Making MELEE viable and fun.

[Marty Czosnyka]

If you want realistic don't play games with killer bunnies, cyborgs with tricycles for bodies, brocolli forests, and brain transfers. The designers say so themselves - Wasteland 1 is loved because you could fistfight a giant robot scorpion and come out on top.

"Make everything except guns useless because realism" is a terrible argument. If you want realism, stop playing games. Go join the army and spend months cleaning latrines, standing in the cold, watching trees grow, then get shot in the neck from some invisible threat that spent weeks camping a ditch. Have your entire squad wiped out by a homemade IED that a kid hacked together with fertilizer. Get cancer from exposure to agent orange and depleted uranium ammo. Have your lungs melted by gas, and spend a month in agony before dying.

Wasteland is a universe where you can bash in a gun-wielding nun's head in with a book, fistfight a spinning octopus with blades-for-arms, and wield proton axes, like a man. If players want to make melee characters, they damned well better be useful parts of the team.

Gameplay where the only tactic is to line up your team like a broadside, all wearing the same armor and gun, is boring and awful game design. This is about game balance. The designers and writers were involved with some of the greatest games of all time - they're smart enough to come up with whatever sci-fi mcguffin they want to make ANY mechanic fit into the universe.

@ abyss taking it a bit out of proportion aren't you? joining the army cause i'm some gun nut... yea. Sorry if I enjoyed games like company of heroes or that I liked halo games. There are many games out there where melee doesn't work against firearms effectively. I've also played fallout games, and I wasn't a fan of the melee, it always felt out of place. But hey, your welcome to your opinion, I just don't agree with it.

[grot]

@ abyss taking it a bit out of proportion aren't you? joining the army cause i'm some gun nut... yea. Sorry if I enjoyed games like company of heroes or that I liked halo games. There are many games out there where melee doesn't work against firearms effectively. I've also played fallout games, and I wasn't a fan of the melee, it always felt out of place. But hey, your welcome to your opinion, I just don't agree with it.

In Fallout 3, I'd agree - simply because that game's VATS system never bothered to work out proper melee aiming, and in real-time, as it so often does, it became a case of indiscriminate quick-click flailing. But in turn-based combat, balanced melee can offer an entirely different playstyle, preventing any kind of ranged stand-off wherein characters hide behind cover at the opposite ends of the map and click at one another until one falls, forcing mad charges and strategy-breaking assaults and so on.

That tactical breadth, those new delicious avenues of skills and perks and character-building choices, expanding the game's strategic possibilities by no uncertain amount, are so much more important than the question of whether or not, in a 'realistic' hilariously ridiculous pulpy post-apocalyptic wasteland, one would be able to punch out a Scorpitron with one's bare fists. Because first and foremost - it's a game, and an RPG. Or so I'd argue.

[Inca]

Maybe melee has to be refocused a little bit.
There is an immensly popular book in Russia about WWII, written by a counterintelligence (CI) officer, based on the field reports of a counterintelligence unit. The basic idea is to capture enemy agents rather than kill them, in fact shooting an agent is considered to be a big blunder on the part of the members of CI. Under the program "SMERSH" (Death to Spies) they specifically train to subdue in H&H combat a well armed agent. They practice what they call a "pendulum"-a way of closing a distance with an armed adversary, literally avoiding his shots, until they can subdue the foe.
This system involves a series of well recited quazi-unpredictable movements and tricks (like turning advarsery against the sun to penalize his aim) to make an approach and than disarm and and disable the enemy (sort of Jiu-jitsu style).

All too often the RPG unarmed combat focuses on killing an enemy in a slugfest. Like punching through the armor and causing damage equivalent to a gun. That may be a path to nowhere. What if instead the Melee professional focuses on disarming, breaking limbs in some joint locks, chocking an opponent, avoiding being shot, rather than a "boxing match".

Subduing an enemy could be the special bonus of the melee combat. You can interrogate the enemy afterwards for weapon chache locations, vital pieces of intelligence, ransoming them.

Imagine capturing a big raider or mafia boss and than selling him/her back for money or explosives or favours.

[MinscAndBoo]

I like this idea.

Using a melee character to take down enemies in a non-lethal way should result in unique rewards (like selling them on etc).

[Ammatinvalittaja]

I think this old adage is the best, "Never bring a knife to a gun fight." In close combat or stealth scenario's, MAYBE, but for the most part guns are always better. I think once your unit gets armed with firearms, that realistically there is no other reason to bear melee against firearms. It's didn't work for the samurai's when guns were brought over to japan, it didn't work for anyone else, it won't work for this game. =p

But make-shift shields block even RPGs!

