What is the secret of good melee combat? Why can't western devs make good melee combat...

It's simple. Japanese gamers want to do melee combat. Western gamers want to watch melee combat. Thus, a Japanese game will generally prioritise responsiveness over animation, even if it means having ugly, choppy "interrupts" and hit-stops. In contrast, a Western game will generally prioritise animation over responsiveness, even if it makes the combat feel floaty and disconnected from actual gameplay effects.

If you read the rest of my post.
Witcher proves my point even further. Witcher 1 has cool movies, decapitations and whatnot, but the combat itself is fuck and might as well be Runescape's combat, click on someone, watch the purdy animations and do it again. There's barely any input from the player and barely any room to improve beyond roiding/oiling up before a fight.
Witcher 2 and 3 are the same. They have all sorts of cool animations but they all play out like shit, you just attack, block/dodge, maybe use Quen and repeat. Batman has all sorts of meaty hand to hand fighting and bones breaking and shit(and besides how silly batman looks gliding across the place looks like it's genuinely cool looking) but again, it's just you clicking attack and pressing block when needed to, no improvement needed.
Meanwhile in platinum games all sorts of cool shit happens. Between great looking effects and animations, to enemies freezing in midair from the speed and intensity of your attacks, to sometimes dismemberment or enemies getting launched across the screen or in the air, it has that "cool effect" criteria.
In addition there's always plenty of room to improve in their relatively deep combat systems.

Now one might say that I'm being a fucking weeb unfair when saying that P* games have a lot of room to improve in while Batman doesn't because unless you're perfect free flowing everything, never getting spotted and essentially always getting the equivalent to Origin's S rank in every fight in Batman Arkham __ you're not playing the game right, but let me ask you this.
At a medium to high level of play in Devil May Cry, what's the difference? The answer: More combos, amazing timing, things you never even knew existed in the game. You're essentially the level of a god, doing shit you'd swear you'd only see in cutscenes.
At high level of Batman, what changes? You play much safer but at it's core it's still the same. You press RMB when prompted, you attack a lot and you don't ground takedown that much.

tl;dr:

In other words, instead of making you BE the badass you simply feel like them.

Wouldn't be surprised if Ubisoft copyrighted some mechanics and jacked the price up the ass.

They are made by japs, you dumb fuck.

So not only do we have meatiness we also need responsiveness.

Individual moves should be simple, but complexity should come from chaining them together.

I know that you knuckle-dragging house ape, thats why i said

Because western devs only make fps games now.
Melee was good, look at dark alliance on OG xbox where you can literally shove someone across a stage if you had a big enough weapon.

Conceptually a sword is not a sword in modern weatern games, it's a very low range gun.

Hang on wait a minute, were the playstation 2 lotr games not developed by westerners now that I think about it?

They also made demon stone, which also had good melee combat.

The secret to melee combat is:
1: Impact. When you hit an enemy or connect with their weapon, body, surroundings, etc, it needs to have a feeling of impact. When there is recoil and an opposite reaction to connecting to enemies it gives off a feeling of realism, such as you actually hurting an enemy.
2: Melee combat cant be a spongey experience. If you're hitting an enemy and he's taking broadsword swings to the face repeatedly, it hurts immersion and fun. It's better to add in dodge, parry and block features, like crusader kings or mount and blade, and making combat brutal.
3: Make it realistic in nature. Your character doesnt need to be doing insane flips and twirls, as its just extra fluff that gets boring over time, unless its incredibly sped up, and it stops being realistic and becomes more fanciful like DMC or Bayonetta. Make the attacks simple, choreographed and actually parryable and blockable.
4: A bonus is when games make it possible to cut off enemy limbs such as cutting off their legs and such, though that can be more difficult and is oftentimes a finishing type move that ends the battle.

That works as well.
If you haven't I recommend playing Lugaru for a good example of this. At the surface it looks like THE WORK OF ONE WHO CONSORTS WITH BEASTS a really simple, outdated and shitty game. You essentially have six moves, a leg sweep, a normal punch, an off the wall kick, a roundhouse kick, a powerful but hard to hit dropkick and a counter button. But it's how they work together and how the game augments them is what's really interesting about it.
For example, after a while you can realize how easy it is to start chaining moves by holding the LMB and then moving in various directions to do the various moves. Then you start to realize that enemies start countering moves you frequently use.
Then you realize that some moves like a midair roll or a wall jump temporarily disorientates enemies so that you can attack them with something. Or how you can parry an enemy attack by attacking at the right moment.
Then you notice how you can modify your damage to spice up the combat. Like how powerful bladed attacks are and how dangerous wolves are to fight because of their claws and clawed feet.
Or how powerful blunt objects are, like for example a normal roundhouse kick deals a decent amount of damage, but roundhouse someone into a nearby rock or wall and they'll be on the ropes or die. Or how you can disorientate someone and then leg cannon(the drop kick attack, which is by the way an incredibly meaty attack that sends enemies flying a good distance and can instant kill if they fly into another enemy or wall) to make a difficult game just a bit easier.

It's why I feel overgrowth is such a letdown, because the combat system has such amazing potential with it being faster and you having more freedom with your attacks(most especially your leg cannon since you can do it at any point in mid air and aim where you and your target should fly) but it's wasted on some retarded furry jew's jewery and early access trash.

user western devs made good melee combat years ago, look at the Star Wars: Jedi Knight series.

I have played The Southern Gate over a hundred times, easy.

Forgot to post video.

1) Hit mechanics. When you do damage to someone, it should make them recoil. Always, with exceptions only in very specific circumstances. Same when someone hits you. Put in those five frames of universal hitstun on impact to lend weight to those hits. Nobody's attack pattern survives taking a solid hit mid-combo. Contrast with any game where an attack lands, but the recipient simply continues with their current action without so much as a pause frame, and you can immediately feel the difference. Some games allow that as a mechanic, but even then, something as simple as a bit of hitstun can make a huge difference. Seeing an attack land on the Hulk and having that fraction of a second to realize it hasn't stopped his haymaker gives you that instant, as a player, to lose your shit before Hulk pushes it back in. On the other side of the coin, the complete lack of tangible contact in MKX or Injustice can be really frustrating, because other than a small tick of your opponent's health bar and the fact that their sprite is flashing, it looks like they literally just walked through your attack. Because, for most intents, they did.

2) Collision detection. BamHam (and most games with grappling) cheat on this. Obviously, being able to make your hitboxes and hurtboxes connect cleanly is important, but the graphical complexity that comes when 3D models do any sort of grappling means that everything has to be perfectly choreographed or you end up with clipping errors that look like they should be instantly fatal. Hits should be hits, throws should be throws, slams should be slams, and there should be no ambiguity as to how an attack will play out if successfully executed. If players want to roll dice for every attack, there are plenty of functional, existing systems to let them roll dice for every attack. If players want to actually press buttons for every swing, then their own decisions and their targets' reactions should be the only factors determining the outcome.

3) Animation. Attention to detail is key here. Weight, acceleration, transfer of energy, and aesthetics all count for something. The way BamHam handles things, in a manner that specifically suits Batman as a character, is that he has extremely little start-up on his counters–one second, the thug's fist is halfway to Batman's face, the next, the thug's got four broken fingers and is dining on sidewalk. This approach doesn't work so well with characters that aren't meant to be brooding, dangerous martial arts masters, but considering how many video game characters these days seem to be just that, it's surprising that it doesn't get more play. For other examples of animation done right, check out Aki's N64 wrestling games–the effort and detail they put into the animation, from the punches to the slams to the ways the wrestlers would writhe in pain or recover slowly after they'd taken big damage, was groundbreaking for its time and remains impressive to this day.

