Gunplay and Melee Combat Mechanics

[ganjou234]

I made a compilation of some changes I'd like to see in WF (although there are more in my mind) these are most of it.

Holstered Reload Indication

Give a visual cues for magazine percentage while gun is holstered (EG. in melee mode)

1. FULL
2. HALF
3. EMPTY

Run-and-gun

Shooting guns shouldn't slow us to a jog, we should be able to fully sprint while shooting, only while aiming down will it be slowed to a jog.

Soft Locking/Hard locking

(Sample Image from The Surge 2's fluid limb/weakspot lockon mechanics)

The Surge 2's contextual soft lock mechanics can be used in Warframe with an addition of a Hard Lock button if the player wishes to do so, with contextual soft locking the gun/melee will aim at the closest weakspot to the reticle and hard locking allowing for more focus on combat maneuvering.

 

Quick Blocking

Other than directly transitioning to melee via quick attack we also need need a button to switch to melee via blocking while using our guns, similar to how there's quick melee (press E while shooting -> melee attack), there should also be a button that we can bind to do quick blocking and just like quick melee we stay in melee form till we shoot again...

During the first 1 second, restore energy based on the type of hits received (heavy attacks (sniper shots, bombard rockets, ground slams, pulls, knockdowns, some melee attacks, explosions) 20 energy, light attacks (bullets, some melee attacks) 5 energy).

Block Frames

Certain melee weapons and combos should have block frames (ie. shield and sword combos)

Melee Only Stamina and Perfect Swings

All warframes have fixed amount of stamina. (100 Stamina)

Different weapons and movements consume different amounts of stamina.

• Light Weapons (daggers, nikanas, etc..) base consumption: 10
• Heavy (Hammers, Heavy Blades, etc...) base consumption: 20
  • Cleaving Whirlwind Crowd Fall Combo: 20 -> 20 -> 30

Similar to Jump Reset below, perfect swings would instead consume 50% less stamina. Certain combos have either the indicator at the beginning or at the end of an attack.

• Cleaving Whirlwind Crowd Fall Combo: Beginning -> After -> After

Walking

Give a toggle walk button so that we can walk and do smaller precise movements instead of overshooting all the time.

Timed Double/Bullet Jump Reset (Vertical Combat Mechanics)

Proper Timing of Bullet Jumping after a slide/roll/jump/doublejump/bullet jump resets bullet jump/double jump timer (chain jumping).

• Directional input during perfect jump indicator allows change of direction (allowing movement not bound to the direction of the reticle).
• Additionally the initial animation (0.5 seconds) of a perfect double/bullet jump has an omnidirectional block frame and 100% crowd control resistance.
• Performing a double jump instead of a bullet jump during the indicator will kill the momentum instead to allow for stationary bullet gliding.

http://guidescroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/pso20120127_085807_015_j.jpg

(Sample image from PSO2's perfect attack/dodge mechanic)

Limited Consumables

Energy and HP Consumables are limited based on difficulty.

Fixed Difficulty Tiers

Instead of infinitely scaling levels, difficulty should be divided into tiers (Easy, Meduim, Hard, Steel Path). Each base warframe can take a measured amount of hits based on modding, level, difficulty.

Increase complexity of enemies instead of simply increasing HP/Armor, design levels that require vertical knowledge, create a director that spawns these enemies based on the mentioned level design.

 

[Voltage]

What's really hard about this is the fact that changing melee needs to be done without heavily slowing down the game as the selling point for Warframe is the pace it sets. I think a better approach to this without adding Stamina (which was frankly a bad system for Warframes and hurts Railjack and Necramechs) is standardizing attack speed multipliers. What DE needs to really consider is changing 1 or 2 things at a time instead of changing too many variables at once. I feel like addressing a mod here and a mod there is much better for the game than trying to do everything at once and potentially having a Warframe Revised type problem emerge.

