Poll: Why is melee over powered?

[Vern]

I think that if someone kills you with a melee attack after you've unloaded your machinegun into them, then you suck with your weapon and deserve to die. It's pretty damn obvious you couldn't aim or control your weapon enough to take down your target, and a knife to the throat is a nice punctuation mark. I have no problem with melee weapons being one hit kill, because if you get close enough to your target to use them, then yes you deserve the kill. It may not be entirely realistic, maybe an animation where you grab the targets head and deliver several slashes across the neck would make more sense. But again, you couldn't kill your target with a machinegun with a 100 round belt fed magazine firing at 700 rounds per minute that can take out targets over 700 yards away. I'd say a knife in your face is a pretty good indicator you need to switch weapons.

Wait not realistic? Try stabing somebody in the throat and tell me if they survive. Maybe developers should have the character bacon sizzle ( bacon!) on the ground getting stabed after to make it more realistic? Especially on a battlefield where there no medics it can realisticly mean instant death.

You also mention animation . In bfbc2 the player actually takes a large swing and jabs the enemy player in the skull, insta killing them. No i don't think melee ( knife melees anyways ) are overpowered.

I was referring to just a random slash, which is what most people end up with while doing a melee strike in an fps. I've made people drop dead in a game by giving them a slash across their upper arm, or leg. I know a knife strike can be a one hit kill if it hits the jugular, heart, lungs, brain stem, what have you. I was referring to just randomly slashing and hitting a mans finger and dropping him dead. Which is why I said the animation would be important, to show that the strike was actually a kill and not just a papercut.

 

[DementedSheep]

Knives and melee weapons need to do more damage to make up for the fact that the person actually has to get near you to use it.

 

[crimsonshrouds]

Cod has the knife which can apparently kill you as you are unloading a machine gun into the target that is meleeing. Halo has this exact problem. (Ive just rented halo reach for the first time) Im unloading a gun into somebody and get insta killed with a pummel.

These games melee just make no sense especially the ballistic knife.

melee makes more sense in

Bioshock 2: it takes 3 hits except with certain tonics

TF2: depending on whether their is a critical but dont get me started on face stabs though.

Protip: CoD does not represent gaming. It being bad is in no way indicative of a problem among gaming in general.

Where did i say gaming in general? I gave two examples of games where melee just unbalanced the game and two where the melee was balanced to fit the gameplay.

 

[ultrachicken]

I guess the theory is that melee...ing....an enemy is tougher to pull of then just shooting them, so it needs to have a greater payoff to justify it. Doesn't always work out that way, though.

Also, I can guarantee that if someone killed you with a single melee in Halo, it's only because they already emptied their clip into you beforehand.

Pretty much this. Melee attacks add a certain visceral feeling to multiplayer, so making them completely useless unless being used from stealth would ruin that, because being stealthy in a multiplayer match is basically impossible unless you're using some OP invisibility power.

 

[TheScientificIssole]

Cod has the knife which can apparently kill you as you are unloading a machine gun into the target that is meleeing. Halo has this exact problem. (Ive just rented halo reach for the first time) Im unloading a gun into somebody and get insta killed with a pummel.

It makes since for Halo, the bullet would just hit the armor while a spartan's super strength would cause a shit-load of concussive force in the inside of the armor.

 

[kouriichi]

If they let you come so close you can slice their throats and cut their hearts out, they deserve it.

I would love to agree with you, because your assessment of how people should die to a knife is spot on.

But the thing that makes me think they tend to be over powered, is in half the games you play these days, the knife doesnt even come within two feet of you.

When you can watch the kill cam of yourself dying, and the dude stabs 3 feet away from your elbow (a place where getting stabbed wouldnt kill you to begin with), or flails his knife around like a cleaver and knicks your shin, and you still die, theres a problem.

Its the lunge+instakill anywhere on the body that makes it overpowered most of the time. TF2, Brink, and Killzone all got it pretty spot on. But every shooter ive played other then that is just.... horrible about melee attacks.

 

[BMX670]

It's all about managing distance. One hit KO melee weapons like the COD knife or the chainsaw gun serve the purpose of creating a buffer zone between players. any player who gets in close enough to use melee in most situations has effectively shut down any conventions of normal aiming. In most shooters, the result of two players trying to use guns from ten inches away is either both parties running/spinning madly in circles hoping to hit something or one person who happened to be facing the right way turning the other into soup. It's like when two pyros try to take each other head on inf TF2. Whoever wins is the one who happened to spin the right direction. This doesn't reward players for having actual skill aiming, and is quite frankly not fun. one hit melee keeps players from charging right up to each other all the time. Such a mechanic may not be that realistic, but it is fair in terms of gameplay and serves an valid purpose.

 

[kickyourass]

As others have said before, if the melee attacks in games like COD weren't one-hit kills they'd be completely pointless. Why take the risk of getting that close to someone if they can just turn around and shot me in the face while I try and slap them to death.

 

[Thaius]

Some games do it wrong. Call of Duty, with its insta-kill, kind of annoys me. Gears of War melee does enough damage to down you in two hits, but also stuns you temporarily, making it easy to down someone by mashing the B button twice. That's unbalanced.

I like how Halo does it. If you melee someone with shields up, it immediately takes down their shields, but unless you snuck up on them you'll likely get meleed as well, and it becomes a perfectly even fight. If they have no shields, it's an instant kill, but any decent player knows not to stay right next to someone when they have no shields. Only if you sneak up behind someone can you kill a person with full shields. So outside of sneaking up to them (which I think makes sense for an insta-kill), the melee ends up balancing itself out very well, since in any use of the melee you are either killing someone who's weakened or giving yourself an opportunity that, assuming they don't suck, they will have as well; then it's a matter of speed and marksmanship. That's pretty perfect.

