Alpha 3.8 Melee Combat

We have Star Citizen had some more information on Melee Combat, Body Dragging & Impact Reactions. I wanted to summarize that information given in inside Star Citizen and talk about applications for Bounty Hunting, Medical and more gameplay in the future.

Melee Combat is coming in Alpha 3.8 and ISC started strong by kneeing someone in the nuts.

They have been adding animations to the system. Melee Attacks cause Stun Damage.

This doesn’t necessarily cause much direct health damage, it affects how dazed and concussed you are and you can be knocked down & knocked unconscious. NPCs will get back up after a certain amount of time is the idea there.

There are Light Attacks, Heavy Attacks & you can combine them together for combo attacks.

If you alternate left and right attacks or light and heavy attacks this will do some form of combo. You’ll get uppercuts, haymakers and other various finishers for the combo, that will add to the stun damage inflicted.

Left & Right Clicking does the light attacks, holding down the button will do heavier hooks.

You can perform unarmed non-lethal takedowns too.

You can block and dodge too.

The block is based on where you are aiming, though you will still take some damage.

Dodging will entirely avoid the damage. You can dodge right, left of backwards.

Knife takedowns are lethal.

Body Dragging is something they are going to be working on later this quarter.

They mentioned to add to the stealth ability of hiding bodies BUT I also suspect it will be for dragging your friends out of combat, rescuing NPCs for missions and medical purposes too.

Dragging a friend to safety or to a Cutlass Red.

Knockdowns as well have previously been talked about in regard to just generally getting shot and damaged, you’d be knocked down or unconscious briefly sometimes rather than just dead, someone could still potentially save you

We do know that they have also been working on some expanded medical gameplay that looks like in the shorter term you’ll be able to use medi-pens on other characters to help get them up or heal them.

Force Reactions are how players and NPCs react to certain direct and indirect events proximate to them.

It’s adding multiple directional animations to various parts of the body that can be blended together. Get shot in an area or bumped, you’ll move slightly to represent that physically.

They are hoping to get some of this in for Alpha 3.8.

For the First Person View, they are adding view and weapon impacts, your view/head my get affected a bit as can your aim and where your weapon is pointing, knocking it away from the camera. They are making sure that you can still return fire on a target BUT it will affect your aim.

They are looking at grenades and distances they go off at and how that would affect a character. Also ships that collide or take a big hit, this could have characters starting to react to that.

The mix of Melee, Body Dragging and even force reactions together could lead onto a lot of applications.

Bounty Hunting and literally knocking out targets, before dragging them to a containment cell. I suspect that less than lethal ammo will also use stun damage BUT close combat could lead to bringing in a character ALIVE as a mechanic.

ISC also had a segment on some really really odd bugs, body horror type stuff, as it was halloween.