[Steel_Rook]

Without wishing to insult you, this post reads like another instance of "Make Warframe into Dark Souls." This prompts my standby response of "Warframe is not Dark Souls and should not try to emulate it." Don't get me wrong - I'm not trashing those games. The Surge 2 remains one of my favourite games, after all. But those games are not Warframe, and Warframe is not those games. Souls games are built around single combat and boss fights. Warframe is a horde shooter. Its melee mechanic needs to be basic and simple enough to deal with large, amorphous hordes of enemies without requiring a lot of fiddly minigames. I say "needs" because anything more complex than that gets REALLY old REALLY fast due to how often we have to repeat actions. Hell, The Surge itself gets old once you start farming for Scrap and repeating the same few fights over and over again.

 

Limited melee stamina is an absolute no-no. That mechanic exists in Souls games to keep the player from button-mashing, but Warframe's melee combat benefits from it. In fact, I'd go one further and argue that the system ought to allow us to hold our melee button to auto-chain melee attacks. The current system of mashing melee just leads to repetitive strain injury and keyboard amortisation. There's a reason Melee 2.0, aka "Warframe Devil May Cry" ultimately failed. It's because Devil May Cry too is a spectacle fighter designed around stylishly fighting small groups of enemies, not cleaving your way through wall-to-wall hordes of enemies packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Warframe doesn't reward you with "style points" for killing your enemy through a slice of pizza. It rewards you with efficiency for killing your enemy quickly and with the least amount of movements. A stamina system is simply not applicable to this kind of combat, unless you simply want to periodically lock players out of their melee weapons and force them to wait it out.

Hell, it's already bad enough that seemingly all new game modes get saddled with movement Stamina - Operators, Railjack, Necramechs. I absolutely do not want to see melee stamina in this game. Not at all.

 

The same goes for enemy locks. Actually, let me get my personal bias out of the way first: #*!% LOCK-ON SYSTEMS AND EVERY GAME THAT HAS THEM! With that out of the way - lock-on only works for single combat and becomes increasingly more problematic when fighting multiple opponents. The Surge suffers from this MASSIVELY, as any time the game throws two or three enemies at the player, target selection becomes a massive pain in the ass. Not only does target switching reset limb selection, switching itself is cumbersome in the extreme, leading to the player fighting the controls more than fighting the enemies. Warframe has this to a much, much more severe extent. Standard combat can feature 20, 30, 40 enemies on-screen and more, moving quickly and passing by each other. Any left/right target tabbing system is going to suffer greatly. Hell, any target lock system is going to cause targeting the wrong enemy most of the time.

Not to mention... Why bother? Do you know why those target lock systems exist in the first place? Consoles. Game pads have limited targeting capability, thus they need lock-on assist to stay on target. I understand that Warframe has console versions, but the console versions of this game play by PC rules. And on the PC, we have all the hardware necessary to manually control our melee strikes without the need for lock-on. In fact, I'd go entirely the other way - let players aim melee strikes directly. Right now, our melee attacks strike an area predetermined by their animation with no ability for players to aim at weak points or heads. But look at something like Vermintide. By tying the player's swing arc to camera orientation, the game allows - and indeed expects - the player to reliably nail Skaven right in the head. Rather than further tying players' hands behind their back with automated auto-tracking systems, simply let the player's torso pivot up and down during melee strikes, such that players can aim for heads, weak points and airborne enemies. That's all we really need.

 

About the only area I agree here is on the subject of quick-blocking. I'm of the opinion that auto-block should always trigger regardless of what weapon we have selected, but also be interruptible by all player actions. That is to say, aiming, moving, shooting our firearms, swinging our melee weapons, etc. The reason people hate auto-block now is entirely technical. DE tied both Glide and Block to the Aim system, meaning auto-block functionally triggers an aim state. If it happens in the air, this also triggers a glide state. It's been a long time coming, but I still argue that Aim, Block and Glide need to be separated into their own dedicated systems. Move Glide to holding Jump while in the air (like Necramechs used to), leave Aim as a standalone button press, leave Block as a standalone action either triggered automatically or by aiming with a melee weapon equipped.

