Improvement: Happy Medium - quick-knife, assassinations and knives...

[berzerkerking]

Originally Posted by Neurotoxin

What the heck is the real-life equivalent of quick knifing? Swinging at the air and hoping you hit?

If it is going to be an "instant death" kinda thing, then there needs to take longer to execute, and have a higher risk factor. Maybe instead of a quick knife, the combatant will grab their opponent and attempt to stab them to death? This is a bit more gruesome, but a bit more realistic as well.

Maybe it isn't used instead of a quick knife, but that the knife has to be drawn and in-hand to perform a grab-and-stab style execution? Maybe it does 50 damage every 0.25 seconds, and the victim (if they are fast enough) can do something like pressing a 2 or 3 arrow combination to break off their assailant?

I know this is a game and not real life, but... The reason why Knife beats Pistol at 6 feet or less IRL is because the knife-wielder will be able to stab and slash vital organs rapidly, while the firearm practitioner gets maybe 1 shot before they are being stabbed (unless that shot puts their assailant down), maybe 1 more shot before they are guaranteed to die from their wounds. Fully-automatic weapons may get more shots before the knife-wielder gets close enough to do work, but the longer barrel and use with two hands means it is easier to be cleared out of the way by a knife-wielding combatant.

Hence my suggestion for counter when using frontal assault. Sneak attacks remain fatal.

[Ratstomper]

Originally Posted by Zolan

Rifle butt, pistol whip, MAX arm slap. It makes perfect sense and everyone can use it.

Well, for realism sake, you already have the rifle/pistol in your hands and thus it could be used "quickly" as a source of minor damage or perhaps a minor push-back in melee.

Like I said in the other thread, put a knife on your belt, unsheathe it, lunge forward, stab something, pull out the knife, and put it back into the sheath. If you can do that with one hand in less than 2 seconds, I'll change my mind about quick-knives.

The issue is that people don't want one-button melee attacks. It's dumb as hell. The only people who want quick-melee are the ones who want to be able to finish of a wounded enemy who happens to be nearby or CoD dudes who want to go around meleeing people to death. My idea allows the former, stops the latter and still wraps it together into a system for knife assassinations for infiltrators or guerilla fighters who want to take that risk for a quiet kill. Trying to kill as many birds with one stone as possible without putting in needless code, animations or additional systems.

I'm fine with keeping the MAX backhand, in fact if they wanted to make THAT a pushback, I'd be fine with it. That would make more sense.

Originally Posted by Neurotoxin

What the heck is the real-life equivalent of quick knifing? Swinging at the air and hoping you hit?

If it is going to be an "instant death" kinda thing, then there needs to take longer to execute, and have a higher risk factor. Maybe instead of a quick knife, the combatant will grab their opponent and attempt to stab them to death? This is a bit more gruesome, but a bit more realistic as well.

Maybe it isn't used instead of a quick knife, but that the knife has to be drawn and in-hand to perform a grab-and-stab style execution? Maybe it does 50 damage every 0.25 seconds, and the victim (if they are fast enough) can do something like pressing a 2 or 3 arrow combination to break off their assailant?

I know this is a game and not real life, but... The reason why Knife beats Pistol at 6 feet or less IRL is because the knife-wielder will be able to stab and slash vital organs rapidly, while the firearm practitioner gets maybe 1 shot before they are being stabbed (unless that shot puts their assailant down), maybe 1 more shot before they are guaranteed to die from their wounds. Fully-automatic weapons may get more shots before the knife-wielder gets close enough to do work, but the longer barrel and use with two hands means it is easier to be cleared out of the way by a knife-wielding combatant.

Thats why we don't want quick-knifing in. It's dumb. I'm proposing instead of the "quick-knife" button, we have a "quick switch" button (ala TF2) for the knife, at that point it acts like any other equippable weapon.

The problem with quick-time events, animations, counters, etc is that they're more complex and harder to code into a game; especially when it's over the internet. You have to take latency, server lag, ect into account. I cannot express enough that it can't be too twitchy.

With the system I proposed, an assailant has to 1) sneak up on a target with indefinite and imperfect cloaking (or without even that) 2) give an audible cue that he is in the vicinity 3) get close enough to the rear of the target without getting killed by him or his buddies and 4) have a set amount of delay after the killing before he can do anything else besides move. We want the knife to be able to do multiple things, but only in a slim set of circumstances. We DON'T want melee > shooting.

