Post
by Korban3 » Sun Jan 22, 2012 6:12 pm
Mount and Blade wut? I just got done mentioning that somewhere else on here.
Yes, if any range-exclusive weapons are introduced, I'd hope that their design could be realistic and balanced. It's not easy though. That's why many games with ranged combat as foremost, the melee features are beefed up to make them at least partially useful.
Gears of War has a freakin' chainsaw bayonet. Original, fun and creative, but still beefed up melee.
In the industry standard Call of Duty, everyone (Quote "EVERYONE") carries a knife in their left hand 100% of the time.
In most other shooters, a good ole fashioned pistol whip causes spontaneous brain implosion, even if you hit them in the ankle.
In Dead Space, you can stomp someone's leg off and knock their block off. But it's more balanced because you get raped up close when you try to melee your way out of a pinch.
In games that attempt to balance in the opposite direction, like Skyrim, we see either overpowered ranged weapons or ranged weapons with unrealistic limitations.
It's such a difficult thing to balance that few games have gotten it right, or even close. Many games simply avoid it by only focusing on one or the other. The old Tomb Raider games were purely run and gun. A lot of shooters are gun-only games. Legend of Kay and Jak & Daxter both add very little, as far as I can recall, ranged combat at all.
Methods for balancing that might be usable without ruining the fun of one of the two things might include:
Resources conservation for horror and survival games which prompts the user to use melee more often.
Maybe a shooting game could give the player a realistic amount of ammo, say 4 magazines?, and drop them into a combat zone with a mission. Maybe allow stealth kills to conserve ammo and remain hidden. Makes the game more difficult, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Making one or the other unusable or difficult in some situations. Maybe you are walking down a tight hallway and some monsters popout right in front of you! It's more reasonable to use your long dagger than an AK in this instance because the AK is long, unwieldy, flashy and loud. It's only going to get in the way and get knocked aside. And when the fight is over, the AK will have alerted other monsters to you position. This can allow for deepening the player's choices of weapon and methods.
Merge the two. Lugaru and Overgrowth, even in alpha, are a great example. A knife can be used to cut and can be thrown. I'm amazed how few games actually don't merge this sort of thing.