 

[mezorin]

Would you rather have melee be as it was in the Quake 1 days where it was 15% health a hit and utterly useless?

I'm sure this has been said a million times, but melee hits in COD are as such because everything else in the game is lethal as hell, and getting in close to an enemy carries a very high risk. It also counters just simply close quarter sniper rifle spraying and preying ala AWM in Counter Strike because if the guy is close enough to no scope spam with a dragunov, he's close enough to be stabbed. But most of the time against competant opponents, you are still bringing a knife to a gun fight in COD or Battlefield. If worse comes to worse against knife whores, just learn some Map Awareness and get a mosberg shotgun and your problems will be solved.

As long as melee is balanced around the game it is in, its fine. IE no insta gib melee kills in a game where it takes 20 bullets to kill a guy, but an instant kill in a COD game where 3 chest bullets from AK74U = kill is reasonable.

Out of the games out there, I think Brink has the most creative melee system right now. Its a rifle butt based system, or bayonet if you put it on your gun, that does decent damage but knocks the character down and messes up their aim. You can also get knives, but those are when you are using hand guns, which don't do the knock down but do more damage against an enemy and let you spy style knife unaware opponents if you are quick/sneaky.

 

[mezorin]

It's all about managing distance. One hit KO melee weapons like the COD knife or the chainsaw gun serve the purpose of creating a buffer zone between players. any player who gets in close enough to use melee in most situations has effectively shut down any conventions of normal aiming. In most shooters, the result of two players trying to use guns from ten inches away is either both parties running/spinning madly in circles hoping to hit something or one person who happened to be facing the right way turning the other into soup. It's like when two pyros try to take each other head on inf TF2. Whoever wins is the one who happened to spin the right direction. This doesn't reward players for having actual skill aiming, and is quite frankly not fun. one hit melee keeps players from charging right up to each other all the time. Such a mechanic may not be that realistic, but it is fair in terms of gameplay and serves an valid purpose.

Sorry for double post, but that = win. Since jujitsu/krav maga style military grappling isn't really doable in a fair multiplayer form, high damage melee knife attacks/rifle butting is a good substitute for close quarter combat that keeps two players from being bumped up to each other for very long.

 

[blaize2010]

well, you're up close and personal. if you're gun or magic is just as tough, not much point to even have melee.

 

[Ninjat_126]

I always thought COD melee should replace the knife with a "bash with gun butt" that has the function of STUNNING the enemy (like a concussion grenade) and sending them stumbling back a bit like L4D's melee attack.

So you can still defend yourself from a surprise head to head confrontation but it is not an insta-kill, you still need to finish them off with either more bashes to the skull or shoot them.

You mean like in Brink? That had a good idea for a melee system.

 

[Brutal Peanut]

It depends on the game - but I'd think it's because in most games you must be at least an arms length from the enemy to do proper damage. As for picking certain games apart and giving a separate opinion for each, I don't really feel like it - I'll just leave this as my answer. lol

 

[Torrasque]

Game Balance.

If somebody can get up close to you and not get shot to death, he needs to be able to kill you quickly to make the move worth doing. Game Balance, it rules all.

This.
Its when the person melee-ing has some kind of advantage that lets them get up to you really really fast (evade/sprint in Reach, commando in MW2) that bends the balance a bit.
A calm couple shots can kill any commando/lightweight/marathon guy in MW2.
If your timing is right, you can either parry the sword swing, or go into armor lock for a split second, deplete their shields, and melee them down (personal favorite of mine ^_^)

You can also just avoid tight quarters.
Melee is not overpowered, it is balanced just fine when compared to ranged.

 

[Jailbird408]

I thought that this would be about Super Smash Bros Melee. Does that make me an idiot?

I can't really contribute to the discussion otherwise. I used the Gauntlet in Quake III and it wasn't really much better than a gun, but considering how that's a 10-year-old game it can't be relevant enough for this discussion.

 

[MAUSZX]

Cod has the knife which can apparently kill you as you are unloading a machine gun into the target that is meleeing. Halo has this exact problem. (Ive just rented halo reach for the first time) Im unloading a gun into somebody and get insta killed with a pummel.

These games melee just make no sense especially the ballistic knife.

Yeah, everything in gaming makes sense, but this Doesn´t.... Come on you are a Space Marine, killing a lot of aliens, because of some kind of religion thing.... Really do you want things to make sense?

 

[Singularly Datarific]

I don't really care if it's overpowered or not, I just want it to be rewarding. Knifing 3 people in COD isn't nearly as fun as bashing a Heavy to death with a bust of Hippocrates.

 

[szakalt]

It should be like in Bad Company 1/2 and BF3, balanced, no I-cut-your-pinky-so-you-will-have-cardical-arrest like in CoD.

 

[skywolfblue]

This is one of the things that annoys me about Halo/CoD and every game that follows.

Stabbing people with a combat knife shouldn't be more deadly then a machine gun. Ever. Completely stupid.

If you want to have melee combat, do something like Gears of War and stick gigantic chainsaws or something equally threatening on it, not a pathetic combat knife. As absurd as it may be, sawing someone in half with a chainsaw = more believable then punching them to death (*cough*halo*cough*).