In my eyes, if the situation presents itself and the assailant is resourceful and smart enough to do all the things listed above, he should get the kill. The "counter" for the assailed is having situational awareness. That seems high enough risk for the assailant to me.

EDIT: Also, not to be too graphic, but you CAN instantly "kill" someone from behind with a knife. Severing major arteries, puncturing nerve-dense areas (pain) usually causes loss of consciousness and causing damage to the brainstem/spinal are all damn near-instant ways of killing someone. It's not outside of the realm of plausibility.

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Ratstomper

The issue is that people don't want one-button melee attacks. It's dumb as hell. The only people who want quick-melee are the ones who want to be able to finish of a wounded enemy

Speak for yourself. A quick melee is a legitimate gameplay feature. A quick switch feature doesn't solve any problem. It's honestly no different than switching to a knife then attacking. At least quick knife switches attacks and switches back which is a far more useful feature in CQC when you need your knife for one attack. If someone wants to use their knife to kill a player from full health they can just equip it.

Originally Posted by Ratstomper

The problem with quick-time events, animations, counters, etc is that they're more complex and harder to code into a game; especially when it's over the internet. You have to take latency, server lag, ect into account. I cannot express enough that it can't be too twitchy.

You really shouldn't use this argument. Forgelight was coded from the ground up to handle these things from what they've told us. It would be unfair to presume the engine can't handle something.

[Ratstomper]

Originally Posted by Sirisian

Speak for yourself. A quick melee is a legitimate gameplay feature. A quick switch feature doesn't solve any problem. It's honestly no different than switching to a knife then attacking. At least quick knife switches attacks and switches back which is a far more useful feature in CQC when you need your knife for one attack. If someone wants to use their knife to kill a player from full health they can just equip it.


You really shouldn't use this argument. Forgelight was coded from the ground up to handle these things from what they've told us. It would be unfair to presume the engine can't handle something.

Anyone who played PS1 or any other game with equipable melee weapons knows damn well it's different. A quick switch is going to shave seconds off switching around, which allows people to deploy it quickly as a finisher or a last ditch attempt to defend yourself because you're out of ammo). Quick-knifing on the other hand is a pathetic way of trying to shoehorn knife-fighting into somewhere it doesn't belong.

It's not the engine, friend. It's the fact that not everyone has the same internet speed. Not everyone has the same latency. Some people are going to have slightly less responsive connections than others. You can't put something like quick time events in the game because there won't be enough sync between connections to allow good response time. It has nothing to do with the engine. As for animations; why do you think they got rid of the entry/exit animations for vehicles?

[Ratstomper]

Listen, folks. I'm not trying to dump on anyone's ideas. For the most part they've been interesting, but I'm trying to devise a simple system that makes knives an effective tool for when they're warranted and ineffective when they aren't. However, I also want something that is intuitive, simple and effective for as many players as possible. something quick enough for people who like the feel of quick-knife, but reigned in enough so it's not easily misused. I'm also not saying all these ideas CAN'T mesh in certain ways later, but I think we all want a different melee system besides the standard quick-knife and the best way to get the devs to listen is if it's simple, easy to do and well-thought out.

[Jinxsey]

The "quick knife" is a reset button for fast paced shooter games, it exists to cover a gap in your gameplay.

Anyone who has played games like GTA or APB can attest to how silly point blank range fights get. You dance around jumping like loons dumping mag after mag at a target that laughs in the face of your puny attemps to track your weapon onto the target. Weapon handling simply wasn't optimised for point blank range and it shows.

It's frustrating, and it exposes all the flaws in you're "responsive shooter" fairly blatantly.

The knife ensures you can quickly return both characters to a range at which the gameplay is more ejoyable for both.

But... planetside isn't about run and gun, the purity of solo dueling, it's a team game, a massive team game. You don't want a "reset" button, because the game is not about two guys circling each other in a vacum. Being able to send players back to "optimum range" is not a desirable outcome for small scale fights because players -must- reach those ranges to capture points, or complete objectives, in this scenario you DO focus on making close range fighting an enjoyable and complete experience and thus, the infinate damage knife, must be dropped. You need other options, flamethrowers, shotguns, the list goes on. These weapons are designed to function purely at point blank range, and they are for the players who want to be up close and personal, throwing in a "quick knife" would only detract from those weapons, and by extension the players who specialised in them by providing a "optimal low-order soloution".(that's a "n00b-tube" to you and me)

If you want to reward player skill, you ensure that the soloutions to any problem cannot be trumped by a soloution that requires less time/skill investment. A knife which only requires a simple positional hurdle to become effective is not a weapon, it is a tool a game developer has used to try to discourage people getting to point blank range.

