Let's talk about melee combat for a bit. Western devs seem to think that High Enemy HP/Damage = Challenge. Why is this? A lot of the "hardest difficulty" in western games simply mean the enemies will kill you in 2 hits, while they take 20 hits to die. Their movesets remain the same. (I think Witcher 3 is the worst example of this.)
The only half-decent melee combat from a western game I can think of recently was nuGod of War. In that game, the highest difficulty (GMGOW) means enemies have a chance of turning elite in the middle of a battle unless they're left alone or disrupted. Turning elite gives them more health, moves and resistance to staggering, etc. The game has a parry and stun system, magics on cooldown and some slight juggling mechanics. This already puts it beyond shit like Witcher 3, but nuGOW still suffers from shit like bad camera, upscaled enemy HP/damage and low enemy/boss variety.
Anyway, discuss what kind of combat system you like to see, or how to improve existing games.
>Why is this? Western studios ape Japanese games superficially but fail to recognise the mechanical details.
Kevin Nguyen
I guess. There's also the issue of developers just throwing dozens of enemies to overwhelm you and calling it a "challenge". I see a lot of this in open world games, where a higher level area is inaccessible simply becomes there's too many enemies or their level is too high. But mechanically they're no different than the level 1 versions.
Charles Davis
Not even Japanese themselves make good melee combat nowadays. Just look how Soulshit became pinnacle of combat.
Wyatt Moore
Looking back, Dark Souls didn't have a particularly challenging combat system. Most of the difficulty came from the lack of handholding and level design. Having to fight a lot of enemies, not knowing if the path you chose will lead to a bonfire, that was tense but also fun. But with open world shit, all that goes out the window. Everything becomes piecemeal and stale.
Devil May Cry and Bayonetta games are still being made
William Powell
There's nothing mechanically engaging about Souls combat. It's just dying so easily gives off an intensity but that kind of goes down the tubes once you realize how broken rolling is.
Austin Cook
You're already talking about Ghost of Tsushima. higher difficulty in the game means higher risk instead of it being just tedious. >Both you and the enemy deal more damage to each other >Better AI >smaller parry windows
John Russell
>The only half-decent melee combat from a western game I can think of recently was nuGod of War
stopped right there.
gow combat was fucking garbage, that camera alone was awful and attacks lacked strength until you unlocked the last weapon skills.
>Just look how Soulshit became pinnacle of combat.
not just that but i hate that western devs are trying to replicate souls games so much. THe devs from darksiders tried to poorly implement darksouls mechanics into the game and it turned out to be a disaster
their newest game is basically third person shooter darksouls and copies everything from it besides the decent enemy / boss design.
that new mortal shell game is also just like dark souls
Ryder Morales
The older GoW games handled difficulty a lot better than some shitty devil trigger ripoff.
Jack Sanders
People who think Souls combat is good or the focus of the games are fucking retarded. Sadly Fromsoft themselves seem to now think this. Souls is about exploration and adventure, not pretending hitting one button to negate all damage is a test of skill.
Anthony Barnes
>stopped right there. keep reading, mouthbreather He makes fair points and also addresses the camera issues.
Lucas Gonzalez
because when your melee combat mostly boils down to a heavy attack and light attack button with everything else being a periphery bloated hp and damage is the only real way you can scale enemies and provide a greater challenge anything else requires a lot more actual work designing enemies and abilities for the player to exploit
Attack warm up is WAY too long in Tsushima. Probably has to do with all of the post processing effects. The lag is brutal. Also the camera is crammed right up the character's ass during exploration. And camera follow is shit. All of those issues could be fixed via update but I don't see all of them happening. Maybe they can give us a performance mode at 720p or something. The framrate being locked at 30 really fucks things up
Isaac Fisher
yeah, also not only they copy and paste the mechanics but also somehow implement them badly.
people just have a hard-on for that kind of shit but somehow don't know how to do it properly.
Luis Martinez
I played GoW and GoW2 on the hardest difficulty. The problem's still there. Kratos died at the slightest touch while enemies are damage sponges. HOWEVER, there were tricks you could pull off, like relying on grab moves because you are invincible during the animation. Throwing enemies into each other also became overpowered as the damage was based on enemy HP. You also became a lot more reliant on instakill magics like the Medusa heads. It's fun in its own way, but far from perfect.
Jonathan Hill
some spear and shield attacks are pretty hard to parry on lethal consistently, probably has to do with the 30 fps.