4) Responsiveness and challenge. This is the big tradeoff, and it's extremely important to know where you stand before trying to jump in. BamHam is responsive. Again, counters are extremely powerful, and you can get into a counter stance so quickly as to make the game laughably easy if you fight purely defensively. Devil May Cry is responsive. Bayonetta is responsive. All of these games let you do whatever you want, when you want, and if you get hit, it's your own fault. The challenge in this particular design lies in taking away that responsiveness at very deliberate, very fair times. Batman can counter at the drop of the hat, but he can't cancel out of his own attack animation to do so. Get carried away with your combo, and you open yourself up to someone else. DMC lets you use the Stinger to get into a fight, chase down enemies, or simply punctuate a combo, but especially if you whiff, there's that moment of vulnerability where you can get smacked for not planning ahead. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor takes the BamHam combat system almost in its entirety, but crucially allows you to cancel out of any attack to immediately counter, and just that small change alone removes almost all remaining challenge from the game's melee.

Putting all of these together is where things can get difficult, but playing with the knobs a little can yield drastically different, but still very satisfying results. Want a burly bruiser who has attacks with slow windup, but tons of damage, the ability to ignore limited hitstun, and big knockback/knockdown on his attacks with the ability to follow up with ground slams? Want a lightning-fast needler who only generates hitstun on every third hit of his combo, but has abusable i-frames and the ability to string together an absurdly long chain of attacks? Want a counter king whose attacks are utterly devastating as long as they land during the opening frames of an enemy's attack animation? Fucking do it.

you make a game with punching and kicking only.

Vermintide has good melee.

A good part of combat with bladed weapons is not making said weapons feel like glorified baseball bats. It's satisfying to be able to chop off limbs and the head and such; when attacking someone with a sword just adds a bloody texture to them at most, it's disappointing. MGR did this better than any game I know of, letting you slice people apart in any conceivable angle, until they just become cat food.

There's two reasons and they are both mathematical. Sorta.

First one is that melee combat fucking sucks by default in FPS due to how it's implemented. It usually goes like this:
You press the attack button, a line is drawn from your camera forward a certain distance and if it hit anything, you connect the hit. It doesn't matter if the sword goes straight through a niggas neck, if your cursor wasn't standing on top of him when you clicked, you're not gonna hit him. It's hitscan combat.
Basically for FPS, melee combat is like firing a revolver that only has 2 meters of range. And in ranged combat, the closer your oponent is to you, the harder it is to hit him since if he moves to the side, it takes you more degrees rotating to correct your aim. So in sum, you get this retarded thing where melee combat, supposelly effective at close range, is actually worse at close range.

The only game that sorta fixed this was Xeno Clash that had a lock on to your oponent and removed this bullshit but until there's actual physical collision between a weapon and the target, it's not fixed.

Secondly, I like to call it "the MMO cat fight syndrome".
You ever saw 2 players in an MMO ducking it out in melee? It's retarded. They stand in front of each other, maybe strafing and spinning around, spamming attacks that almost always hit.
There's no defense or parrying, you just constantly claw at your foe while he claws at you. This is how fucking peasants fight and the fights are fast and deadly because of this.

Ideally, melee combat would see little to no hits landed for a good chunk of it. You'd parry, block or dodge your oponents attack because 2-3 blows would be enough to kill you.
You'd also have to manage stamina since getting tired means you'll make more mistakes or be slower, etc. It would balance out heavy armor versus light armor since the second drains more stamina to fight in and if you're not proeficient or strong enough, you'll be exhausted faster.

Combat done this way would feel a lot more tense, mistakes punished harshly. But as long as it's not about split second decisions, rather managing resources and having your marging for error diminishing as the fight goes on, you'd get a really good combat system.

Magic

Neal Stephenson tried to kickstart a literal sword dueling simulator, they realized that it wasn't any fun or didn't work halfway through and he returned everyone's money on his own. Realism on its own doesn't make for good gameplay.

Flailing around like a retard and watching the physics simulation play out is not good combat.

hah

There is also another game in development by the same guys that made the crpg mod for warband; the combat mechanics are similar except you physically block weapons with your own by chambering an attack in the same direction as the incoming attack. So basically you just move your weapon in the direction of the incoming weapon.

Realistic/enjoyable, go to far in one direction you lose sight of the other.

As someone who literally just fought the past weekend in a longsword tournament, I'm calling you on your shit.

The problem with making a realistic sword simulation is that the controls and feedback are entirely too lacking; you cannot in any way, shape or form accurately simulate fühlen with the controllers that exist today. Moreover, the inherent lag between eyesight ques to act are so much greater compared to the sense of touch means that you have to slow it down to retardedly slow levels, sapping all the fun and explosiveness out of it.

Additionally the animation simply cannot accurately convey small details like where their balance is, where are they looking, how they change their grip a little or shift their thumb. Not on any realistic budget, anyhow.

This isn't going to be a "Dark Souls is WRPG" bullshit, is it?

There should be a variety of weapons with lots of depth to them, to the point where a single hit in a combo can have a paragraph explaining why it's so important.
Take MonHun's hammer, for example. It's got a 3 hit combo and a charged hit, and that's pretty much it. Each one of those hits means a lot, though, because by positioning yourself differently or timing them properly you can get very different results. Add nice animations and sound that give a lot of heft to the weapon, and you have something that's easy to pick up and has a massive skill ceiling.
The problem with games like Skyrim and melee combat is that they're first person. You can't usually roll in FPS games, so quick positioning is out of the question. Melee weapons use the same buttons as ranged, so you usually only have 1 button combat and the ability to block. The games usually let you move while attacking, too, so positioning ends up being walking back and forward with your weapon ready.
The closest to good melee FPS combat I can think of is the Doom mod Demonsteele. It's got your general slashy attacks to mince things that are close, but there's also a secondary fire that hits enemies upwards. You can then follow with slashes or shoot them, or do other things. There are also special attacks done by double tapping a direction and attacking, which each have their own advantages. You end up thinking about the moves you want to do, and weighing up their advantages, instead of being a blender. It even has a dash with iframes, so you can quickly slide in and out of combat.

Examina is the bomb.com once you get the hang of it, I never got the hang of thrusting, though

When have jap devs ever made good melee combat?

in skyrim you can stagger people and stop them mid-swing when you power attack. its morrowind where your attacks have no weight, idiot

You actually can stagger people in Morrowind (greater chance with higher damage), and even knock them down

Good job revealing that you haven't played Morrowind, though.

im saying morrowind has no weight to the attacks. skyrim you see it in character animations and camera movement, morrowind staggers happen but there's no "weight" to combat

...

You're the first person to even bring up Morrowind. Why are you acting like someone was comparing the two? The other title in the post you quoted was Gothic.

because the person said skyrim had no weight, which it does so i gave the benefit of the doubt and thought he must be thinking of another elder scrolls game and is not actually pants on head retarded

Skyrim has no weight, though. Did you even play it?

So what jap games have good melee combat then?

You think having weight to your attacks just means camera shake, huh?

I know it's cool to hate on Skyrim over here, but Skyrim's combat is much better than people give it credit for. It's better than both Morrowind and Oblivion; in Morrowind you stand there and spam click, blocking and dodging is calculated automatically. In Oblivion attacks are super quick and it's hard to dodge or do anything effectively besides block, counter, block. And in Oblivion your weapon actually does feel like a wet noodle. Skyrim's combat is more dynamic and it has more weight to it and is better in general. Enemies have combat patterns that you can observe and dodge, you have different combat options like power attacks and shield bashes, etc. Try playing on master difficulty where the giant spider's poison attack takes like 75% of your health, and you will realise you have to use good combat tactics to survive.

