Melee and My 2 Cents

[Steel_Rook]

7 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Exclusively High-commitment attacks do not work for a game like Warframe. That's what I'm arguing for. You're practically admitting this yourself by saying 'just dodge cancel'. I don't need to bloat the post with many of the others because of this - you are admitting yourself that high-commitment attacks can pose a problem in WF's gameplay.

"Pose a threat" is not the same as "do not work." Plenty of melee weapons are already like that in Warframe. The reason I keep bringing up Hammers and Great Swords is because both their Quick Melee attacks and their Stance Combos involve full-body rooting attacks, and plenty of those weapons are pretty slow on top of that. The Arca Plasmor has a good run at being the game's slowest weapon, yet it still works when used correctly. In fact, I tend to prefer the larger, slower weapons as tradeoff for those shortcomings is longer range for swings, combos and ground slams.

Moreover, plenty of things in Warframe "pose a threat." The Lenz is a perfect example. Even as a P2W tanky Inaros, I still managed to kill myself plenty of times with that thing because I kept underestimating its range and damage. The Opticore is another good example. It's a very powerful weapon capable of some decent AoE, but it comes with so many drawbacks that using it often poses an active threat. Hell, Archwings themselves pose a threat just for using them as auto-run tends to ram you into terrain causing damage and non-Archwing missions are replete with heavy-damage AA guided missiles.

High-commitment attacks very much do work in Warframe. The only real challenge is proper balance between them and low-commitment attacks, and I'd argue the game already does that with its heavy melee weapons.

 

22 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

You're not 'locked into' attack animations in Nier Automata or Platinum's other brawlers though. You are given the tools to cancel out of those animations at any time, and in fact high-level play with certain weapons in a lot of Platinum games basically revolves entirely around never actually letting an animation finish ever because you cancel out of them immediately after you land damage on the enemy to maximize your damage output.

I'm pretty sure you can do that in Warframe, as well. I recall being able to slide and dodge in the middle of melee attacks. In case I misremember, that can be coded into the game - it's a part of its animation sequencer. I'm not a huge fan of it myself, but if that's what it takes to retain at least a few slow, heavy melee weapons in the game then so be it. Frankly, I'm pretty disappointed with post-Bloodborne games de-emphasising weight and over-emphasising fast, agile weapons. Even something as "chunky" as The Surge still chose to render its block function all but superfluous in return for permanent sliding dashes. What happened to Lords of the Fallen and having to pick yourself up after a roll if you were wearing heavy armour?

[Loza03]

49 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

"Pose a threat" is not the same as "do not work." Plenty of melee weapons are already like that in Warframe. The reason I keep bringing up Hammers and Great Swords is because both their Quick Melee attacks and their Stance Combos involve full-body rooting attacks, and plenty of those weapons are pretty slow on top of that. The Arca Plasmor has a good run at being the game's slowest weapon, yet it still works when used correctly. In fact, I tend to prefer the larger, slower weapons as tradeoff for those shortcomings is longer range for swings, combos and ground slams. 

Moreover, plenty of things in Warframe "pose a threat." The Lenz is a perfect example. Even as a P2W tanky Inaros, I still managed to kill myself plenty of times with that thing because I kept underestimating its range and damage. The Opticore is another good example. It's a very powerful weapon capable of some decent AoE, but it comes with so many drawbacks that using it often poses an active threat. Hell, Archwings themselves pose a threat just for using them as auto-run tends to ram you into terrain causing damage and non-Archwing missions are replete with heavy-damage AA guided missiles.

High-commitment attacks very much do work in Warframe. The only real challenge is proper balance between them and low-commitment attacks, and I'd argue the game already does that with its heavy melee weapons.

You're not wrong - hence why I'm not arguing that they go away completely. But, as we also agree, they are a downside in some cases, which means universally applying them to all animations would be a significant downgrade to the melee system

[Teridax68]

10 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

"Pose a threat" is not the same as "do not work." Plenty of melee weapons are already like that in Warframe. The reason I keep bringing up Hammers and Great Swords is because both their Quick Melee attacks and their Stance Combos involve full-body rooting attacks, and plenty of those weapons are pretty slow on top of that. The Arca Plasmor has a good run at being the game's slowest weapon, yet it still works when used correctly. In fact, I tend to prefer the larger, slower weapons as tradeoff for those shortcomings is longer range for swings, combos and ground slams.

