What Do You Consider the Ideal Melee Combat System?

[Lleventyate (Sevtenonuhnder)]

So I was drawing up ideas for a melee combat system some time ago.
I figured my biggest goals in creating one were:

• Easy to Learn, utilizing as few keys and states as possible
• Being smart and skillful is important, experience makes a difference
• Avoids spamming attacks
• Functions as a good basic combat system, which future additions can take advantage of to create new playstyles and advantage-disadvantages

And so for now I have my first system.
There are only two controls: LMB and RMB. Combining these and timing your use of them leads to different results. This checks off Easy to Learn (the controls at least) and experience difference (knowing when to use what combination).
There’s also a stamina bar, which obviously when it’s empty then no actions are possible. Actions like attacking or being attacked while blocking consume stamina, and parrying an attack (done by attacking as your opponent is in the pre-attack animation) regains some stamina. This solves the spamming attacks, since actions have an eventual limit.
This I figure is a good basic system, and later I can add abilities which don’t consume stamina or parry-stun without the need to time.

But then I think of other systems which seem to work.
Most FPS games have one simple attack, usually using knives. Some games use multiple abilities or skills or items and combat is achieved by combining these. A few I’ve seen work with light and heavy attacks, and possibly also by altering the direction of the attack. And one or two was something like charging up your one attack and the damage dealt was based on that charge.

And now I’m in question of what makes a good melee combat system. I know it’s different for every game, what each game wants to focus on and how the game wants combat to be. In mine I want melee combat to be just as interesting as ranged–in tactical shooters different weapons specialize in different situations and the slight change in stats allows players to choose weapons that suit their playstyle.

[astraIboy (The Batman)]

Honestly I like combat systems that feel snappy and super responsive, I also hate limiters like stamina but I do appreciate systems that dont reward players for spamming though, the perfect balance between feeling good but also requiring some sort of skill but also being easy to pick up

[Random_DUD379 (WaIterWhite)]

A really good combat system I know is from a game called Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. In a nutshell, it’s basically just a medieval game where you can become a lord, king, and more stuff. But the thing about that game is that it has an AMAZING combat System.

It’s pretty simple. Each direction you look, you attack in that direction. Look up? Overhead attack. Look right? Right Swing. Look Down? Stab. It’s really simple but allows you to really control where your blade is going. The same goes with blocking, you can block up, down, left, or right.
There’s also a cool system in the game called feinting. Whenever your going to attack, before the blade even swings, you can block last second to cancel the attack. This both helps in tricking your opponent in blocking one direction so you can attack the other direction, and it helps with blocking last second.

Another thing it does(though this one might be way harder to script) is Chambering and Combo’s. When I say combos, I’m pretty sure many people would just think of pressing the same button multiple times and watching some animation. While it is very similiar, it’s a little different in Bannerlord. When you swing your weapon, when the weapon is almost done swing, you have to PERFECTLY time a click to do a cool trick to swing again. Basically what your character would do is, if he is swinging right and he is finishing his attack, you can click again at the perfect moment and he’ll swing his arm over his head and swing right again. Pretty cool if you see it.

Another thing is chambering. This one might be a bit harder to explain. So basically, whenever your opponent is starting an attack, as soon as it is almost about to hit you, you have to attack the same direction as the blade is attacking you at(example is if your opponent swings left, you have to swing right since its going to hit your right arm). If you do this, your character will push the blade out of the way with his own blade, and strike quickly and unpredictably. You can also feint this to make it way more confusing for your opponent.

This combat system is also perfect for competitive players. If you look up multiplayer gameplay from “Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord”, you’ll notice just how confusing it is. It’s such a simple combat system yet so…I don’t know what the word for it is. “Flexible”, I guess. People are just feinting, swinging, blocking, feinting, comboing, and stuff like that. It’s crazy. I’ve tried the multiplayer a few times and I just can’t handle the melee combat so I just become an archer half the time.

So here’s the checklist for Bannerlord’s combat system:

1. Easy to learn - Yes
2. Can be used skillfully - Absolutely
3. Can avoid spamming attacks - Attacks are slow usually, so yeah
4. Good basic combat system with multiple playstyles, advantages and disadvantages - Of course. Heres yet another list of playstyles from Bannerlord:

• Swords, Axes, Maces and Shield
• Two handed Sword
• Two handed Axe (Different from sword)
• Two handed Mace
• Polearm and Shield
• Two-Handed Polarm(Halberds, etc)
• Bows, Crossbows, Javelins, and Throwing axes(all of these can be used on Horseback too, so people can play as Horse Archer’s and stuff like that).
• That’s right - Mount and Blade.

In conclusion, Bannerlord has one of the most perfect combat systems ever. it’s ideal and I’m pretty sure it would be easy to make(except the chambering and comboing, that might be tough to make). Anyways yeah, I hope that answers your question.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk.

Oh, and also, one more thing, Bannerlord doesn’t have any stamina, which is a good thing, I don’t like stamina that much. It works for some medieval games but for large scale ones like Bannerlord, it doesn’t.

I hope this answers your question. I really do consider this the IDEAL combat system.
(sorry if this is to much to read)

[xknuighsu]

By choosing a combat system you must consider several things,
The imact on the design of the game, and the capability of that combat system.
For instance, altho the combat system @Random_DUD379 presented is really great,
it does not fit an engine like roblox as far as I could tell.
Roblox is based on events systems and has some delay (you can see that on task.wait() function.
This means that complicated combat system that calculates the direction of the user that strikes and responses with the enemy’s reactions is probably impossible, and even if it is, it could be very much exploited by the user to send false events.

Where a combat system like that does work? PVE.
When talking about player versus entity everything turns a lot easier for developers, everything is communicated directly to the server and does not require communication between clients. And a combat system like mentioned above is really great, and brings a lot of elements and playstyle to the game.

So, what do I recommend?
Simply think about the impacts of any design concept, everything has an upside and a downside but you can narrow and utilize it to your game’s advantage.
For example abilites gives you expandable options, but may cause unbalance and overuse of them (which is no skill at all).
But by adding cooldowns and making many abilities, this will narrow the balance issue.
So this is just an example.

Before you try to make any physical change, just consider the impact of the change on all game aspects and if it suits well, then implement it.
Hope this explanation helped!