And really, it's an RPG, it's not about combat. It's about role-playing and character development. Skyrim's combat is good for what it is. Stop complaining.

Skyrim is still shit. We have had this discussion over one thousand times in the past six years.

For Skyrim you'd have to add a short stagger to every hit, slow down swinging speed enough that you can't just stunlock everyone´, then modify stagger strength by the damage dealt, life remaining, stamina, block status, weapon type and perks.

Lot of work for a marginal improvement.

It just appears that way, Skyrim has a pants on head retarded instakill mechanic where either you or your oponent gets an uninteruptable animation depending on level difference. Most of you just didn't notice because the pathfinding is so bad enemies can't walk past any tight/sloped surface. Fuck Skyrim.

Not like you ever played it.

Did you forget about the retarded instakill shit or are you just accusing him for no reason?

Why she's trembling?

He obviously has no idea how the kill animations work. Just regurgitating talking points that get spouted whenever Skyrim combat comes up.

Compare Skyrim to Dark Messiah, then you'll see that it's nothing more than a Diablo clone without an isometric view.

The fact that the kill animations work at all are indicative of godawful design decisions. I honestly forgot they were in Skyrim because that's the first thing I get rid of.

I'm not claiming any of those games 'are shit'. All I'm talking about is the combat and its mechanics.

Yes, it's shit that there is unavoidable instakills that will kill you when you are still at 100% health. I used mods to get rid of that. And I'm fucking sick of deer and their matrix-tier arrow dodging feats.

Dark Messiah indeed has better combat. But like I've said, advanced skill-based combat is not essential to TES games, and it's still better in Skyrim than the previous iterations so I don't get why people complain so much about it.

Skyrim makes it impossible to play a proper spellsword character. The "magic as a weapon" mechanic ruined playing a mage because it's impossible to have out a weapon and cast spells at the same time.
And that is what is truly overlooked about how awful Skyrim is.

The subject of the thread isn't Skyrim's combat vs Morrowind/Oblivion. It's purely about good combat, which Skyrim simply does not have. Comparisons to predecessors isn't going to give it a place on the good combat list.

Spoiler alert: Every TES game has shit for combat, some are just worse than others.
Skyrim's is the worst

Not to mention destruction itself gets really outclassed by archery and melee later in the game.

You'd think they'd do a minor patch or something to buff it.

You're a fucking retard, Skyrim was just perfect for that kind of thing and the one thing it did right.
You can have a sword on your right hand and a spell on your left to cast at will, even while attacking with your sword, something you couldn't do in any of the other games. In Oblivion\Morrowind, you either casted a spell or used a weapon, you couldn't do both at the same time, only difference is not having to switch for them.

Really, what are you losing with a spell in your left hand? A shield? Like that fucking matters for a spellsword. A second weapon? It's useless on it's own, especially compared to having a Destruction spell equipped there instead.

But that happens in Oblivion\Morrowind as well unless you abuse the magic crafting system to make Power Words yourself.
Magic does not scale at all with skill while damage for archery\melee does, nor is there equipment to boost your magnitude as there is for combat usually, but this is a problem the entire Elder Scrolls Series has where they expect you to craft a better spell that does more damage but consumes more mana, offset by the lower cost due to your skill and multiple +Magicka bonus.
That's just their default view on how2mage, which is stupid but hardly unique for Skyrim.

They never patched anything. Just let the modders fix their game.

That's exactly my point. You can become a magic wielding god in Morrowind if you decide to have your character focus on destruction. In Skyrim there's literally nothing you can do that an archer/dual wielding character can do half a dozen times better.

store.steampowered.com/app/362490/

Thank me later.

How the fuck are you gonna post that bullshit? If I want to play a paladin character, guess what? I've gotta put away my shield every time I want to cast a fucking spell. I can't dual wield and cast spells through my sword. I can't easily switch between spells - I've gotta go into the fucking shitawful menu to do that.

Skyrim is garbage. Garbage.

Retard detected. Here's something you can do with a mage that no archer\warrior can do:
Get the dual casting perks for Destruction, focus on Shock. Dual Cast Thunderbolt (the single target, single fire shock spell, second one unlocked for it) at enemies and you stagger them.
The special detail here is that you stagger them long enough to recast and keep them staggered and even more special is that this works against Dragons.

So yeah, as a BZZZTmancer, you can stunlock a Dragon and fry him to death.
There's also a lot of utility spells and let's be quite frank here. You either play the game with Restoration or Alchemy for the health recovery so you're gonna need some magic anyway.

Nope. You can become said god if you understand how magic truly works in the Creation Engine and you can work with those rules. It has almost nothing to do with your character skill or focus.
50 points of Destruction in Morrowind can be more destructive than 100 points of Destruction in Skyrim if you craft the right combination of Weakness to Magick, Weakness to Fire and Fire spells or go for full cheese with Weakness to Magic and Drain Health 100 for 1 second on touch. You can easily down incredibly tough enemies with a spell that costs the equivalent of a lousy firebolt.

There's even funny quirks like a spell with 100 magnitude being more expensive than another spell with 4 components with 25 magnitude each, despite doing the same thing.
The engine is fucked and balance was never though about, Skyrim just saw them giving up on it and removing it entirely. Morrowind\Oblivion magic system isn't any better than Skyrim just because it's more exploitable, it's still shitty but for it's own reasons.

Eat my ass

Why are you having an outburst over not being able to cast advanced spells while your hands are occupied with a sword and shield? Yah, you can't shoot a fireball out of your knuckles, deal with it.

As opposed to…?

seriously my dude

BUT I COULD DO THAT IN OBLIVION, YOU FUCKING CUNT

That's great, all the while you're spamming thunderbolt a min/maxed archer and warrior buttfucked that ancient dragon ten minutes ago.

Between smithing, and enchanting folks who want to use destruction as their main source of damage don't stand a chance. And yeah, you destruction in Morrowind goes a lot further than in Skyrim, that's what I was trying to say.

And if you were a Paladin in Morrowind, you were either attacking or casting a spell. You couldn't be swinging your sword WHILE channeling a Restore Health on yourself for example.
How is switching between shield and spell any different than stop attacking to cast a spell and then resuming attack? Mechanically it's the same, only the DR you got from the shield changes.

The fucking shitty menu was awfull but if you were on PC you could still hotkey things from that menu to 1-8 keys. This includes your shield as well so you could press 3 for a healing spell, cast it (while swinging your sword or blocking with it) and then press 2 to requip your shield.

Having to favorite things does not change the hotkey functionality at all, you still get the same number of hotkeys you always had anyway.
If you're gonna complain the game is shit, nobody is disagreeing with you and SkyUI exists for a very fucking good reason.
But don't go around sputing bullshit about the dual-wielding that's not true at all when there are much worse things about it that can be said instead.
You're not wrong, you're just wrong about why you're right.

I remember having a High Elf with as much magicka as I could get, and a friend watching commented that a destruction spell that cost most of my magicka did about as much damage as he could with one shot of a bow. In my experience, magic in Morrowind was shit unless you used exploits like levitate, drain strength till they were overencumbered or use weakness to x

You could do that while you weren't attacking only. Now in Skyrim you can do that while attacking and blocking with your other hand. You are fucking retarded.

That doesn't make any sense. There are no paladins on Morrowind.

How the fuck do I cast a spell while I have two swords out, dumbass? Did I miss a crucial part of the game? No, I've gotta stow away my weapon and bust out the magic again.

