Dawnstealer, on 21 January 2015 - 07:46 AM, said:
Bah - I've seen several non-2D games that implement a punch or a knife-stab as an attack. It's not some mythical attack-mode that's never been pulled off in any game before. You're making it sound like a moon-landing.
The mechanics would probably be fairly easy to code on the client side and server side, the animations, not so easy since every mech is different, and each mech would need to be animated at least slightly, if not entirely different. That's quite a lot of work to get every mech to punch properly. QA would take a ton of work, as it always does in any development cycle, and balancing it would also take a ton of work. Now, I may be mistaken (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I believe a punch from an Atlas or any 100 ton mech would do 20 points of damage, and cost zero heat. That's basically giving it a free AC/20 no ammo attack that only works at point blank range. Sure, the Atlas is a slow mech, but 20 damage for no heat still needs some careful consideration when you're just giving it to a mech like that for free.
Kicks are also part of the melee attacks you can make, and they have a chance to knock down opponents (not sure about punches knocking down, it's been forever since I played table top). I'm pretty new to this game, but from what I have heard, knockdowns did previously exist in this game as a possible result of collisions, and they were completely removed due to numerous gameplay and server issues they caused. A lot of questions would need to be answered and a lot of potential imbalance issues fixed, like how often could you melee attack, would the range be dependent on the size of your mech, would they have a chance to knock down, what's an appropriate damage amount, etc. That also would take a ton of time and consideration. Think about all the potential ways to abuse these mechanics, and they will have to have solutions and safeguards implemented to prevent things like the 90 kph battlemaster with an xl400 that simply runs up, kicks, knocks down, and then wubs a dire wolf to death like it was nothing, or a 3 light mech wolf pack that kicks stuff as a group until one of them scores a knockdown and then they kill their hapless target.