mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

Melee Weapons…Instant Kill?

Better late than never, but I finally got my copy of Call of Duty 4 and beat it within a week. My buddy was right that it is extremely addicting and I’ll probably do nothing else but play it all the time. I still have not tired multiplayer, but will do that in due time.

So what’s my overall perception of the game? One word, awesome! There are somethings that did bother me a little bit but nothing that made me want to stop playing. I am sure those of you that stop by have played it already but for the benefit of doubt I’ll remain relativiely spoiler free.

A general rule for an awesome game or film is to start with a bang to hook the audience and COD 4 did that, literally! The first mission on the cargo freighter was one hell of a level, I kind of got disoriented a bit when backtracking the level as it was sinking, but I assume that adds a little bit to the psuedo-realism the game provided.

Outside the sheer awesomeness of the gameplay and visuals COD 4 presented it worked like any other FPS I have played. However, there were two missions that really stood out that I have not seen in other FPS games. The first was the mission aboard the AC-130 where you provided air support fire for ground troops, the second was the sniper mission. The AC-130 was awesome becuase it the entire mission was presented from a view of an onboard camera and using that camera sight you delievered some heavy fire power to unsuspecting enemies below.  With sniper mission it was all about camping, which I do nomrally in most FPS games so I enjoyed it even more!

Now that I am done with COD 4, I have nothing new to play till GTA IV comes out in a few weeks. That will keep me busy for a while.

In the meantime I decided to fire up Doom 3 on my new rig. Last time I played it was on a rig with 512 MB ram and a Radeon 9700 Pro. Now that I got a Quad core beast with 4 GB of RAM and an 8800 GTX so I assumed it would work flawlessly on ultra high detail. Well it didn’t, the game ran quite slow, this had me stumped as to why this was happening with such awesome system specs. Turns out the game does not like dual monitor adapter, so I had to use the Nvidia control panel to tell it to run Doom 3 running single display instead of dual. Once I did that the game ran really smooth and looked great. Almost done with it again, recently finished the hell levels, damn did that shit look scary on such high detail.

Since I am on the subject of Doom 3 I can safely segway into the topic of this rant. Melee weapons…instant kill? I never really thought about it too much but now I have seen this in three games and it just seems odd. So my first example is with Team Fortress 2 and the Spy. Pretty sneaky fellow if played right and most commonly known for backstabbing people with a small knife. If you backstab someone they die instatly. Next example, COD 4, the knife if used to backstab unsuspecting AI they go down in a second flat no effort required. Doom 3, the chainsaw kills most demons and zombies instantly or in some cases a second or two.  However, in all three of these games using normal bullets to take someone down takes while and most AI or human player can sustain a barrage of bullets but knife or chainsaw takes them down instantly? What the hell!

I don’t have answer for this but it’s an odd design choice, ok perhaps TF 2 can be an excepetion given that the backstab is Spy’s main attack and it’s funny to do it or watch people get backstabbed. However in the case of COD 4 or Doom 3 I would assume that melee weapon would deal some damage and slow the AI down for a bit but not kill them instantly.

Anyways something to think about why do melee weapons kill instantly, I am sure there are other game examples that I can’t recall now.

That’s it for now, till next time.

Cheers.