How the fuck do I attack, block, and cast at the same time? I can't, that's how, because Skyrim is retarded and I can't just shoot a fireball out of my sword like I could in Oblivion.

That's why I said it's only usefull if you properly exploit it.
For instance, if you make a spell for 100 Fire Damage, it's gonna cost you a lot of mana. But if you make 100 Weakness to Magic and 50 Fire Damage, it's gonna deal the same damage but costs a lot less. And you can stack Weakness to Magic on top of itself with sucessive casts to increase it's magnitude even further to the point that you can cast 5 Fire Damage and end up dealing 500.

Or just use Drain Health that, because it's not real damage and returns as soon as the spell ends, is much cheaper than "real" damage. But if you drain more health than the enemy has, you kill him anyway. Now guess what happens when you combine this with Weakness to Magic, both very cheap magicka-wise spell components.

Oh and stuff like Levitation with long duration and magnitude 1 at touch to "paralyse" an oponent far more cheap than actual Paralize.

The system had it's quirks and it was fun to come up with ingenious ideas sometimes, but in the end what you have is a system that's useless unless you break it. Like a videogame that you can only win if you use cheats.

I'd rather have components like Fire, Shock, Healing, Target, Touch things you can learn from other mages and the magnitude of your spell dictated by the equipment you carry with Elven Staff and Daedric Wand being a thing.

Well, if you wanna be a pedantic asshole…
How did you do that in Oblivion or Morrowind when you couldn't equip two swords there?

And in Oblivion\Morrowind you gotta stop attacking before you can even cast anything, being defenseless while you do so.
Meanwhile, I can attack people nearby while healing myself in Skyrim.

In neither of these games since you had to play out the retarded casting animation in Oblivion\Morrowind, preventing you from attacking and blocking.

You are literally bitching about switching equipment\spell to use it, not about doing things at the same time because literally at the same time, only in Skyrim.

Being able to sit there and tank hits while spamming M1 and M2 to have my red jelly bar fill up is another reason why Skyrim is bad. There's no sense of danger or urgency unless you play on full retard mode where you deal 25% damage and everyone's hitting you three times as hard.
All of the things you are praising Skyrim for is why I hate it.

Moving the goalposts, we weren't talking about how good or bad the healing system was in Skyrim.
Yes, it's fucking stupid as hell, especially since 80 potatoes are a good substitute for a healing potion now, but that doesn't matter at all for anything we were talking about.

I am not praising it for anything, I'm calling bullshit where I see it. The game was better than Oblivion and Morrowind for playing a spellsword since it allowed you to cast spells while attacking as well, not to mention it made it so equipping a shield in your off hand wasn't mandatory for everyone including mages because it was an open slot and there was no disadvantage to not equip one. You got the DR bonus even when two-wielding or using a staff.

What mattered in Oblivion was the ability to use Destruction for ranged combat while keeping your weapons for melee combat and you still have this in Skyrim in a different way.

I'm not gonna praise what was the most stupid and badly implemented mechanic in the whole game when shields were still always relegated to the left hand and you couldn't use two shields or use one on the right hand or how the magic shields were stupid as hell.
The worst aspect of dual wielding wasn't even the spells, it was that melee dual wielding was fucking pointless, you lost defense in exchange of nothing.
Dual attacking was slower and forced you to stand still, Dual powerattacking was even slower and restricted your movement like no other powerattack does.

The only advantage here was having two different elements available at anytime enchanted in each weapon in case your enemy resists one of them. But this only saves switching weapons and doesn't even matter when resistances are so retarded.

There was plenty of bad and terrible with plenty of things in Skyrim but playing as a spellmage wasn't one of them.
You complaining about it is like being served a pile of shit and complaining about the flies. Complain about the actual fucking good reasons, you don't have to make up your own.

Okay, fine, you're right, I'm just arguing to argue at this point.
They still should've just had a regular cast button you could assign a spell to. Hold it down and you can shoot two spells at once or something.
I just want to cast spells through my arms, goddammit.

If you're after that, go back to Oblivion and get a mod called Magic Fists or something.
Once a spell school hits 50, any touch spell you have equipped is cast automatically everytime you punch someone.
So you can equip Fire Touch and Shoryuken people to death, it makes Unarmed runs much funnier.

No, no, I mean my weapon arms and shields and shit.
Although that does sound pretty alright.

>the game which had Gabe show up in one of its kickstarter videos and say "these things, they take time" is a NEVER EVER

That's kind of hilarious.

Anyway, the problem here OP is that you're autistic and only like weebshit/base all of "the east" off mount & blade - a single game.

I don't know what you're talking about, it's the most OP thing in Skyrim. Put the perks into duel wielding and pop elemental fury, spam power attacks and you're an ungodly whirlwind of dps that will kill anything is seconds.

Make it like Mount & Blade: Warband, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, or Exanima.

Chambering is already in Warband.

Gothic 2 was genuinely the last good rpg released

Yes but the chamber blocking window is a fraction of a second. In OKAM, you use LMB for blocking as well, rather than having RMB for block and LMB for attack. Link is the vid I attached, embed didn't seem to work

dailymotion.com/video/x4vless

That's pretty fucking stupid tbh UNLESS they put a time limit on how long you can hold attacks. Because "holds" are already really useful in the Warband meta, what you're suggesting is almost like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare style blocking (where, if you're too early or too late slightly, you're fucked), but with the ability to have an attack held and ready to be released for an infinite amount of time (which is something Chivalry doesn't have, you can only delay attacks by angling your body, or feint)-

just watched the video. It looks like they just turned it into Chivalry style timing (no holding of attacks) + a directional system, which is fine by me. I probably wouldn't like it given my 2,000+ hours into Warband's existing style of combat, but I wouldn't like it because I wouldn't want to train myself out of my current habit. The mod looks great, though.

It's made by people who made a Warband mod, it's not a mod itself. There is infinite block and attack holding like in Warband the video is mine, with feints and all that as well. Also there is a basic RPG element so you can put points into speed, damage, attack speed etc. The game is planned to have a campaign map sort of thing where factions of different players will go and siege enemy castles and whatnot.

You've never played morrowind. Magic is seperate and bound to keys

I noticed when you said that earlier.

wew…

If you've ever played somewhat competitive Warband gameplay you should have noticed how obnoxious people who hold attacks for a really long time can be, especially the ones with a good enough reaction time to hit you before you release the block you've been holding and attack them (which is why it's usually best to just stop blocking and immediately block again in the same direction if they're holding an attack for 5+ seconds.) I'm pretty sure the duelling meta for that mod is going to revolve around cancerous levels of holding attacks.

I only played Warband casually, fuck those people who can feint 5 times before I can blink. I got the game too late to bother too much. I was sort of competitive with Chivalry for a while, but that was a long time ago before spin-around attacks became the meta and man at arms was nerfed to shit.

What you said wouldn't happen in this game, since in that position both people would be primed to attack. Also in Warband, if they did what you said couldn't you just chamber block their attack?

Well you said, "The mod looks great, though"

Oh, so it's an entirely new game, didn't realize.

Not if I'm holding an attack while you're not. If I'm holding an attack on you and I release as soon as you begin to attack in a different direction, I win, if I am holding an attack and you begin to attack in the same direction and I manage to have my attack land in the last ~10-20% of your animation (which I am fairly certain the devs would not consider an animation that is in its last moments a "chamber"/block) then I also win. So there's no reason not to be a faggot and sit there with a held animation and release the attack as soon as I see you move, the only risk being that if I am holding it for so long I can get relaxed and not react fast enough to a counter (which happens when noobs hold attacks forever in regular Warband), at least in regular Warband if someone is just holding an attack I can just hold a block and he doesn't gain an advantage in a 1 on 1 duel from holding an attack in a direction I am holding a block. In groupfights the impetus not to hold attacks is that your friends might die before you finish your fight if you use turtley-take-forever tactics.

