Melee Weapons and You : II

Greetings Mechwarriors,

Last time I talked a little bit about melee weapons and their place in MWO. Long story short, they don't have a place in MWO! There are many challenges that would have to be addressed before one could even hope to see them.

Collision detection, for one, would have to be much better. Sure, walls, buildings, and large trees are solid with good collision detection, but that's to be expected. I know that I've been able to clip through a few of the smaller obstacles and I'm sure we've all experienced clipping through a teammate that doesn't respect our personal bubble. I can only imagine the challenge of making not only the collision detection accurate enough, but also the physics accurate enough. Imagine sinking your weapon into an enemy Mech. Realistically, you'd be able to let go of the weapon or probably at least lift it out of the wriggling remains of your enemy. This would be extremely difficult to do without just having the weapon clip through your target a certain distance and then clipping back out, or just having the weapon clip out of your Mech's hand.

Balancing such a weapon would also be difficult. It's hard to see how a lucky "one hit KO" swing on a Firestarter would become a popular mechanic. As it is, a lot of people are abandoning light Mechs in favor of the larger variety of heavier Mechs. Hopefully, that will change with upcoming Mech releases, but still. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that a well placed swing could also KO a Mech outfitted with an IS XL engine. I suppose that they could have the weapon just get lodged in the enemy and reduce the armor of the affected component to zero, but that doesn't really work either as it could easily be followed up with an Alpha strike to down the enemy. I'm not saying that you can't "one-shot" a cored enemy as it is, but I don't think that it needs to be able to happen more often, even with how realistic it may be for melee weapons.

To continue on balancing such a feature, how would it make sense to reflect a melee weapon while outfitting your Mech? Obviously, you'd have to dedicate that arm to the melee slot and nothing else, but what kind of restrictions would be put on the rest of the loadout? Would it make sense to limit a melee carrying Mech to just a couple other weapons, considering that they could potentially leg an enemy Mech with one swing?

And what about targeting? I mean, really. Sure, we all get close enough to an enemy on occasion that we could realistically take a swing at them, but let's be real. Unless PGI didn't severely limit the loadout of a melee weapon toting Mech, you'd be almost useless if you couldn't get up close! I will admit that there are already some useless Mechs in the game, but that's a different argument.

And what about friendly fire? It works now that you're able to clip through a teammate that gets too close and you both take a little damage, but imagine a teammate turning to run for cover only to run directly into your melee weapon and core himself. Yeah, that's hilarious, but it doesn't make it a good mechanic.

Lastly, do I think that melee weapons could be done properly in MWO? Yes, but not by PGI. There, I said it.

Good luck and good hunting, pilots.