Melee! Melee! Melee!
Hello! This is your friendly neighborhood Design Lead, Kiva Maginn, with some new information about how we've approached one of our most-anticipated game features: giant robots punching other giant robots in the face!
When we started working on melee, I proposed a single overarching goal: once you're close enough to punch someone, punching should usually be the right thing to do (or at the very least, it shouldn't ever be the wrong thing to do). There are a few reasons for this, mostly having to do with the speed and intensity of battles. When battles get in close, it's not all that much fun to spin in circles around each other, trying to get a good back-shot but otherwise standing mostly in one place. I wanted the final stage of a battle, when ‘Mechs are in spitting distance of each other, to be brutal and decisive. Once you're that close, the fight's about to be over one way or another.
One of the first decisions we had to make was: how many different melee attacks are there? On one hand, offering a wide variety of options makes the experience more involved; when you choose to "kick" and your results clearly reflect your choice, it feels like your decisions mattered. But on the other hand, the risk of offering a variety of choices is that some of those choices are always sub-optimal, and thus act as a trap, encouraging less-experienced players to make the wrong choice.
As well, the more time we spent on the weapons UI, the less we wanted to force a similar level of complexity into other parts of the game. It's really important that you be able to pick and choose which weapons will fire and at which target, so we can't really avoid that level of complexity. But melee attacks seemed to come down to a simple choice: do you punch, hoping for a head hit, or do you kick, hoping for a leg hit?
This dovetailed with another issue I wanted to address, which is the frequency of head hits. Generally, head hits are fun and interesting and provide an element of chaos and sudden reversals to battles, and I approve of that (Mitch says, "Watching McCain lose his Atlas in the Super-Pre-Alpha video was one of the great joys of my life.") but it's a lot different when the victim of the head shot is your prize MechWarrior, whom you've carefully guided through dozens of hours of gameplay. It's interesting when a veteran MechWarrior dies; it's less interesting when it happens abruptly, through no fault of yours, at the whim of a single random die-roll from a lucky punch.