Moreover, plenty of things in Warframe "pose a threat." The Lenz is a perfect example. Even as a P2W tanky Inaros, I still managed to kill myself plenty of times with that thing because I kept underestimating its range and damage. The Opticore is another good example. It's a very powerful weapon capable of some decent AoE, but it comes with so many drawbacks that using it often poses an active threat. Hell, Archwings themselves pose a threat just for using them as auto-run tends to ram you into terrain causing damage and non-Archwing missions are replete with heavy-damage AA guided missiles.

High-commitment attacks very much do work in Warframe. The only real challenge is proper balance between them and low-commitment attacks, and I'd argue the game already does that with its heavy melee weapons.

I feel there may be a crucial difference here between weapons or attacks that are slow, and attacks that lock the player's actions: the Lenz may be very slow, but the player can also cancel the shot at any time, or release early. Similarly, the Arca Plasmor fires slowly, but does not lock the player's movement, and its reloading can itself be canceled at any time. Meanwhile, even sped-up finisher animations that render the user invulnerable for the duration are disfavored by long-term players, simply because they lock the player's actions. The same can be said for many stance animations, which also feature animation locks and cannot be canceled, and even cast animations on warframes (which is why there's a high demand for abilities to be turned into one-handed actions, or to be made castable from parkour). As such, while I agree that there's room for moves that require commitment through slow speeds, long reloads, etc., I feel it is nonetheless important that this commitment comes exclusively from player choice that can be opted out of at any moment, rather than some forced, uncancellable animation.

Edited March 13, 2019 by Teridax68

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I feel there may be a crucial difference here between weapons or attacks that are slow, and attacks that lock the player's actions: the Lenz may be very slow, but the player can also cancel the shot at any time, or release early. Similarly, the Arca Plasmor fires slowly, but does not lock the player's movement, and its reloading can itself be canceled at any time.

OK, this is me being an idiot who shouldn't be posting at 5 AM on 4 hours of sleep... Let me try that again 🙂

I was trying to reference the Arca TITRON, but have the names cross-wired in my head. The Titron is the weapon I was trying to reference as being one of the slowest (if not THE slowest) in the game, and yet it still works fine in my opinion. I'd be using it over the Paracesis if the Hammer combos weren't all terrible with built-in lunge attacks and frankly awkward, stiff animations. But we can just as well cite the Galatine and the Paracesis here, as both weapons have rooting animations on all of their attacks, as well, and I do use both of those largely because I find the Cleaving Whirlwind generally very well-animated, and the rooting full-body animations help with that.

I referenced the Lenz less in terms of how slow it is to fire, and more in terms of how likely it is to kill its own user - something that my face can attest to. The weapon itself can be made pretty quick with just a single Vile Acceleration mod, but it nevertheless "poses a threat" to its user. I was responding to an argument about how rooting animations pose a threat to the player, and merely meant to show that this is neither unprecedented nor necessarily bad design.

 

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

As such, while I agree that there's room for moves that require commitment through slow speeds, long reloads, etc., I feel it is nonetheless important that this commitment comes exclusively from player choice that can be opted out of at any moment, rather than some forced, uncancellable animation.

We're going to have to disagree on that point, I'm afraid. While I know there's a general preference for faster, non-rooting attacks throughout video games and in Warframe in particular, I personally find that that experience ends up lacking "weight" and tend to prefer slower, high-commitment rooting animations, instead. As I said earlier in the thread, the game can have both. Lighter weapons could and probably should have non-rooting or interruptible melee attacks, but I'm of the opinion that heavy weapons still need that commitment in order to communicate their size and weight accordingly. I'm also of the opinion that Attack Speed buffs could stand to be reigned in somewhat, because we have enough of them now to just about break the "feel" of melee animations.

I'm of the opinion that weapon balance could be largely based on a tradeoff between attack mobility and attack range. The more mobile your Warframe is while meleeing, the shorter-ranged the weapon is and vice versa.