Don't really know what you mean when you're talking about the animation. Consider this: one person goes for an attack and holds in their attack, and then the other person goes and positions their block. Since in this game LMB is used for both block and attack chamber, they are both in exactly the same position now and thus neither have an advantage. The logical event in this situation is that one person would attack but then feint in another direction to get past their opponent's block. tbh, it's been a while since I played Warband and I don't remember what the annoying tactics that people used against me were.

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is that from that mod where you needed to level up your char on webpage? dont remember the name but it was insanely popular

Oh, I didn't know you could actually hold "blocks", when you said chambering I assumed "blocking" (that is, attacking in the direction of the opponent) has to be timed carefully, and that if you're holding an attack that doesn't count as a chamber, the way you describe it, holds do count as "chambers", so I was wrong, the meta isn't inherently built to be cancerous holding.
Depends if you're talking Napoleonic Wars or Native. In NW, spinning is pretty common, combined with angling your body as far up as possible/as low to the ground as possible while switching between up and down stabs to fuck up your attempts at blocking. "Microholds" and holds are fairly common to discourage chambering/spam, if someone is just downspamming, it's worth it to counterchamber them, just be ready for the counter chamber. In Native, I've seen more complex feinting, the most complex one I've learned is where you take a great sword with a left swing, you spin to the right and as you are facing away from the opponent you switch to a downstab which lands right as you reach the front of your opponent, hard to execute but pretty fucking effective, there are similar "combos" which take advantage of the 4 directions which I don't see in Napoleonic Wars given the prevalence of muskets which only have up/down stabs, chambering and kicking is also more important in NW given the limited attack directions. If you're fighting a player that's significantly better than you, they can afford to feint like hell (which unskilled players will have trouble blocking), if you try to spam through their feints instead of blocking they'll often be quick enough to punish you (which is why I often try to fake my own attack during prolonged feinting by the enemy to get them to finally stop feinting and attack), if you try to feint as a relative noob, better players will often be able to spam through it.

so tl;dr
If you're not good and you're fighting a skilled opponent, you're pretty much fucked, you're not good enough at blocking to be safe during prolonged feinting which might actually get through their blocking, you're not good enough at blocking to last against prolonged feinting by your opponent, you're not able to "force" them to stop feinting, and if you do feint they'll probably have no trouble blocking it, or just stab through it. Though, your opponent can always make a mistake and you can get lucky etc. which is why duels in tournaments are usually first to seven (kills), so that one or two unlucky mistakes don't favor the worse player.

crpg, yes.

Sometimes I have fun in Warband playing against skilled player, the fights are pretty much me trying to position blocks as fast as they can while they go to town with feinting. Usually can last a while, or I can get in a few hits because they seem to be oddly susceptible to simple attacks when they focus so much on offense. I went into one of the duel servers once though, it was just an embarrassment, I couldn't kill the worst one there.

No, you eat my ass.

Dark Souls is a WRPG.

The secret is contained in this video. It's a large amount of factors.

But they can be described as "juice.">>11787216

enemies have three states: normal, attacking and staggered. this is not good. i agree that at least when you shield bash or power attack they're more often than not staggered, but it's not some incredible paragon of combat and you fucking know it

i want melee combat where locational combat is actually key. enemy has a shield? he has to actually track your attacks. no bullshit huge hitbox where "he's guarding so you can't get through", make it so if he's blocking high left and you go low right you can connect. let me stagger him mid-swing. if i stagger him mid-swing and he still clips me with a slower swing, this should cause reduced damage or no damage at all. if my enemy is swinging a warhammer my shield should not be as effective as if he had a sword or lance. axes should be more versatile i am a huge fag and took part in a couple of those medieval renn faire style battles, and man, axes can be used for fucking anything from smashing a motherfucker to pulling his shield off and then smashing a motherfucker. all spears should be braceable if the enemy is charging. movement needs to have more weight and more import - move into a strike and take more damage, or step into a strike with a more armoured part of you exposed and absorb the damage properly. etc

The combat has depth. It doesn't matter if it's animated like shit. It plays fun.

That animation matters very much to graffix faggots.

I'm explaining why it is considered good, I don't need to explain why it is considered bad because we all already agree on that shit.

Also good animation does not make good games. It only makes them pretty. (see assassins creed) You need everything to be good.

The sound the visuals, the complexity of the combat itself, the ai's ability to hold it's own. The whole fucking package. That's why games are unique and fun.

We take the best of the best of every field and force them to get along together in a fucking room and create something beautiful. All parts need to be good for a game to be "good."

Gameplay is the only part required for a game to be good. Everything else is subservient to it.

That is the general consensus among older Holla Forums browsers. Also programmers

You cant tell me you cant name a game that was spectacular in every aspect for it's time. You've got at least one.

I can name many games that were spectacular in gameplay in their time and likely still are, because that's the only aspect I care about.

Western devs can't even into drawing basic anatomy because art classes are shit here so they had no chance in doing good melee. Just post webms and embeds.

be wary of the stage and enemy placement, play with the recovery frames and enemy placement and make the player learn when use quick attacks, when to sweep, when to stun everything then finish while they have a window

fast paced
fun
satisfying
fluid

youtube.com/watch?v=p-B4AwgArwA

here is some new multiplayer melee game wip video

Maybe if the game didn't have a easy to get daedric quest reward shield that was faster, easier, mana free, and just plain better than every ward spell in the game that would be true.

Also the lack of touch spells and the fact that there were no upgrades for the short range cone spells seriously killed any reason to be a spellsword.

And god help you if you wanted to use a two handed weapon or a bow with your magic, best you could do then was use the bound weapon spells so you could at least keep a real spell in your offhand with out having to deal with skyrim's shit hotkey system. In the end I just ended up remaking every spell as a shout so it would work more like Oblivion's system.

When I wake up I'll learn you faggots good about what made Dark Messiah so perfect. I've been meaning to do an essay about that game for a while.

Too bad Arkane is stuck with Bethesda now. Though if they were smart, they would get some of the guys who made Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah to help on the next Elder Scrolls game (assuming they haven't quit Arkane already).

Why would they do that when they can just shit in a box and call it a day?

is it too much effort to make room for other people's shit?

No one's gonna thank you, you faggot.

Here we go again.

More like SHITvalry because that game is fucking terrible and is only popular with little kids.

Severance - Blade of Darkness has quite descent combat. Very souls-like.

What is piracy?

The secret to good melee combat is designing it around a high skill ceiling.

Western devs can't do this because they're working at the whims of marketing and executives who demand games appeal to 6 year olds and their mothers in order to maximise profits.

it was decent for its time, now its just a clunky, archaic turd

Can you explain why you don't like it?

It is still decent you fucking retarded millenial moron, instead of using buzzwords try explaining why you think that its "clunky"

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I found out she is a cosplayer known as Jessica Nigri.

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1, stamina
2, stagger
3, focus on spacing
4, 3rd person
5, animation cancels or room to improve upon simple game play through techniques that require practice

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I hate that people use the term "melee" to refer to close range combat. That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks is probably the best 2-player beat-em-up ever made.

But Dark Messiah's melee combat is shit though. The only good thing about it is the kick, the rest is just well animated skyrim combat.

