Famine52, on 27 June 2012 - 09:57 AM, said:
I've been playing Mechwarrior since MW2. It's been believable enough to keep me staying. One of the pillars of the Mechwarrior franchise is the realism bud. You get the cockpit view. You get the heat overload. It's the believable realism that keeps all of us here playing it. It may not be feasible, or even wise to do in the future. But that doesn't stretch it as a fantasy land arcade game.
The difference is - were in Mechwarriors. You think when tanks run out of Sabot or HE rounds they try and ram the enemy? Come on man, think. You back off and rearm at a Foward operating base, undercover of your lance.
Punching has been leftout of all the mech games. Punching is not feasible with the majority of mech designs or B, it looks absolutely rediculous. (Picture a MadCat throwing it down with a strider - yeah, thats not the "Mechwarrior" game I want to play, more laughable then believable).
Whats in the lore (if it even is) does not translate to making it a good game feature. Oh, yeah - I'm willing to bet you'll see matches with only fists. Lots of servers touting atlas MMA fights. No thanks.
Melee is actually pretty rational in the context of MechWarrior. We don't (normally) use melee in modern combat because our weapon systems far outstrip our ability to protect against them. You can't get close enough to hit someone without being shot to pieces first. In BattleTech, that's not true anymore. Mechs are perfectly capable of closing to within melee ranges of each other without getting murdered for it,and many of them are appropriately articulated to take advantage of that opportunity. The fact that mech armor is likely designed to deal with projectile weapons also means that something relatively crude like a multi-ton bludgeon could be more effective than you'd anticipate.
This isn't to say that melee should be a dominant strategy or appropriate for every mech (something reflected in the rules; trying to smack someone with a weapon might just damage your weapon), but it's pretty silly to claim that something like an Atlas with fully articulated legs, hands, and arms
shouldn't be able to use melee attacks when they quite routinely end up close enough to make use of them.
Edited by Voyager I, 27 June 2012 - 10:47 AM.
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