Can You Say Melee? How About Merch? Anyone Want a Production Update?
Mitch here, back again with our final update of 2016. It’s a long one, so smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em....
Man, what a whirlwind of activity in our little studio! (Did you know we sit at 4’x2’ desks crammed up against each other all day?) The bees are buzzing up the hive but good, pushing hard to prepare for our Kickstarter Backer Beta next year. Expect news on that topic in a KS Update in early 2017. Today, we’ll go in-depth on a feature we’ve been teasing a looong time - melee! We’ll also give you some insight on everything we’ve been working on since we put out our
Super-Pre-Alpha video in August. And HUZZAH! The official BattleTech Crowdfunded Merch site is officially open! Woo hoo! I want ALL THE THINGS!
Okay MechWarriors, let’s get to it!
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.
Sometimes, an Atlas punches your arm off.
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.
...and sometimes, it’s a swing and a miss. (Note that all the gifs in this update show the game in a work-in-progress state - for example, this untextured base and Kintaro!)
The third element that we considered is how melee looks. In an abstract system, we can just declare that a ‘Mech punches, kicks, shoulder-checks, or whatever seems appropriate. Even if it’s an Atlas punching a Commando, we can basically imagine how that would work. But in our game, we’ve committed to animating every single attack so that it looks like something that could hit and do damage. That means the Atlas has to kick a Commando; its punch will swing wildly over the Commando’s head.
Bringing these three concerns together -- complexity, head shots, and visual consistency -- we decided to collapse all melee actions down to just one, “Engage”. When you engage, we look at your relative size, your relative position above or below the target, whether you have arms suitable for punching, whether those arms are intact or blown off, and so forth. Then we pick an attack that best fits what you have available.
Even this mangled Hunchback can land a well-timed melee attack.
To ensure this isn’t unfair to some ‘Mechs, we also collapsed all the consequences of the attacks into one outcome. This means that, in terms of effect, a punch and a kick are the same thing, a shoulder check is the same as a punch, and so forth. Some ‘Mechs are still more powerful in melee than others due to both tonnage and design; the Atlas is always going to wreak more melee destruction than the Catapult. But every ‘Mech can melee, regardless of their build.
The system works like this: every ‘Mech has an “engagement range” at which it can move up and take a swing at an enemy. If you’re within the engagement range of a target when you start your action, that target gets a gold box around it to show that you can punch it. Then, as your entire action for the round, you move up and swing (or kick, or shoulder-check, or stomp).
That all said, the Commando is still at a serious disadvantage going up against the power and raw tonnage of an Atlas.
Which of the possible attacks you perform is based on your ‘Mech, your opponent’s ‘Mech, and your relative heights. If you’re standing on a hillside facing an Atlas whose head comes up to your waist, you’re going to kick the Atlas. If you’re driving a Catapult, you’ll kick or body-check, but never punch (you have no real arms!). If you engage a vehicle or a downed enemy, you’ll try to stomp them instead of kicking. The goal is to make sure that whatever your situation, the attack looks and feels like it solidly connected.
‘Mechs do melee damage based on their tonnage, and whether they’re particularly good at melee -- you can build your ‘Mech to be a punching machine by installing melee-focused actuator upgrades, and Jordan and I both still dream of one day getting the Hatchetman. In keeping with the goal of making close-range melee a decisive moment in battle, the damage is tuned to be quite large. After all, you’ve had to walk up under a hail of fire from every long-range and mid-range ‘Mech, survive all of that mostly intact, and then hit with an attack. Gambling all that on a single attack roll is risky, so we want to be sure you’re well-rewarded for doing so.
That looks like it hurt!
Probably more important than the damage of a melee attack is the instability it inflicts. Melee is by far the easiest way to knock another ‘Mech down. Especially if you outweigh the target, you can put them on the ground with just one or two attacks, leaving them vulnerable to further attacks and forcing them to stand up on their action instead of moving. And, of course, when you fall down, if your MechWarrior fails her piloting roll, she’ll take an Injury. Enough knockdowns and an enemy pilot could end up as a red paste inside the cockpit.
We also wanted ‘Mechs to be able to use some of their weapons in melee, but that led to a problem: even as powerful as punching was, short-range, high-damage weapons like the AC/20 were the kings of melee. We wanted melee range combat to be for everyone, not just the Atlas and the King Crab. So when you punch, you don’t use
all your weapons.
This turned out to be an excellent opportunity to address a part of the game I wasn’t satisfied with: the small weapons. Machine guns, small lasers and flamers are woefully underpowered, underused, and generally a poor choice when you’re customizing. Especially when melee is so powerful relative to other weapons, why would you ever fire your small laser at all?
So the small weapons are simply incorporated into your melee attack. If you have them, and you punch, you also fire any small weapons you have. For a good time, get in close with a Firestarter and punch the enemy. You’ll also blast them with four flamers worth of damage and heat, on top of the punch itself. It’s pretty great, and gives ‘Mechs with high tonnage and small weapons (looking at you, Battlemaster) a reason to have the small weapons: the punch rips off the target’s armor, and the MGs spew possible criticals into the structure.
We made up a fake Shadow Hawk with Flamers just to try this out...
I’ve talked about how we rolled most of the melee actions together into one overall “Engage” action, but there’s one melee attack we kept separate. We knew from the start that we’d be including the Death From Above attack as a special and deliberate action. It’s too iconic a moment to not let you choose it yourself.
If your ‘Mech has jump jets, and you’re within the melee engagement range, you can jump and land on top of your target, smashing them to the ground. It’s powerful, does a ridiculous amount of damage, smashes your legs up something fierce, and it looks really damn cool.
In a recent fight, I DFAed an enemy with my Shadowhawk (and let me tell you, the SH is nothing to sneeze at when you use it as primarily a melee attacker). I landed as the enemy ‘Mech’s head and center torso both turned black. I’d basically ripped it in half with the DFA. Mission accomplished.
After several rounds of iteration (as always!), we're very happy with the state of melee in the game. It feels really satisfying to engage in, and ensures that the battles that make it to close quarters become bloody and decisive, rather than bogging down in frustration. We're excited for you to punch 'Mechs in the Kickstarter Beta next year!