Almost every recent thread has devolved into talking about Skyrim and Morrowind. Can't you guys talk about something else for a change?

What word should be used instead? I understand the frustration of common usage vs definition, but its been used that way in gaming for decades now. English is still a living language and subject to redefinition through usage and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

It depends on what kind of game you're going for. First, you decide what perspective the game has.

Attacks need to have weight and a good sense of direction. Mount & Blade still has some of the most immersive combat (when you actually use first person, anyway), despite being very barebones (Can't wait to see how Bannerlord fares). First person games lend themselves very well to immersion, so it's best to go off of realism to a degree (though not strictly adhering to it).

Attacks need to actually be able move the target and give a sense of movement. Furthermore, elements like placement, momentum, etc should have a place somewhere. MMORPG's are fucking awful 99% of the time because you're just sitting there slapping eachother with wet noodles and nobody ever moves like they just got hit with a giant hammer/whatever.

Third person, "behind the back" games lend themselves well to a combination of immersion and a widened perspective- you'll actually get to see the effects of your attacks, and also see the effects of the enemy. Furthermore, because you have a heightened sense of perception vs first person, you need the added element of movement to add another layer of complexity to combat (otherwise it'd get too dull because you'd see most attacks coming too easily).

This one's a little bit more general, but think MOBA's/isometric/etc. At this point, you can see literally everything around your character (sans some kind of dynamic fog of war system, but that's another concept entirely), so melee perception is insanely easy- you'll have an almost instant grasp of your surroundings. From this perspective, melee should focus more on movement, placement, and tactical decision making rather than relying purely on physical skill (although feel free to make a gookclick simulator). This perspective lends itself well to strategic thinking pretty well (hence RTS's), because spatial awareness is almost a nonexistent issue.

There's lots of other perspective styles (fightan, cuhrayzee, etc), but those are probably the 3 most prominent.

From there, you can choose how "realistic" or how "fantasy" you want the game's tone to be, and then just make the game's mechanics reflect this.

It should influence the melee, too, and not just be "its own thing". If you can make a fireball, it only makes sense to be able to make a whip out of flames. Or light your sword on fire and light niggers on fire with it.

Directed combat mechanics and targeting system(s) may be needed- whacking a toe shouldn't bring a dragon to its knees.

It should have spears.

Basically, good melee combat isn't just a sign of good design- it requires good design. By contrast, "ranged" mechanics have been mostly refined and mastered by so many games at this point that it's easy and simple to implement.

Hope this answers the question, user!
Swords are for faggots, pike4life

Maybe we could talk about the extraterrestrial Norse deities and the Atlantean training camps where they raised the Aryan race?

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The secret is wrestling mechanics, for some reason outside world wrestling titles devs are scared shitless of making wrestling mechanics of any form so you're extremely limited to strikes vs strikes. and QTEs. You'll notice real life fights when you watch live footage has a lot of body checking in some form or just getting down and dirty right up close and personal so having wrestling mechanics in the game means you can have the strikes and the body checking together. This is just like the dev that said doing proper liquid in a barrel physics is too hard.

Well, to start, I should define what makes melee combat good in a video game:

Dark Messiah does all of this, and it's varied and challenging to boot. If you want to be pedantic, then telekinesis and other magic is definitely overpowered considering how few resources it takes to use, but for the casual player who won't obsessive carry a large rock through the entire game, then your options are equally valid. The melee combat animations have yet to be surpassed, so they speak for themselves, and the enemies all react to different kinds of attacks. Weak strikes won't do much, power strikes will stagger most enemies, different forms of magic have different death animations, etc. There was clearly thought put into how players would approach the game in different ways, and almost every situation barring a few forced combat encounters can be played differently.

Stealth holds up surprisingly well. Spiders and the cyclopses can't be stealthed (although I believe it's possible to sneak past the orc island cyclops if you gimmick the door just right), but most areas with humanoid enemies can be completely ghosted. Naturally, those areas also offer you plenty of chances to assassinate your targets, and there's nothing like grabbing an all-powerful lich from behind a corner and knifing him in the gut for an instant kill.

The level design is an important part, too: Dark Messiah often has the player switching from puzzle solving or traversal to straightforward combat. Often, these areas will be combined (such as the collapsing cliffside house after you go through the spider caves, or the raft with the rising water level that leads to goblin-infested tunnels) or situated immediately after one another in order to remind the player of his varied skill set. Each area feels meaningfully different as well because the types of traps and environmental challenges change - the orcs and goblins have giant, manipulated traps, whereas the necromancers have kennels full of doglike undead which will pour out if they live long enough to flip the switch, and the city at the end uses its walls and houses to form a tightly knit rope of overlapping gameplay avenues and hidden rooms.

And on top of all that, there are a bunch of small touches that make the world feel more real: you can just step on the tiny spiders instead of attacking them. You get arrested for causing a ruckus in the bar near the start of the game if you wander into the kitchen and steal some of the food. You have to discover the game's quests for yourself, such as the dragon sword in the necropolis, or the blacksmith's tools and the required metal. The Superior Naga Silksword can be found at three different spots throughout the game, with the earliest requiring telekinesis to reassemble an ancient statue - because the sword gives a small boost to random crits, it will help a wizard in the early game more than a swordsman because the potential for randomly killing an enemy is more useful than a flat damage boost.

The rope bow is fucking great, too, even if it does let you skip stuff. The climbing animations are solid, and in particular I remember backtracking through the orc's cliffside paths after having cut the bridge down, thinking I had fucked myself, then discovering I could plant a rope arrow into one of the trees growing out of the cliff face and climb down.

Kicking, of course, is an amazing mechanic and more games should have it, not simply because it's visceral fun but because it simultaneously unites combat and environmental interaction. It was awesome in Iji and it's awesome in Dark Messiah.

Visually similar, but they play nothing alike. Skyrim's mix-and-match combat fails to meaningfully differentiate between different types of spells like lightning and fire and ice, since they're all just damage beams. They don't interact with the environment, either, which means you can't set traps like ice patches.

Webm unrelated.

I think you can go back further, but you nailed it. Its mostly about the movement system. Giving the player options to move and move there body makes for a more furfilling combat. Pressing a buttion for simple attack sucks. Having more options, simple movment, works amazing for enjoyment.

I'm pretty sure you can just straight up skip that fight but it's been a little since I played. I remember having to go back to fight it because I wanted the xp.

Severance
Dark Messiah
Die By The Sword

All western

Here's the eastern list:

This.

The real answer of good combat is how much impact it has.
Bulletsponges are retarded because they break this rule. Your attacks have no impact on enemies.
Same goes for you nor dying too easily. What is point of enemies attacking when you can stand in place and tank them.

Look at dark messiah besides good physics stuff one thing it did good was each damage being done to you mattered. It was also fair in a way you could easily avoid damage.

Good job? I guess?

Because vid related is the design philosophy at 90% of western studios today.

As soon as Hammerfell comes out, it'll be okay to talk about how Skyrim wasn't actually that bad. Just like with Oblivion when Skyrim came out.

Until then, the hipster autists need their hugbox.

Nobody here unironically praises Oblivion. Even with mods it's 4/10 at best. Skyrim with mods is a solid 7/10.

Nah.

You think Skyrim was better than Oblivion?

I'm pretty sure he was only implying Skyrim is the better game when you take mods into account.
it's true

Maybe, but vanilla Oblivion is definitely better than vanilla Skyrim.

Vanilla Oblivion is easily the worst TES game. The leveling system is shit without mods to fix it.