Adam Lee
>attacks lacked strength until you unlocked the last weapon skills. Thinking weapon skills improve your actual damage output? Focusing on Melee Skills first before Ranged? Upgrading anything but the Passive Status Effect skills first? You might as well just admit you didn't play on GMGOW and just bow out. Melee in the early game is only for waiting in-between Cooldowns and putting in extra damage during Stuns. You shouldn't be able to use Melee reliably in GMGOW until you've gotten enough to upgrade your gear to at least 1 lvl above your enemies since they'll inevitable level up during a fight, making your Melee that much harder to use, since they'll be staggered less often.
Furthermore, Melee Skills are either weak as fuck, useless, or in one case a straight downgrade to be avoided. If you played GMGOW you'd know this from the first two fights, let alone the 10 or so you have to do before you even get to the Blacksmith. The beginning of the game is all about using your Shield, Atreus shitty Arrows (before the upgrades when they become essential for crowd control), the one cool-down ability you have at the moment, and landing heavy ranged attacks to create distance. If you think God of War is about Melee only, then obviously you'd think it's bad, because you'd be bad. The combat is less about using any one style but changing it depending on the situation, your cooldowns, and what you need to kill first to stay alive.
Christian Allen
>Throwing enemies into each other also became overpowered as the damage was based on enemy HP. Wrong. Throw damage scales inversely with Kratos' defense.
Juan Powell
i actually got the plat on the game. did everything in it including searching for the fucking birds.
As for skills i didn't mean in specific weapon skills, i meant abilities such as being able the freeze enemies in a aoe or when you call a snow storm
Jack Bell
I think that's why Bloodborne and Sekiro existed. It's an evolution of the L1/R1 combat system, with a dash of guns/prosthetics.
Bloodborne rewards aggression with the rally system, and has a healthy variety of weapons. Sekiro rewards you for studying the enemy and parrying at the last moment (parry spams are punished), requiring a sequence of perfect parries to break someone's posture and end them.
Jayden Evans
This. It's like the game is eating inputs
Andrew Jenkins
well, might be. All I know is a bunch of dudes die if I throw one skeleton at them.
Joshua Howard
>because when your melee combat mostly boils down to a heavy attack and light attack button They did pretty good though considering this, surely better than GoW3? The press, delay-press, hold, and throw variant moves of the axe, and their various combos when weaving them together offers an impressive amount of variety in terms of damage, attack speed, range, AoE, and stagger for just 2 button presses.
Jose Murphy
It's a well known and proven fact.
Alexander Parker
Yeah, I'm doing the Muspelheim challenges on GMGOW and it requires me to learn the stance switching, and it's awesome. The Blades of Chaos' R1 stance switch attack just turns Kratos into Wolverine until he gets interrupted. As for the axe throws, there's those instant-recall attacks where Kratos does a freezing slam as the axe returns, it's great.
That's why I'm so frustrated with nuGOW's camera. There's a good combat system hidden underneath all that.
Tyler Gutierrez
Ah, IMO you really shouldn't have used anything but the original two Axe abilities you got then. Damage Abilities might be better for late game when you have the gear to make them scale, but by then you have way more options so focusing on Frost/Stun Abilities is more important. Especially since the Light Axe Ability is near instant cast, while the Heavy Axe Ability is a long Stun + Slow when upgraded.
But like I said, the combat is about using EVERYTHING at least when it's on GMGOW. Especially with the Valkyries. It may not be as hard as Dark Souls can be at times, but it was a very fun RPG/3D Metriodvania. I really liked how you slowly changed from just running around, dodging enemies to constantly crowd-controlling and going in and out of the fight based on what you had up.
Ian Scott
This any good? From what I hear it aped Sekiro's parry system and Souls exploration, then coated it with Star Wars paint. On paper that sounds great, actually.
Sekiro yes. Bloodborne no. Bloodborne has the same issue as Souls. It's not mechanically complex and it's still a dodge fest with even easier parrying.
Gabriel Sullivan
7/10 Low movesets Difficulty is enemy spam Difficulty crumbles when you get more force powers and learn how to abuse push Almost no reason to explore.
Jordan Jenkins
I haven't played Sekiro but I'd say the combat is a much faster and less punishing Dark Souls. Early game it is harder but you put skill points into abilities and unlock new combat mechanics it loses that and becomes more of a third person hack and slash with occasional spikes in difficulty.
Oliver Anderson
>L1/R1 combat system I really hate this control scheme, could never play games that uses this setup
