpg
All metals are shiny. Your sword isn't shiny, yet. It needs a good specular map. It sould be specular all around, and the specular map should be VERY bright near all the edges. All shiny things have sharp contrast especially near the edges. It's usually a good idea to paint the edges in a lighter color at least in the specular maps, possibly in the actual color map as well. One way to do this is to create an "Ambient Occlusion" map.
http://polygonseverywhere.weebly.com/me ... games.html
http://www.indiedb.com/company/rising-s ... -texturing
Team Fortress makes heavy use
of specular maps of metal weapons such as the minigun
, even though the textures are extremely simplified. There is very,very little detail. There's a base color, edge highlighting... and that's about it for the colormap. Most games use much more detail in the colormap. However, you should look at how they can make it look like metal with so little detail. It's all in the specular map. It highlights the edges, the shiny surfaces, etc etc.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=73559