I don't see the point in having a separate "block" button with a ranged weapon equipped. As long as melee blocking is a "neutral action," the player still has the option of controlling it by deliberately not taking other actions. Long ago, Bungie's Oni did precisely this and the system worked like a charm there. Not only was blocking intuitive by deliberately not attacking, but it introduced a slight additional skill element as players needed to resist the urge to button-mash. Attacking leaves you vulnerable. Not attacking leaves you safe. If you want a sanity check on melee button spam, this is far more useful than melee stamina.

 

I'm not ideologically opposed to major changes to Warframe's core systems. Hell, I proposed one in this very post. However, I AM opposed to changes for the sake of making Warframe more like X. More like Dark Souls, more like Devil May Cry, more like Gears of War, what have you. I don't feel there's anything to gain from turning Warframe into Dark Souls.

[quxier]

On 2021-03-06 at 11:33 AM, ganjou234 said:

Proper Timing of Bullet Jumping after a slide/roll/jump/doublejump/bullet jump resets bullet jump/double jump timer (chain jumping).

Resetting rolls, jumps etc is kind of nice but I'm not sure if Bullet jump is a right trigger.

In general, this idea is nice (look at Zephyr) but needs some work.

On 2021-03-06 at 11:33 AM, ganjou234 said:

Certain melee weapons and combos should have block frames (ie. shield and sword combos)

What you mean by "block frames"?

On 2021-03-06 at 11:33 AM, ganjou234 said:

Melee Only Stamina and Perfect Swings

No. It will slow down combat. And make it more tactic. Tactic is good as option not as must, in my opinion.

On 2021-03-06 at 11:33 AM, ganjou234 said:

Give a toggle walk button so that we can walk and do smaller precise movements instead of overshooting all the time.

There is walk/run toggle in the game if that's what you mean. You have to set some option and button probably (I have it set long time ago).

On 2021-03-06 at 11:33 AM, ganjou234 said:

Limited Consumables

Energy and HP Consumables are limited based on difficulty.

That's big no. It will just reduce it's usage a lot. In low level you don't need it that much but you probably (with your suggestion) spam it a lot.

On other hand in higher level mission you want more but you couldn't...

On 2021-03-06 at 11:33 AM, ganjou234 said:

Increase complexity of enemies instead of simply increasing HP/Armor, design levels that require vertical knowledge, create a director that spawns these enemies based on the mentioned level design.

This. I don't like hp/armor/shield increase. This would make it harder without needing to some viral, armor stripping or something.

 

[Aadi880]

19 minutes ago, quxier said:

What you mean by "block frames"?

Its an instance of time where your weapon is physically in front of your body. While attacking, the weapon, being a physical object, will block/reflect all damage that is dealt in the side it is facing.

It only lasts for a few milliseconds, and its more akin to slicing bullets in mid air, or a bullet parry, if you want to think of it in that sense.

One example: Genshin Impact features "Block Frames" onto enemies. Mitachrul is an enemy that wields a massive axe, and has an attack that is like Cleaving Whrilwind's "spin2win". While in that spinning state, it is invulnerable to damage on the torso section from ranged weapons (the axe blocks arrows). But it is still invulnerable to damage via headshots or legs, or if you fire just the right time that the axe misses the arrow (Though that is hard to do.)

______________________________

As for the OP:

I would like to see an increase of enemy complexity as well. But not stamina on melee. I believe increasing enemy complexity like implementing more flying, airborne enemies may just make the stamina in melee not required at all. As you have to use guns or do a slog of parkouring up to kill it with an air-swing.

[ganjou234]

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Without wishing to insult you, this post reads like another instance of "Make Warframe into Dark Souls." This prompts my standby response of "Warframe is not Dark Souls and should not try to emulate it." Don't get me wrong - I'm not trashing those games. The Surge 2 remains one of my favourite games, after all. But those games are not Warframe, and Warframe is not those games. Souls games are built around single combat and boss fights. Warframe is a horde shooter. Its melee mechanic needs to be basic and simple enough to deal with large, amorphous hordes of enemies without requiring a lot of fiddly minigames. I say "needs" because anything more complex than that gets REALLY old REALLY fast due to how often we have to repeat actions. Hell, The Surge itself gets old once you start farming for Scrap and repeating the same few fights over and over again.

