Hey everyone,
Welcome to Dev Brief #117!
This week we're sharing with you the details on our upcoming melee combat mechanic!
To take you through all the details, as well as when you'll be getting to grips with your new melee weapons, I'll be passing you over to Lead Developer Max -
A Message From Max - Melee in Hell Let Loose
Hi everyone!
In Update 9 we’ll be introducing melee for the first time to Hell Let Loose.
Melee in World War Two was a far more common occurrence than most people think and often took place in brutal room to room fighting - perhaps most poignantly depicted in a tragic scene in Saving Private Ryan.
How to Melee
We wanted to emulate the ability to immediately draw your melee weapon and plunge it into the enemy. To do this, we’ve enabled the B key as a quick melee attack. It’ll go for the immediate stab on the target by checking your inventory, seeing which melee weapon you possess and then actioning the attack.
For those who enjoy a more deliberate rampage, you can simply equip your melee weapon in your inventory before going for the kill.
In terms of parameters, we’re going to be testing relative reach and speed of a stab in order to give each melee weapon its own benefits. As a result of this, we’re then able to add different melee weapons to different loadouts later - with different speeds and ranges (including bayonets).
We thought a lot about how we’d introduce melee into such a fast and hardcore game like Hell Let Loose. If we made melee require multiple hits on the target, then it’s very likely that melee would almost never be used - as any attempt to do so would get you killed before being able to administer the killing blow. Similarly, we thought about potentially adding the ability for a blocking or parry system, but realised that this would also be entirely unused as it’s highly unlikely your target will resort to melee in the circumstance.
We felt that melee would most frequently be used when successfully flanking the enemy - moving your way through a trench or building brutally dispatching the enemy as quickly and efficiently as possible. As a result of this design, meleeing in Hell Let Loose kills the enemy instantly, covering your weapon and hands in blood.
Development Update
The team is incredibly busy right now working through issues that arose during the previous PTEs. Thank you everyone for the very useful feedback. We’re excited to action all of it in order to ensure a smooth release of Update 9.
Onwards to the weekend!
That wraps up this week's Dev Brief!
It's slightly shorter than usual, but we wanted to get... Straight to the point and share the core mechanics of how this new combat feature will work.
Let us know what you think too! What melee weapons would you like to see in the future?
Have a great weekend everyone.
We'll see you on the frontline.