Odanan, on 24 June 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:
They kept this multiplayer-only game alive for 5 years, while some more "capable" alternatives were shutdown in a shorter time.
Frankly, that's thanks to the IP, and nothing but the IP. Everyone knows if MWO fails the MechWarrior portion of the Battletech IP will be too toxic for any game maker to want to touch in the future (well . . .
maybe not, but big MAYBE with the reimaging of the Classis and Harmony Gold finally getting the proverbial middle finger). That's the ONLY reason so many people have held on for so long. PGI hasn't kept the game running, the IP has kept the game running.
Most of us who are upset, angry, disappointed, and/or bitter WANT
-DESPARATELY WANT, IN FACT- PGI to succeed, but their track record is horrid and many of their decisions have been terrible . . . going all the way back to their decision to use the Cryengine that they had ZERO experience with when all of their game making, to that date, had been done in Unreal . . . they got suckered into the new shiny and it went terribly.
Odanan, on 24 June 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:
No offense taken, but I did
things much harder in the past, before I studied programming and without any instruction in 3D modeling or any proper tools for animation (I was younger and had no kids, so I had all the time and disposition). Sure, I can't actually deliver them a finished product, because nobody has access to the game's source code.
And when I say it would be easy to add melee, I'm referring to hatchets (or swords) locked in the new mech's arm, with no more weapons in that arm. That's the case of the 4 mechs I proposed. Adding punching and kicking for everybody would require new animations for every single mech in the game - a huge undertaking.
PGI didn't do this yet because yes, it would consume resources, which in the past probably wouldn't pay off. But now we have hundreds of mechs of all kinds, MW4 mechs and new tech - what more could be really exciting in a mechpack than mechs with melee weapons?
Again, I'm not saying I wouldn't want the mechs, but it's also sadly not how Russ wants to fund Solaris. He's asking if people will just throw money at him for the game mode; and little of anything else.
However, again, melee is a complicated beast -especially in Cryengine and modern gaming- because of everything involved. It's a lot harder to "fake the funk" like it used to be done with an animation of a "weapon firing" and a hit-scan impact point within a certain range. They've got a LOT to compensate for in this game to even attempt to make it viable, like I outlined above.
Let alone the fact that you can't just implement melee for a few mechs and call it a day. Melee would be a HUGE game-altering feature that would need to be done whole-hog or not at all.
Odanan, on 24 June 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:
BTW, wasn't the hatchet just a placeholder in the TT sheet for the Yen's unique titanium nails? From Sarna:
There are no game rules for those titanium nails. Judging from the 3027-era record sheet published for the CN9-YLW, a 'Mech hatchet—the only 'Mech melee weapon that existed in the rules when the novel introducing Yen-Lo-Wang was written—was used to represent the nails in game terms. (Notably, Yen-Lo-Wang was never ruled to have featured a 'Mech Claw.) This stand-in in turn apparently resulted in art depicting the 'Mech with a proper hatchet.
The hatchet was done for TT compensation purposes, yes, but it was still meant to -and fully capable of- melee combat with enhanced melee "weapon grade" capabilities. The hatchet just provided their stand-in rules . . . but it still cost the tonnage in order to achieve it. The Yen Lo Wang had a melee weapon, Battletech just didn't have the rules in place for anything other than a Hatchet, at the time.
PGI still had to remove the melee weapon and compensate the mech elsewhere for the removal of the melee weapon, the tonnage it took, and its capabilities.
Odanan, on 24 June 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:
Knockdown is a whole different beast. They did it once and the issue was more "is MechBowling Online a good idea?" than technical limitations.
Not really, it's still heavily connected to melee; and melee would be heavily impacted by collisions. What happens when the mechs collide during the melee attack (and I'm not just talking weapon impact)? What happens in the near inevitable collision of moving mechs before/after a melee attack? Where does the melee attack land if mechs are colliding into each other as the animation is performed? Do melee and collisions combine to make an exploitable form of headshots?
That's also not mentioning the technical limitations of both melee and collisions in MWO. Both are massive hurdles to attempt to overcome; and PGI is thinking they're only getting "somewhere in the distant future" to revisiting the collision side of the puzzle.
Again, just being realistic here.
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