[Geras]

'Leave This One To Me' - If two accomplished melee characters enter melee combat together, awestruck by the duel, other combatants may refuse to open fire on either of the pair, and will gain/suffer combat increases and decreases based on the result of the fateful single combat.

I like this idea for a perk. Nice.

[Elandryl]

Ok, I feel like I've got to defend the melee fighting system.

First of all, excuse my poor english. I'm french and this is my first post, so I'll humbly ask a bit of patience

Second, I've always felt like it was actually a poor gameplay design to limit the fighting system to firearms. I remember that whatever the way you chose to play Fallout, for example, the "ultimate character" always had to be proficient in energy weapons. Simply put: they were the most powerful, the most precise, so why bother to chose anything else?
But one of the (many) great thing in Fallout 2 is that you could at last choose to make another type of character. All my characters in Fallout 2 were always build to be melee fighter and boy were they powerful, even far before getting a power armor. You didn't even need to have a super-strong character, you needed a lot of agility, and a few very useful perk, the ultimate beeing the one allowing all of your melee hits to become critical. See, that was just another way to fight: a lot of people felt far more secure using energy weapons or heavy guns, but you could also try something else and still have fun. You just had to adapt your tactics, and I guess that's actually a very important part of a tactical RPG.

See, the point isn't to say if it's realistic. If you want some realistic game, forget about post-apocalyptic setting to begin with. The point is for the fighting system to be both fun, challenging and believable. Even with a gun, in a close-quarter situation, or simply in a bar brawl, you just have to be able to use the lack of distance to your advantage -and that means melee fight!

Since one of the great things in role playing game is to build a character and to adapt to every situation according to the way you build it, I would certainly feel very disapointed if the only way to fight in Wasteland 2 was to build a team of top-shooters and to simply win every fight by using more or less the same method, aka "my gun is bigger, my aim is more accurate, so I win."

Ps: I absolutely love the examples of perks given by grot.

[krellen]

I remember that whatever the way you chose to play Fallout, for example, the "ultimate character" always had to be proficient in energy weapons.

I have never had a Fallout character proficient in energy weapons. High Small Guns skill and called shots to the Eyes were my solution.

[suz]

'Leave This One To Me' - If two accomplished melee characters enter melee combat together, awestruck by the duel, other combatants may refuse to open fire on either of the pair, and will gain/suffer combat increases and decreases based on the result of the fateful single combat.

I like this idea for a perk. Nice.

Yep, I'm sure some melee fans would also like a perk that made characters in party with a point over the initial skill level in melee so hot and spiffy that gunpowder based ammo explodes if they get within 30km radius of them.

Another perk "Balance Things Out" - You gain a new melee move - Bitchslap, which has a damage equivalent to 6.3225 megatons TNT.

And to make things interesting and fun - Buff roundhouse kicks to 8 times Chuck Norris equivalent with AE damage component, cause we can't have just ranged weapons to deal AE damage.

[Elandryl]

Yep, I'm sure some melee fans would also like a perk that made characters in party with a point over the initial skill level in melee so hot and spiffy that gunpowder based ammo explodes if they get within 30km radius of them.

Another perk "Balance Things Out" - You gain a new melee move - Bitchslap, which has a damage equivalent to 6.3225 megatons TNT.

And to make things interesting and fun - Buff roundhouse kicks to 8 times Chuck Norris equivalent with AE damage component, cause we can't have just ranged weapons to deal AE damage.

Well, this is a forum, you know. Place where people share ideas and view about a particular aspect of the game. And where they meet nice and comprehensive people, just like you.

[suz]

Well, this is a forum, you know. Place where people share ideas and view about a particular aspect of the game. And where they meet nice and comprehensive people, just like you.

And just like them I get to criticize their ideas, and make sarcastic remarks about obviously flawed ideas - in this case it's blatant OP'ness.

By making melee on par with gunnery- characters you're basically saying; you could go for gunnery, and have fun with ammo but it requires more effort to pull off OR you could go with melee and tear every scorpitron a new one because it's not a realistic game.

In WL1 you could have melee as a dominant, because combat there didn't visualize and it didn't have to make much sense - you could imagine there's a wall between scorpitron and your ranger which prevented scorpitron to just steamroll you into a tiny layer of paste, you could imagine that you lured scorpitron to a cover from which you went out on melee skirmishes every turn or any other imaginary scenario.

When you SEE a superior opponent, in a superior tactical position it makes no sense(to me) that you'll suddenly kick his ass because well, you took a bunch of super duper perks AND it's not a really-realistic game!