I'd say the only thing Oblivion did better than Skyrim where the side-quests. The character designs(no potato faces), the combat(you can dual-wield spells or use a sword and spell), the map(it felt more varied) and the main quest(dragon fights were less tedious than Oblivion gates). Please note, that Skyrim isn't a good game, especially when compared to other games, but it's still better than Oblivion.
Morrowind>Skyrim>Oblivion.

Absolutely. Vanilla Oblivion is basically unplayable due to the retarded level scaling which turns everything into a massive damage sponge if you don't exploit the enchant system and make a 'reduces magick resistance + reduces specific elemental resistance + elemental damage' enchant, since the reduced magic res stacks and will tank their resistances into negative values, allowing you to do somewhat decent damage no matter how high enemies get scaled. The stat system is also beyond worthless, and by lategame you can take a weapon that is repaired to 125% and fucking BREAK it fighting a single spongy enemy.

Skyrim has pretty solid gameplay in Vanilla, although the environment isn't particularly interesting and the quests are boring.

It is fucking understatement. It has total of 3 enemies, dragons, beasts and humans. In reality this means Skyrim has one enemy, which is bullet sponge. You don't use different tactics against anything they are all blood sacks.
Which is a shame because from not gameplay standpoint all of them are good looking.

I won't allow you to say Skyrim did magick properly.
Your magicka only regenerated when you didn't cast a spell, but because you could just use one spell after another this meant you will always get to a point where you were forced to wait for it to regen. You had to rely on enchants, which also could boost you to 100% reduction. 100% is pretty much only way to play destruction magic.
But fact you didn't quick cast on them have more problems. It means casting and changing between spells takes much longer. All Alternation Armour buffs were pain in the ass to use, same goes for invisibility/muffle but here at least you only could focus on casting them while sneaking.

i.ytimg.com/vi/0XgYvHYIoVA/maxresdefault.jpg

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Kill you're self.

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Skyrim with mods is a solid 7/10 porn game with this weird, shallow, pointless adventure shit tacked on to the side.

(nice digits)
I get it now. They're called souls-like because it sucks your soul out.

Dark messiah, Chivalry, M&B, Exanima, Killing Floor 2, all of these have better melee mechanics than whatever sterile gook shit you can pull out of your ass. Fuck the japs, after playing vidya for nearly 20 years now I can tell you that the japs can't make a game to save their life, only entertain braindead little weebs who have no taste outside their shitty shovelware garbage like senran kagura

First it depends on the gameplay style. The choices you should make depend on the genre and style. Generally, the best kind of melee in a game depends on the impact and feel of the attack. Attacking the enemy needs to feel satisfying. The weapon should feel fun and rewarding to use.

honestly bashing ghouls with oh , baby ! is fucking fun

Systems and mechanics cannot be copyrighted as they are considered 'inartistic'.

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Do individual engagements always take so long to hack a dude to death, or are these practice fights drawn-out to help you get a feel for it (and with the logic that they're using dull/invisibly padded weapons)?

I'm not sure. This is from beta and they are still balancing it. I think that training fights are longer.

You can see some regular combat with multiple fighters here.

youtube.com/watch?v=Y75sRJXkvjY

There's no secret, it's just that nobody tries. Including japs, weeb.
Most casual games like for instance dmc or god of war have you mindlessly press a button to do something flashy.
And then there's the few that consist of swinging swords to the left or right and you still mindlessly spam the attack button but you get nothing flashy in result, like skyrim.

There has to be some kind of weight and solid audiovisual feedback. Good, responsive animations and sound design are a necessity. Make every swing matter so the player won't be just spamming attacks. Directional attacks and multiple techniques per weapon would help in creating a responsive combat as well.

For me, the game that did melee combat the best is Jedi Outcast. The animations and techniques are outstanding. Chunky and responsive sound effects and visuals. Every blow is fatal. High skill ceiling. Insane amount of combat variations and approaches. It's literally everything you can ask for. The force spamming and jedi combats are one of the best experiences in video gaming I've ever had. They never get old.

If you're looking for a bit of realism, Kingdom Cum and Severance are quite excellent. KCD is MP only however and Severance is a bulletsponge fest with fucked up leveling unmodded despite having god tier 3rd person combat mechanics. Exanima is excellent but it burns my processor too much. GTA IV has a severely underrated melee combat. Condemned has decent combat, but it's a sloooow paced sluth game so you need quite a patience before seeing the real action.

Now from the gook devs. Dark Souls grasped the fundamentals of what makes a good melee combat well, but imo the rest of the game design is utter shit. I wouldn't consider Metal Gear Revegance's combat to be a good melee combat due to the shitty bullet sponge and stylization, but if you're looking for DMC type weebcuck game it's a quite nice entry. The same can be said for God Hand. They have the typical japanese design of "depth and flashiness" emphasis over realism that I can't really enjoy, they're too arcade-y.

And to be contrarian, I actually don't like Dark Messiah. The kicking is fun, the spells are fun, but the game feels too linear and the sword swinging is somehow floaty. I can't quite nail why, but it's floaty, though not as floaty as Skyrim. The animations aren't chunky enough I think.

This is the biggest bullshit I've ever seen in my life.

Gothic's combat feels like shit no matter what. Severance is the one game that perfected Gothic's shit combat.

Because it's much, MUCH more complicated than gunfighting.

So many combinations and body motions that a simple controller just won't do.

Things is, a lot of real weapons are a lot lighter than most people think, and there won't be much staggering.
If I'm wearing plate with padding underneath, most strikes are something that I would shrug off.

Contrary to holywood movies, armor actually did do something.

In most fiction, armor is simply cut trough like it's tissue paper. Even something like linen was damn good.

Yeah, but to be responsive, there needs to be some sense of pounding when the sword clashes. It doesn't have to be a stagger like in Dark Souls, maybe just a slight twitch with a chunky sound effect of flesh ripping and/or metal screaming. Skyrim doesn't deliver this pounding quite well.

There's nothing wrong with abstracting something. And armors were actually weak to bows with blunt metal tip and hammers.

Motion controls

Motion controls as in VR? That would feel weightless and imbalanced.

No, motion controls as in a Wii Remote or something with more precision. Fucking Wii Sports Resort had satisfying sword gameplay, it would be easy as shit to expand on that.

No, motion controls can't simulate impact, just like mouse controls. We'd better stay with buttons, since evading mechanics should be as important as swinging mechanics.

The sword gameplay you speak of was literally waggling the controller until you win.

Oh, they are fun indeed but they are not REQUIRED.
Ignoring all the cancer that Skyward Sword brought, I did enjoyed some fights were quick skills were obligatory and where I actually got to know a GAME OVER screen (in a Zelda game, of all places).
I still missed more classic Knight-to-Knight fights. My favorite in the franchise is still fighting against a high level Dark Nut in Zelda2. Nothing too fancy, just classic shield-block until you make a hit.

Blade of Darkness (Severance) has a lot of that: the interface was not an obstacle in the real meat of the game:
- What angle should I use to make some sure hits?
- How much weight and impact will my hits make? I need to know because if the enemy isn't pushed back then he'll counterattack.
- Which enemy hits should I just avoid/jump/evade and which ones should I shield-block? Blocking will make the enemy's weapon bounce back an give me a second to do something, but my shield will receive some damage.

This simple mechanism worked and it was fun enough to make a whole game around it. Sure, the ambience & graphics & combos really help but the core is what should be celebrated and replicate.

I believe the spanish devs went to make CastleVania: Lords of Shadow, which has little to do with Blade.