Have you ever tried to use the contextual lockon feature? You only needed to use your mouse to aim at a part no need for tabbing through target parts, actually the best fights I've ever had in The Surge 2 is when fighting a lot of enemies, there are even weapons that are specifically designed and used for mobbing.

 

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Limited melee stamina is an absolute no-no. That mechanic exists in Souls games to keep the player from button-mashing, but Warframe's melee combat benefits from it. In fact, I'd go one further and argue that the system ought to allow us to hold our melee button to auto-chain melee attacks. The current system of mashing melee just leads to repetitive strain injury and keyboard amortisation. There's a reason Melee 2.0, aka "Warframe Devil May Cry" ultimately failed. It's because Devil May Cry too is a spectacle fighter designed around stylishly fighting small groups of enemies, not cleaving your way through wall-to-wall hordes of enemies packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Warframe doesn't reward you with "style points" for killing your enemy through a slice of pizza. It rewards you with efficiency for killing your enemy quickly and with the least amount of movements. A stamina system is simply not applicable to this kind of combat, unless you simply want to periodically lock players out of their melee weapons and force them to wait it out.

Hell, it's already bad enough that seemingly all new game modes get saddled with movement Stamina - Operators, Railjack, Necramechs. I absolutely do not want to see melee stamina in this game. Not at all.

Except, warframe needs to actually slow down, it needs its style back. Have you ever seen how ridiculous weapons are with too much attack speed, the game literally looks like an ugly spasmic mess at that point. I wonder if the dev team ever intended for us to enjoy their hard-worked animations when we simply go over the perceivable. Besides the game I'm basing this stamina idea is PSO2, which is highly comparable to Warframe in terms of enemy count but is superior in terms of enemy and boss design. In PSO2 you actually dont get punished by button mashing normal attacks, but it also rewards skillful timing of normal attacks and skills (Photon Arts). There's even a pseudo stamina resource that only gets consumed by spamming skills (photon arts), but gets recovered by normal attacks, and even more "Photons" are recovered if properly timed. A proper rotation for warframe can be derived from this, normal attacks recover energy while certain 2 handed skills and most 1 handed skills recover stamina then we can have executions recover our ammunition, proper timing would recover more (Thus most energy and stamina issues are solved by just being skilled enough). (While the stamina idea stems from PSO2 the recovery mechanics are derived from DOOM and DOOM Eternal)

If you see how dividing difficulty into tiers and proper enemy design also connects with the rest of the suggested features then you'd understand that the need for excessive button mashing is gone and the need for insane armor system for our enemies. Properly designed enemy and director systems would remove the need for the current mind numbing melee and gun combat system.

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Not to mention... Why bother? Do you know why those target lock systems exist in the first place? Consoles. Game pads have limited targeting capability, thus they need lock-on assist to stay on target. I understand that Warframe has console versions, but the console versions of this game play by PC rules. And on the PC, we have all the hardware necessary to manually control our melee strikes without the need for lock-on. In fact, I'd go entirely the other way - let players aim melee strikes directly. Right now, our melee attacks strike an area predetermined by their animation with no ability for players to aim at weak points or heads. But look at something like Vermintide. By tying the player's swing arc to camera orientation, the game allows - and indeed expects - the player to reliably nail Skaven right in the head. Rather than further tying players' hands behind their back with automated auto-tracking systems, simply let the player's torso pivot up and down during melee strikes, such that players can aim for heads, weak points and airborne enemies. That's all we really need.

The reason is speed, the pace of warframe is excessively fast and not to mention enemies that have a non-telegraphed movements. Contextual Locking means that there's an area around the reticle that the game automatically aims at, meaning there's no need for target switching you only have to simply look at your target. Though I think that the Vermintide method of aiming melee is superior to contextual locking, but I believe that it should only be available when aiming down with a weapon. Kinda like this...