This "not a realistic game" excuse is getting on my nerves.
I dig it's not a realistic game but it's not a Katamari game with weird shit all over it, there's no nyancats shitting rainbows all over the sky and no ponies of different colors doing retarded crap.
There's a difference between "not realistic" and "completely batshit" type of game.

[CookieEatingHuskarl]

Maybe melee has to be refocused a little bit.
What if instead the Melee professional focuses on disarming, breaking limbs in some joint locks, chocking an opponent.

You just described the basic dwarf wrestler in dwarf fortress. Also to add, the ability to induce knockdown via takedowns, grapples, clinches, or judo moves. Characters losing in a strength/dex/luck complex save against the melee character will be knocked down, where agi determines their recovery rate and the melee characters have a better chance for aimed strikes while the other party is on the ground.

So basically you could make the bullet ignoring charge (Maybe with a nice degradable disposable riot shield you looted from somewhere, or even a looted car door from the President's bulletproof carriage. ) to melee range worth it by pouncing the nearest guy, disarming him, taking him down, then immediately blinding him and breaking one of his joint (arm or leg) and move on to the next guy knowing your ranged fellows can now safely take care of him, instead of what usually happens in CRPGs (You get to punch him once, he doesn't die and makes mincemeat out of you with his SMG next round).

[Elandryl]

When you SEE a superior opponent, in a superior tactical position it makes no sense(to me) that you'll suddenly kick his ass because well, you took a bunch of super duper perks AND it's not a really-realistic game!

Well, Fallout 2 had a twist about melee fighting: you could use a power fist or an energy-powered weapon. Was it more realistic to you? At least, it was a realistic way -since that seems so important to you- to go "punch that scorpitron a new one", because it's not necessarily a machine who was conceived for point-blank close combat.

I also think the first Wasteland offered a few melee weapons, liked proton axes. So I guess it's not even a treason against the Wasteland universe to include melee fighting.

This "not a realistic game" excuse is getting on my nerves.
I dig it's not a realistic game but it's not a Katamari game with weird shit all over it, there's no nyancats shitting rainbows all over the sky and no ponies of different colors doing retarded crap.
There's a difference between "not realistic" and "completely batshit" type of game.

Well, you remember what I was saying about sharing views in a forum? You have quite a few people here discussing about the more clever and interesting way to integrate melee fighting in W2. Your witty -and very useful, no doubt- contribution is to call it "completely batshit". I'm sure you're quite an open-minded, sensible and interesting kind of guy, but right now I can't exactly pretend that you sound like one. I might also ask what the heck Katamari and "nyancats shitting rainbows" could possibly have to do with what we're discussing here, but my guess is I can already guess the answer, and so can you.

[syncswim]

Elandryl hit the nail on the head in emphasizing the believable over this notion of realism. More to the point, I agree with previous posters in pointing out that the whole realism vs. farce debate is a bit of a red herring--it's not really the heart of the discussion here. I think the more important issue is authenticity, that is to say, would a proposed system of melee mechanics or set of melee-centric perks make sense in the world and gameplay design being used by the dev team? Since it's so early and we don't have a very good sense of how all the nuts and bolts of the gameplay will work it's quite hard to make blanket "it would never work"/"it would work perfectly" statements without sounding really presumptuous.

That said, if previous comments made by Fargo about zone exploration and combat taking place on the same map are true, and if we can just assume hypothetically that this means we're getting a sort of Fallout Tactics/Jagged Alliance turn-based hybrid combat system then yeah, I see plenty of room for melee builds being highly viable (emphasis on viable as stated in the thread title, not OP; I don't think anyone wants OP). That doesn't mean they should be quantitatively superior to ranged builds, or even easy to play, but the key here is that if a player wants to commit to building a party of former pro wrestlers or just one ranger who's a "reformed" machete murder, that path should be open to them. It won't be easy, it will most likely be really ridiculous, but hey, aren't RPGs like Wasteland all about gaming the way you want to?

My own inclination is that melee combat should be high-risk, high-reward behavior. Say you're trying to root out a group of enemies holed up in an entrenched position where a frontal assault wouldn't be the best decision. You could use your firearms characters to keep them occupied while you sneak your high-stealth, high-melee specialist around the flank until he's in just the right spot. He tosses a flashbang or gas grenade into the position then sprints in and proceeds to dispatch the incapacitated enemies with whatever stabby/smashy weapons he prefers, his initiative boosted by both the grenade as well as a stealth/ambush boost. That ties into a totally different hope I have, though, which is that the game will reward rolling a party of different sorts of specialists as opposed to having four clones of each other specced in the exact same way.