Planetside is not a place where this disincentive is applicable.

In this scenario, a reset button to eliminate the unfavourable point blank range gunplay is irrelevant because each player's relative position on the map is much more important. It's not just about the kills anymore, it's about the objective.

"Quick knife" realy has no place in this kind of environement.

Give me a quick knife that can "insta-kill" and I'll just throw Galaxy dropships full of them at you. I can parachute, what do I care about you're puny assault rifles! Frustration abounds.

[Ratstomper]

Originally Posted by Jinxsey

Give me a quick knife that can "insta-kill" and I'll just throw Galaxy dropships full of them at you. I can parachute, what do I care about you're puny assault rifles! Frustration abounds.

What do you propose for a different way of doing things?

[Toppopia]

BF3 has an alright knifing mechanic, you can swing it, but it is slow, takes 2 seconds between each swing, but i prefer a knive to be a silent killing weapon, like sneaking behind someone and slitting their throat or the other numerous ways of killing people, you should be rewarded for managing to sneak up behind someone, and if you somehow get close enough to someone to stab from the front, then you should do enough damage to scare people into not being too close to enemies, but not too much so that enemies can't just charge you and win.

[Cuross]

Well, I prefer the idea of the quick knife mixing attack with equipping. It's a whole hell of a lot better than the animations we have now. But I still think that a quick knife attack looks wild and unfocused, definitely not worthy of much damage even in the back. There's so many reasons that a blade can be deflected just by the skin and an unfocused strike is likely going to do no more than leave a cut. I do not think a quick knife should be able to do more than 30% health damage to any unit, but if it were equipped then the damage could potentially go up.

I like the idea of attack/quick draw and I'd prefer to see that in game than a quick knife function.

[Jinxsey]

Originally Posted by Ratstomper

What do you propose for a different way of doing things?

Flamethrower MAX units, shotguns, and sidegades for SMGs to make them shoot faster, but with less accuracy...

[Ratstomper]

Originally Posted by Jinxsey

Flamethrower MAX units, shotguns, and sidegades for SMGs to make them shoot faster, but with less accuracy...

So, no knives in combat altogether?

What about infiltrators/ambushers and assassinations?

[Jinxsey]

Originally Posted by Ratstomper

So, no knives in combat altogether?

What about infiltrators/ambushers and assassinations?

No assassinations, animation locking someone and oneshotting them is a gameplay mechanic designed for dueling gameplay as a way to "reset" an encounter.

A quick melee, with rifle butt that does some damage and an equippable knife have a place, but animation locked assasinations do not. They are gameplay choices made to ensure firefights take place at ranges above point blank, they are not distinct weapon choices.

[Ratstomper]

Originally Posted by Jinxsey

No assassinations, animation locking someone and oneshotting them is a gameplay mechanic designed for dueling gameplay as a way to "reset" an encounter.

A quick melee, with rifle butt that does some damage and an equippable knife have a place, but animation locked assasinations do not. They are gameplay choices made to ensure firefights take place at ranges above point blank, they are not distinct weapon choices.

Not in firefights maybe, but what about infiltrators who want to take people out quietly? It doesn't make much sense that an infiltrator would have the knife, have the opportunity and just not use it.

I suppose I'm confused as to where knives fit in if not in fights or assassination. I suppose we could use them to clean our fingernails and pick our teeth.

[Jinxsey]

Infiltrators have silenced weapons, knives remain in but they are not one shots. It's just not appropriate to have insta-kill knive mechanics because there are very many ways to get to point blank range and plenty of devices (Jet pack, cloak) that vasty improve movement ability.

Knives niche, is that if you're out of amunition, you can draw your knife to kill someone at point blank range. It does more damage that "quick rifle butt" but at the end of the day, knives are more survival tools than weapons.

A beyonet would make more sense in PS2 than a knive.

[berzerkerking]

Originally Posted by Jinxsey

Infiltrators have silenced weapons, knives remain in but they are not one shots. It's just not appropriate to have insta-kill knive mechanics because there are very many ways to get to point blank range and plenty of devices (Jet pack, cloak) that vasty improve movement ability.

Knives niche, is that if you're out of amunition, you can draw your knife to kill someone at point blank range. It does more damage that "quick rifle butt" but at the end of the day, knives are more survival tools than weapons.

A beyonet would make more sense in PS2 than a knive.

There's a thread for that http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=43045