 

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't see the point in having a separate "block" button with a ranged weapon equipped. As long as melee blocking is a "neutral action," the player still has the option of controlling it by deliberately not taking other actions

The point is that someone might want to directly transition into blocking while shooting (like when ammo has run out but one prefers to stay away or simply blocking that bombard rocket), but I guess that's solved by not doing anything. I used to use a mod that had a chance to do that I think it was called Reflex Guard.

22 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

I'm not ideologically opposed to major changes to Warframe's core systems. Hell, I proposed one in this very post. However, I AM opposed to changes for the sake of making Warframe more like X. More like Dark Souls, more like Devil May Cry, more like Gears of War, what have you. I don't feel there's anything to gain from turning Warframe into Dark Souls.

It's not that I want WF to be like those games, it's just that WF is now suffering due to it's own design and design decisions. In fact I think WF doesn't know who it is at this point lol.

[Steel_Rook]

12 minutes ago, ganjou234 said:

Except, warframe needs to actually slow down, it needs its style back. Have you ever seen how ridiculous weapons are with too much attack speed, the game literally looks like an ugly spasmic mess at that point. I wonder if the dev team ever intended for us to enjoy their hard-worked animations when we simply go over the perceivable.

While I fully agree that excessive attack speed looks utterly stupid, that's as far as I'm willing to go. Slow down attack animations until they're human-readable and leave it at that. If necessary, adjust stats to compensate for DPS, but I'm not convinced it is. That's it - that's all that needs to happen. I don't see why Warframe's melee combat needs to be any more complex than that. Here's the crux of my argument - fast-paced, repetitive combat does not benefit from complexity. The more complex a repetitive action is, the faster it burns players out because the point where we "can't be arsed any more" comes much sooner.

As much as I praise Vermintide's combat system, I feel that that too is also overly-complicated, with its block-cancelling combos, varying stats for attacks within a chain, over-reliance on swing arcs, etc. It CAN work, but it gets really old really fast when I pick a more complex weapon. For as much as people criticise "left click spam," that has longevity. Left click spam with the need to aim for specific body parts really is enough. Plus, despite Vermintide's "horde" nature, it's still a much slower-paced game. Yes, we generally kill more enemies (2000-3000 per run with a full team), everyone moves slow and the game typically breaks down around fixed battle lines, with enemies clumping together to be cleaved. Due to Warframe's mobility, that doesn't really happen so much here. Enemies are almost always more spread out, and typically a lot tougher individually.

Here's the thing - Melee 3.0 removed a lot of the Devil May Cry pointless fat from the game. It took out the press-wait-press combos and standardised attacks into 2-4 "styles" per stance. However, it added a tremendous amount of extra mobility via the aimed ground slam attack. What that accomplished was ostensibly letting players go exactly where they wanted and target exactly the enemy they wanted to attack in melee from quite a significant distance. To me, that's more than sufficient complexity in melee, at least when fighting ranged enemies who back up, take cover and stay at range. Add the ability to target body parts (heads and weakpoints, say) directly to this and you have a more than sufficiently complex combat system to hold interest while also not being so complex that it grows old fast.

It's the same thing we do with firearms, after all. You have some amount of aim spread, some amount of recoil but we don't use iron sights or prevent players from shooting on the move or require players to be on the ground or have fall damage or have really complex reload mechanics, etc. This is a simplified arcadey shooter game with some more complex mechanics used sparingly. The same needs to apply to melee, as far as I'm concerned. Warframe's "style" is in its movement, not its gunplay or melee combat. Integrating those into movement is where complexity comes from.

In short, individual systems don't need to be complex on their own. The interplay between them is where a fun game can be found. I fully agree that changes are needed to encourage players to use a mix of all systems (rather than just melee, or just guns, or not using parkour). I do, however, feel that each individual system needs to be kept light - at least within reason.

 

27 minutes ago, ganjou234 said:

The point is that someone might want to directly transition into blocking while shooting (like when ammo has run out but one prefers to stay away or simply blocking that bombard rocket), but I guess that's solved by not doing anything. I used to use a mod that had a chance to do that I think it was called Reflex Guard.