[suz]

Well, Fallout 2 had a twist about melee fighting

Fallout 2 had a twist about combat, it was a one-man-army game, because you are the Chosen One.

Gaining some levels made you Jesus among mere men. You could use anything as a weapon, you could even forget about using a weapon and just walk around in turn based getting stimpacks injected every turn and win, since at that point you have infinite stimpacks and armor blocks ~99% damage making you effectively immortal.

you could use a power fist or an energy-powered weapon. Was it more realistic to you? At least, it was a realistic way -since that seems so important to you- to go "punch that scorpitron a new one", because it's not necessarily a machine who was conceived for point-blank close combat.

I won't go into all kinds of theoretical scenarios of why the Scorpitron didn't wipe the floor with the rangers when you can't see what's happening, I could make a few of them myself within a couple mins, but a machine made for combat that's not built by retard robots will have arsenal for engagement at any range.

I also think the first Wasteland offered a few melee weapons, liked proton axes. So I guess it's not even a treason against the Wasteland universe to include melee fighting.

No problem, if you can jump out of cover, hack the enemy, jump back and do it under the limitations of your "turn" - it's fine. If you didn't, you shouldn't get perks described here which make you Neo reincarnation bending the matrix to avoid bullets like you were in FO universe.

Well, you remember what I was saying about sharing views in a forum? You have quite a few people here discussing about the more clever and interesting way to integrate melee fighting in W2. Your witty -and very useful, no doubt- contribution is to call it "completely batshit". I'm sure you're quite an open-minded, sensible and interesting kind of guy, but right now I can't exactly pretend that you sound like one. I might also ask what the heck Katamari and "nyancats shitting rainbows" could possibly have to do with what we're discussing here, but my guess is I can already guess the answer, and so can you.

It has to do with expectations of "realism" by other people, who overexaggerated(the same thing I did with my new spiffy perk examples). While I don't expect WL2 to have completely realistic depictions and a single bullet instagibbing a ranger or NPCs, I do expect that facing a big guy, that's moderately good at what he's doing, who's squeezing a burst from a minigun at a target which isn't behind a wall - to have at least a few bullets hitting.

[Elandryl]

Fallout 2 had a twist about combat, it was a one-man-army game, because you are the Chosen One.

Well, if that's what bothers you, you'd better be ready, because Wasteland 2 might place you in a very similar situation, the difference being you'll play a four-or-five-men-army.
Because that's exactly the point in a videogame: you're not here to incarnate your average garbage man, but to incarnate someone with a big destiny. So yeah, you'll probably have to save the world -or at the very least the whole region- against giants robots, mutated creatures, cyborgs or even your mother-in-law.
It's not realistic, as I'm sure you've already guessed, since it won't be easy to find an example of a handful of guys saving the world all by themselves in human history. But we'll want to believe it, because that's one of the things that makes a game so fun.

I know somebody told it in another topic, but one of the great strenght in Fallout was to face formidable odds: a crazy mutated genius and an army of mutants, no less. And you defeated them all by yourself. Honestly, I don't give a damn if that wasn't realistic -course it wasn't! But that's not important. What's important is to play a fascinating game. I *do* hope we'll agree on that. So, no, I don't want OD perks, magic sword or extraterrestrial beeing looking like inverted ice-cream cones because it's harder to believe in. But I want to be in a post apocaliptic world and be amazed every minute.

[SagaDC]

Personally, I feel that melee has its specific place in the grand scheme of Wasteland 2. I've generally approached it as a skill that works best in close, cramped quarters. If you see four gunmen standing one-hundred yards away, pull out a hammer, and then run towards them to engage in melee, you'll almost certainly be shot down (barring exceptional circumstances, such as the gunmen being terrible shots or the player being clad in power armor). On the other hand, if a player is navigating the twisted wreckage of an ancient office building, then a combat knife or baseball bat suddenly becomes more viable.

If you watch most movies that fall into the action or spy-thriller genre, you'll see a lot of situations where a gunman has the hero or ancillary character trapped in a building/alleyway/maze/forest with armed gunmen hunting them down. Or maybe the gunmen don't even need to hunt them down, because they've got them dead to rights with a gun pressed against their head. In many of these cases, the thusly trapped character will suddenly and abruptly throw off the badguy's aim, engaging in close-quarters combat or using cover to their advantage. After all, a handgun or assault rifle will eventually run out of ammunition, while a combat knife won't. In the assorted tabletop games I run, gun-toting players have learned to fear melee-specialists, because it's awfully hard to hit with a sniper rifle when someone's simultaneously trying to beat you to death.

