That knight of Caliban Video brought a tear to my eye. He wiped an entire room of heretics out on his own using only melee. A true inspiration for both Dark Angels and melee LSM players alike. Thank you for sharing that Proteus.

I heard they actually had plans to make a trilogy but never went through with it, which is a total shame. It really is a great game. Does multi player still happen at all?

Yes, you'll have to play on weekends or in groups for community events. It still has an active playerbase of somewhere around 300 players on the weekend.

But, as said, it has huge issues with peer 2 peer connection - it's a fucking amazing game but is really held back if you aren't playing with people from the same country.

Here, some footage from the heyday of Space Marine.

I always found it a shame here when this game was being created to after launch that soo many would bash on Space Marine, and now they are realizing how awesome it was. Getting melee vs ranged balance down I always thought was difficult at best.

Unless we talk everything but a Chainsword or Powerfists, which plays out completly different in a good and bad way at the same time, Melee actually feels a lot better now to me.

Not only as the Melee Guy swinging me sword, but also when i play Tactical and get charged at.
As said, as long as we talk fast melee weapons. The slower ones are just bad at the moment, and to get value out of them you have to count a lot on sprint-attacks or Roll-attacks to cheat the weapon into attacking faster

Maybe, but probably not. I would like to avoid the "tacticals with powerswords" issue.

Now don't kill me, but ranged, specifically headshots across the board are often slightly too powerful in this game, movement is too clunky, and the solution to buffing the hell out of melee's damage isn't going to help.

For a patch;

Tacticals primary weapons need a .5/1sec second universal DPS nerf. This may vary between races due to different TTKs, but .5 should be the middle and no less than .4.

Tacticals then should be universally better at melee, knives are capable weapons and could use greater upgrades, like serrated that would upgrade the knife to T1.5 status. For Orks, knuckles could have higher impact and be considered T2.

Sprint Attack desperately needs a stat port from R. SM.

Breaking weapons and the status afterwards would have to be evaluated. Breaking weapons I'm should be a viable tactic for Maces and Clubs. That's exactly why players would bring them, they deal low damage, high impact. Entire strategies could be developed around this, asymmetrical balance would encompass this. Knives, swords, and force weapons are all about hitting flesh. Axes and Choppas are middle ground and strategically flexible, and Maces, clubs and PF/K are impact weapons designed to crush your opponents skull through his own defenses.

That's the sort of thing I want to see next patch. Mass melee. Data collection, balance the patch after.

No. Lowering the skill ceiling is the last thing the game needs.

We've seen the "Only Eldar should be able to land headshots" thing, what's next, "Only Eldar should be able to roll"? "Eldar shouldn't take fall damage?" "Eldar should be able to matrix dodge bullets"?

+1

BTW:
Maybe we should make headshot multiplier only if shield is down (it's weird, when you receive bonus damage to head, when our power armor still works)? And lower damage from headshot.

I'm not whining, but bolter weapon is too powerfull.

Actually, if you read what I said, I nerfed DA into the ground, they would probably require an entire clip of Headshots to down an enemy with a .4 sec increase to headshot TTK.

But that's ok. They're optimal range is really close, so once they down an enemy like this:



It's "draw swords" and get into melee, like this:



Willingly, even when one of these guys show up:



It is a metaphor though, I fully expect those DAs to not stand there in a line but rather charge into melee... It's just that Legolas is over used.... And Elrond did it better

In all seriousness though, the Eldar ASC has a really good model for clip size to killing power. You HAVE to reload very frequently with it, often times this will get you stuck in a forced melee situation. If you're really good with it, you might get a double kill without outside influence, and that's where the ranged stops, whereas Orks can potentially erk out an additional kill and SMs have been seen to kill 6 enemies without reloading. No knife or secondary skill needed, just keep scoring headshots with primary weapons with minimal movement spread and you can take on literally one shy of half a skirmish battle on your own before reloading. You couldn't do that in SM, even with a fully kitted out Bolter. Again, max two kills before needing to reload/cool down was still the general rule (stalker Bolter was the exception since it relies on Headshots) even though with all the ammo laying around the Bolter had near infinite ammo, they had strict limitations to that power, thus forcing the majority of players into a close combat situation, and they were just fine there as well. I fear that the pendulum is just going to swing the other way and we'll instead have two extremes and no middle ground - a lot of firepower with little limitation, and big ol beatsticks that one shot whatever they can get in contact with. That's the opposite of what we need, even for Eldar which is basically what they do.

There's a lot of factors going for keeping melee from getting to be 50% of the game, half of them are melee' own mechanical flaws, the other half has been giving ranged, too many tools to deal with a lot of enemies in quick succession.

I'm not sure what sort of melee engagements you've been in. Mass melee can currently be really really fun. Often I hear the most positive comments after a CSM and Ork battle because they often have great blobs of melee (often under 6 people total) find each other, whereas the other races prevent melee from occurring in the first place.

That said, the greatest melee brawl I've been in recently was CSM.vs LSM where LSM inexplicably chose to roll all but 4 people as melee. I honestly think people stopped caring about the result.of the game and enjoyed the killing because we had nearly 6 minutes of brawling on Torias C in the little pathway coming up from the road. Though both teams clearly sought out this engagement even over winning, it revealed what happens when you put around 15 melee combatants together. The result is obviously pure chaos which is pretty funny to see the first couple of times (it never actually gets old), but that's kinda it. There's almost no order to it because it's very clear melee was designed with the intention of it being a dueling 1v1 system, which is totally unrealistic for game of this scale, even in its infancy as a lobby shooter. As soon as you put, say, 5 people together, it starts to break down unless you're really coordinated. 15? Watch as pretty much no matter what option of the RPS system you choose, statistically you will be clanged and beaten.

Ranged doesn't have this problem.

Any idiot can put DPS down the line without getting in the way of other players. In fact, the more people that go ranged, the better a team generally does, which is not a pleasant thought. On the other end of the spectrum, even coordinated teams struggle to go all melee against semi competent foe. I don't think I've ever, not even once, seen a full melee vs melee match, even though CSM and Ork are fully capable (encouraged even) of doing so, yet regularly see this happen with ranged of all factions.

It's all symptoms pointing towards balance, and flawed mechanics of melee. Melee vs melee brawls are how the devs can glean what happens to melee should there ever be more than 60 players on a battlefield, or, as suggested above, tacticals join the fight as they should more often do so. Both contribute, which is why melee vs melee is still valid data. If two PuG teams willingly choose to go primarily melee in a ranged dominant patch of the game; and their comments at the end of the game where, "Holy shit did you see that maceline?"
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD"
and
"Fucking awesome melee!", I as a developer would know that at least I'm on the right track delivering a 50/50 experience. I would want to know why they did what they did, and how it could be replicated as an experience for all.