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I've shown that video to other game developers. They scoff at it for the first five minutes. At the end, it changes their perspective on development. One thing I do myself is watch videos of people playing similar games. I try to gauge the point they become immersed and try to figure out everything that got them to that point. If a person cannot immerse themselves in a game, then it is a shit game.

After completing those stupid dungeons while working towards Platinum, I still haven't gotten the last ending.

Oh fuck I forgot all about this game.

mount and blade has great combat

Defiled Amygdala wasn't so bad because you can exploit his AI, but defiled beheaded Bloodletting beast on the other hand was a change even compared to Manus SL1 without pyromancy. but nothing was as brutal as Kalameet SL1

Is this PC or do I need to go emulate?

Fast paced
fluid
the abilities happen as you press them, proper framing
strategy, many options
not just "smash A for instant gratification"

Kalameet is alright, unless you want his tail. That's when he's a nightmare.

You made some good points, but what the fuck? Have you ever played crusader kings?

Mark my words and heed my warning.
There will be no game with satisfying melee combat until the concept of view models is THROWN INTO THE TRASH

The only reason uncivilized uneducated people think that third person combat is better is because of the myriad of bad practices and habits that developers have ingrained into their puny skulls over the years.

For PC. Torrent the GOG version.

In real life you have a limited field of view which is compensated for by your sense of your own body. You know which way your feet and your arms are facing without having to see them.

A purely visual feedback medium like video games is not going to be able to replicate that.

In first person view you are crippled and forced to use wooden melee engines like skyrim.

That's not fair for the weebs.

No. In first person games where you have a field of view between 50 and 70 and use view models, badly at that, you end up with wooden melee systems. Just look at FEAR.

Mount and Blade has good and unique overarching mechanics, not good moment-to-moment gameplay.

Pretty much this. One player base consists of scrubs while the other does not.

Kalameet is easy if you are properly leveled. But when almost all his moves are OHKO's even with armor he is a pain in the ass.

this

Disregarding that Skyrim is barely an RPG, if you were to look at its combat from that perspective then it's far worse than Morrowind's. Morrowind's combat is almost purely based on your characters building and decisions, while Skyrim and Oblivion remove most that focus and thus having a more action-oriented combat that's really shit for roleplaying and really shit as a action game because it's not a whole lot better than Morrowind's.
Fuck you.

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Thats a bit more accurate.

Also trips makes it true.

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Morrowind's combat is shit because the animation and rolling dice system are gay.

Good post and choice in gif friend

Maybe if you were a shitter.

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It's been said before ITT, but impact effect is the key. In real melee combat, impacts have effects: if you strike an opponent's leg hard enough, the leg will buckle, staggering/tripping him. If you strike his arm, the arm will recoil somewhat even if he blocks the attack.

Equally important (and this is something virtually no game mimics to my knowledge) is that your own attacks will also recoil/stop when they make contact. If you miss a swing, the swing will of course follow all the way through, but hitting a human body is not like hitting a baseball. Your sword/club/whatever is not just going to keep on going after a hit unless it was a very glancing strike, and you can't just alternate left-right swings as if you're in an anime; you'll have to deal with recoil putting your blade somewhere different than you sent it and then work off of that new position with your net strike. It's somewhat understandable that this second point isn't realized more often because it would be difficult to program, but doing so would make for some genuinely good combat mechanics.

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easily some of the best movie games

Imagine a world where mechanics can be copyrighted. Every single game would have to be completely different gameplaywise. It would be pretty sweet actually. Every game would be its own genre.

Imagine where copyright trolls lay claim to every single silly game mechanic, possible and impossible. Now developers either start licensing from those trolls or go out of business. What a horrible nightmare.

Chivalry is pretty decent combat game.

it's pretty awful

wow, do you suck dicks or something? How can anyone dislike Chivalry? Did they own you so hard that you immediately uninstalled the game?

No, I played for about 40 hours and dropped it because it had awful maps, poor hit detection and awful combat that focused on realism instead of actual fun

nice you can enjoy it, but I found it horrendous compared to pvk2

the hell is wrong with you? Ducking under sword attacks, your sword clipping trough the enemy, how are those things realistic? If you rush into someone's face and stab them they have to do a 180 turn because the swords hitbox is behind them and hits them in their back.

Chivalry is full of exploits like that.

The real lesson is that games are not individual pieces, but a sum of their parts.

So many disciplines go into making games and if they are all perfect you will have a perfect game.

part of why its shit

nothing you say makes sense, you say it's to realistic, but it's totally not realistic considering the shit you can do.

poor hit detection claim is retarded, your probably bad in the game and got out played or your internet is crap. Idk why you would think the maps are bad, game has all kind of fun maps to play. Plain and simple maps, but also exotic maps.

I don't understand.

are you trying to say something in this incoherent mess? You don't know what realistic means either.

it's part of the game, get good at it. That move is not easy to pull off and doesn't work with every weapon.

just not with small arms, and it's not worth getting good at a game with bad mechanics that isn't fun in the first place.

Let me break melee combat for you. You need
>different attack and damage types for each part of the weapon that can do damage, and by that I mean ALL OF THEM
In short, most medieval weapons were made with the idea of making an instrument useful for every single possible battle scenario. So until we have a game where all the weapons are swiss army knives it won't work

or just don't appeal to the autistic simulator market and make a good game instead

I do irl swordfighting and this is pretty much true in real life as well. Amateurs can surprise experts, since experts are used to the structured movements of other experts and novices. Suicidal attacks and rushes don't "make sense" to them so they're weak to a direct hit because they don't even stop to consider the possibility.

My fellow patrician.

There's your answer.

A bit late to the thread but with melee combat in general there has to be a huge number of things taken into account for both truly "real" and "good" combat. Have any of you anons ever been in a fight? It is a fucking mess, even the best of the best don't have their exact moves or techniques performed perfectly because it's unpredictable, in the heat of the moment nothing goes exactly as planned, and everything can turn upside down in an instant. Real fights are also extremely brutal even in cases of people with little skill or experience going at it. Combat should be life or death every time, regardless of level or personal skill, but it's hard to make a system in a game work where your entire body/environment is a weapon (like in real life), where you can beat a motherfuckers teeth out with your fists or a stick or stomp them out just as easily as you could stab them with any sharp object or slash them with a blade. While it doesn't have to be entirely physics based like Exanima, almost all aspects of realistic physics (even for unrealistic things like giant creatures or enemies) would have to come into play. In a PvE setting it could be done probably a little easier but it's also much more grittier and demeaning to the player. If you spent a good minute and a half fighting off some alley goons or woodland highwayman with your bare hands or a nice sized club just to take one down and go down to ground and pound for the kill or disabling of a foe, you'd just get your head kicked in by the next nog. I mean since you the player wouldn't feel pain it could play out different, some people are just hard to put down and have a high pain tolerance, so maybe mixing a stat-like RPG system with physics backed attacks and actions/reactions could work. Your character has a hard ass head and chin of granite, so taking into account his pain cap or damage threshold you could maybe add it to the actual math behind the angle and weight and physics of the NPCs attack and where it hits, the timing, and also considering player reactions as well. We've all had those epic moments in skill based games like chiv or dark souls where we pull something off usually by the skin of our teeth, and that fight or flight adrenaline feeling should be what every player of a good melee combat games feels at first, until they as a person feel skilled enough that they know how to fight and what to do, like in real life, but are also not too reliant on their skills or weapons because just as it is IRL as well you absolutely never know how shit is going to go down.

Fuck every single one of you.

chivalry is shit

Get over it

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chivalry is shit
feminists killed it

Fuck yeah PVK2 mah fellow nigga