Of course, in the world of Wasteland, technology immediately changes the entire battlefield. We're not just talking about knives and clubs - we're suddenly talking about combat-ready chainsaws, proton axes, and any other insanely advanced melee weapon that some weapon designer saw fit to construct. Couple that with incredibly advanced armors like Pseudo-Chitin Armor and Power Armor, and it makes melee much more viable. Granted, under the wrong circumstances a heavily-armored lunatic with a chainsaw will still be mowed down from a mile away, but woe to those who engage at short to medium range.

[suz]

Well, if that's what bothers you, you'd better be ready, because Wasteland 2 might place you in a very similar situation, the difference being you'll play a four-or-five-men-army.

I never said it bothered me. In THAT particular context where you have ONE guy to save the world, where this character dying means a reload it's natural that he can't be your usual hobo and he better not die when a mutie kicks his nads.

In THIS context, which is a party based game, where you have multiple rangers and them dying is NOT game over and not an automatic reload, making characters, or a subset of characters(melee) completely impervious to bullets like the perks listed above would make more sense in a Matrix-like or JRPG game, not a western CRPG with guns.

So, no, I don't want OD perks, magic sword or extraterrestrial beeing looking like...

Dodging a minigun burst like in FO universe is exactly that "magic sword" you're speaking of, except it's "magic perk of total awesomeness" instead, you can disguise it under a different name but it'll still be the same.

[Elandryl]

Dodging a minigun burst like in FO universe is exactly that "magic sword" you're speaking of, except it's "magic perk of total awesomeness" instead, you can disguise it under a different name but it'll still be the same.

Right now, it's just ideas that could lead to perks ingame. We don't know what the stats system will be, we don't even know if there will perks, for that mater. Judging if a perk is useful, useless or "total awesomeness" will come with balancing of the game. Something that we might begin to think of in, oh, let's say a year. And we, players, won't design a single perk, we're just being part of a giant brainstorming that may -or may not- give a handful of ideas and concept to InXile. That's all.

[grot]

'Leave This One To Me' - If two accomplished melee characters enter melee combat together, awestruck by the duel, other combatants may refuse to open fire on either of the pair, and will gain/suffer combat increases and decreases based on the result of the fateful single combat.

I like this idea for a perk. Nice.

Yep, I'm sure some melee fans would also like a perk that made characters in party with a point over the initial skill level in melee so hot and spiffy that gunpowder based ammo explodes if they get within 30km radius of them.

Another perk "Balance Things Out" - You gain a new melee move - Bitchslap, which has a damage equivalent to 6.3225 megatons TNT.

And to make things interesting and fun - Buff roundhouse kicks to 8 times Chuck Norris equivalent with AE damage component, cause we can't have just ranged weapons to deal AE damage.

It is quite incredibly lame, butthurt, lame and petty of me to charge in and whiteknight my own post (sorry), but your satire's way off the mark, and also I'm a glutton for punishment. I suggested a few dumb ways to make melee 'viable' - they all started with the assumption that shooters should have a uniform damage advantage, then applied various disruptive/psychological abilities to melee characters, usually upon reaching a human enemy, to try and make them worthwhile and so expand the possibilities of combat - which is quite patently different from demanding EXTRA SUPER-DOOPER-DAMAGE MULTIPLIER FER ME COS I IS LEVEL 20 UNARMED MONK AND CAN PUNCH OUT OPTIMUS PRIME BECAUSE I IS AWESOME, as you implied.

Good party-based RPGs need real combat diversity. Your heroic fantasy party-based RPG could have all manner of wizards and druids and invisible rogues, super-powered weaklings of various kinds, to break up the swords-and-shields monotony; your vaguely realworld modern/PA RPG actually has to be a bit more canny to create a combat system that doesn't involve everyone emptying their machine-gun clips from behind cover until one of them gets hit by a ricochet and dies (hurray for realism!).

The reality is that, despite what chess has taught us, most bishops and queens would be ill-equipped to physically take down knights and castles - frankly, the idea that they could is 'batshit'. The reason for their existence in chess has nothing to do with Chosen One syndrome or Neo dodging bullets, and everything to do with diverse combat adding up to a more enjoyable turn-based game. And that's what matters, far more than 'my God! That obviously competent henchman with a minigun failed to murder the character he was aiming at! This wacky monster-and-robot-filled post-apocalyptic game just jumped the shark.' A game is not required to be a facsimile of reality; its only duty is to be fun.