On that specific subject: Yup, that was kind of my point. If you want to smoothly transition from swinging or shooting directly into auto-block, you simply stop attacking and your character blocks. I'm not ideologically opposed to having a separate button for it, but rather I just feel it's not necessary. Auto-block is... A pile of garbage right now entirely due to coding and implementation issues so it would need a LOT of fixes to work like this. However, assuming that auto-block can trigger with a weapon equipped, not trigger glide in the air and be instantly interruptible by any combat action, I think it could work.

For reference, consider Baruuk's Elude. That's essentially what Auto Block would be. You'd avoid all damage coming from the front with a passive animation, but only as long as you're not attacking. And yes, I realise this feels ostensibly like giving every Warframe Elude, but... Well, I say go for it :) Baruuk can have a custom melee block animation with additional benefits like eroding his restraint and maybe even regenerating energy per hit eluded. The primary issue here - as I said - is a highly technical one. DE would need to put in the back-end coding work to separate Aim, Glide and Block into separate actions, rather than the single combined action they are now.

[ganjou234]

5 hours ago, quxier said:

That's big no. It will just reduce it's usage a lot. In low level you don't need it that much but you probably (with your suggestion) spam it a lot.

On other hand in higher level mission you want more but you couldn't...

Read the change in context of the difficulty changes I suggested. The levels get harder with scarcity and would require player to be involved with other key gameplay mechanics to sustain. Giving more sustain items on harder difficulty would be counter productive to giving the player a hard time.

  

5 hours ago, quxier said:

here is walk/run toggle in the game if that's what you mean. You have to set some option and button probably (I have it set long time ago).

I think they removed that.

[quxier]

1 hour ago, ganjou234 said:

I think they removed that.

I've been using this today (run toggle).

1 hour ago, ganjou234 said:

Read the change in context of the difficulty changes I suggested. The levels get harder with scarcity and would require player to be involved with other key gameplay mechanics to sustain. Giving more sustain items on harder difficulty would be counter productive to giving the player a hard time.

I read it and still don't get why it's good.

Limiting it would cause players to change focus to other things. You probably want to limit those as well.

[(NSW)Leafar]

8 hours ago, quxier said:

Resetting rolls, jumps etc is kind of nice but I'm not sure if Bullet jump is a right trigger.

In general, this idea is nice (look at Zephyr) but needs some work.

What you mean by "block frames"?

No. It will slow down combat. And make it more tactic. Tactic is good as option not as must, in my opinion.

There is walk/run toggle in the game if that's what you mean. You have to set some option and button probably (I have it set long time ago).

That's big no. It will just reduce it's usage a lot. In low level you don't need it that much but you probably (with your suggestion) spam it a lot.

On other hand in higher level mission you want more but you couldn't...

This. I don't like hp/armor/shield increase. This would make it harder without needing to some viral, armor stripping or something.

 

i do say its quite interesting that we still dont have a single enemy that can walk on walls. not even the raknoids which are supposed to be literal robo spiders XD

 

and that i know off the only enemy that can at least jump off walls are the Kavats and Zanukas which i wouldn't be surprised if they are using the same type of AI

[quxier]

2 hours ago, (NSW)Leafar said:

i do say its quite interesting that we still dont have a single enemy that can walk on walls. not even the raknoids which are supposed to be literal robo spiders XD

 

and that i know off the only enemy that can at least jump off walls are the Kavats and Zanukas which i wouldn't be surprised if they are using the same type of AI

Deimos one probably has something like this... but I kill to fast to bother.

[Aadi880]

10 hours ago, (NSW)Leafar said:

i do say its quite interesting that we still dont have a single enemy that can walk on walls. not even the raknoids which are supposed to be literal robo spiders XD

The infested can walk on walls.
More specifically, the Cranis enemies. The one that looks like centipedes.

[(NSW)Leafar]

10 hours ago, Aadi880 said:

The infested can walk on walls.
More specifically, the Cranis enemies. The one that looks like centipedes.

... oh YEAH!   

 

I forgot about those , i dont hang out at deimos that much though so that explains that but i do remember them hanging of walls and stuff