yo you should try chronicles of riddick: escape from butcher bay. it has the perfect first person melee system and is all around one of the best games i have ever played. it's pretty much the only good movie tie-in game. i am really excited for the upcoming remake that will reportedly have multiplayer.

condemned and condemned two also have pretty good melee but it's not as dynamic and satisfying as butcher bay's and condemned two has lame quick time events for finishing moves.

dead island is a game coming out sometime next year that will be a zombie survival melee-focused game with very few guns like in condemned, and has a neat skin-flesh-bone wound layering system for the zombies

cvni2oe87n:

condemned and condemned two also have pretty good melee but it's not as dynamic and satisfying as butcher bay's and condemned two has lame quick time events for finishing moves.

Really? I saw the Condemned system as an expansion of the excellent system Chronicles of Riddick had, and therefore superior. The only thing CoR:EBB had on Condemned (I and II) is the weapon reversals.

ehh i guess i prefered riddick's setup and flow of combat, the way directional hooks were tied to the control stick instead of L and R corresponding to individual fists like in condemned. also in riddick you could get these really great left right combos where your just punching the heck out of the guy and his head is flopping back and forth and its so satisfying and tricky to pull off and condemned it was more like hit a guy, block, hit a guy, repeat, and it didn't feel as fun to me as riddick.

also the knife combat and how every weapon had a different instant kill counter you could pull off and stealth kill animations for each weapon.

and you could drag around dead bodies and throw them into the air and the stealth was so well implemented and you could shoot out a light and sneak up and shiv a guard in the neck and the ownage last level where you get into one of the guard robots and it had the best combo of regenerative health and medkits ive ever seen and it had the coolest pause menu of any game and the action and stealth and brawling were all paced and integrated so smoothly and the escalation and seriously none of this has to do with melee but its pretty much the perfect game

True, the HTH combos in Condemned didn't feel as "natural".

Fireaxe FTW though!

i love how in these games a single enemy can be a big problem for you. basically my dream game would be like a blue collar assasin sim, like the low level version of hitman blood money, where your pulling off hits for a thousand bucks to kill some big redneck who cheated on his wife, and it has a super refined brutal melee system and you can't afford guns yet so you just have to sneak in and kill a dude with a lamp or something and it takes like 5 minutes of just kicking a single dudes ass using environmental weapons and stuff and he has the same health and capabilities as you do.

cvni2oe87n:
i love how in these games a single enemy can be a big problem for you. basically my dream game would be like a blue collar assasin sim, like the low level version of hitman blood money, where your pulling off hits for a thousand bucks to kill some big redneck who cheated on his wife, and it has a super refined brutal melee system and you can't afford guns yet so you just have to sneak in and kill a dude with a lamp or something and it takes like 5 minutes of just kicking a single dudes ass using environmental weapons and stuff and he has the same health and capabilities as you do.

Dude that sounds sweet! I'd definately play it. After playing Condemned I and II to death I really like the idea, as you said, that every H2H battle is a matter of life and death. Actually when you got the guns in Condemned II it kinda took away some of the tension for me.
The early Silent Hills had that effect, where you dread coming across an enemy.

One game I played that pulled off melee combat near-flawlessly was Jedi Knight 2/Academies. Once you got used to using the light saber, you could really sword fight your opponents. I found myself setting up blocks and swinging for openings in their defenses. Even swinging the mouse would change the way your stroke would land. There were times where I was doing a hard stroke, which is a good 130* swing in front of you, but by swinging the mouse, it would turn into about a 570* spin attack. Sadly, they changed the mechanics a little when in multiplayer, so I don't know how well real PvP battles could have gotten. I certainly didn't like the alternative feel to the saber.

You seem to look in the wrong places, sure, if you want something completely without ranged weapons you'll have to look for quite a while, and go to the unrealistic area, because really, people USE ranged weapons. They're effective, that's why they're so popular. There are plenty of games out there though, in which meelee is the only (or only sensible) choice of weaponry. Not too many of them have multiplayer though, and a number of them have magic or guns. Vampire the masquerade Bloodlines has all three actually, the Thief series, if a bit too hard to enjoy much, has really nice close quarters combat. I can't go without mentioning Die by the sword, even if that's probably a bit too old for you to enjoy. Mount and Blade, like many people have mentioned (and multiplayer might be a possibility quite soon, if the lead developer get's his will through), is an amazing game, one of the best game released in years, in my opinion, and almost completely melee. Gothic 3 also has quite a lot of melee, and while not as skillbased as the other mentioned games, it's not only number-crunching.

I'm sure there's a lot more I've momentarily forgotten, but they are out there. You just have to know where to look.

axia777:

ZakuII:

axia777:

While this is true of two or more people who are untrained, a trained swordsman would shred a novice like cheese in any sword fight. Highly trained knights and samurai were the special forces of their time. They common public was simply no match in combat against these men. It is like trying to say that any man who can swing his fists can get in the ring with a veteran MMA fighter like Houston Alexander, Chuck Liddell or Brock Lesnar. The simple fact is that the average guy would get devastated in ways that are embarrassing to think about.

Hence why I used the word 'unskilled'. In a modern gunfight, I'd personally bet on the person that would had training in how to handle the gun, how to aim, how to draw, how to duck, weave, take cover and so on. Yes, a complete novice could, by luck or natural talent, kill that trained gunmen. Likewise with swords or anything else though. The common public devastated knights on many occasions, often with simple pitchforks. The fact of the matter is any combat is dangerous, no matter how much training you've had. No man is invincible, and no one can fully understand that which would make him invincible.

Sure a unskilled villagers could kill just about anyone with pitchforks. I never denied that one. I must have missed you saying "unskilled". But, on average, unskilled villagers often got killed by the dozens by skills knights or Samurai.

That didn't really have as much to do with superior *weapons* training as it had to do with superior morale and discipline. Remember, pre-modern combat =/= dueling. The skills involved in an MMA cage match or a one-on-one sword duel are much different than the skills involved in a unit vs. unit confrontation. Unskilled villagers often tended to run away when a much smaller number of soldiers showed that they weren't going to stop fighting just because you killed one of them.

+++++

As for why melee is unexplored? It's just so much harder to capture with the inputs available to us. How do you simulate with gamepad or mouse/keyboard the subtle shifts of weight and position that are so important in melee fighting? The foot placement? Attacks that are designed not so much to hit your opponent, but to get them to block or dodge in a way that leaves them off balance? How you position your weapon/arms in guard position?