Why [TF2] has (Almost) Perfect Melee Weapons

special thank you to War Thunder for sponsoring this video you know what's weird hyenas I I just I don't get it like is it a is it a dog is it a simulacrum crafted by Satan is it some kind of crab I I just don't understand like where's the joke pal but you know what's even weirder than that FPS games having melee weapons it's called a firstperson shooter not a first person slasher because that term is better reserved for when you go staring in the park and you just don't happen to tell all the other people there that they are also participating but as semantically strange as it is FPS games have had melee weapons since the beginning Doom had the fist Quake had the axe and of course Battlefield 1984 had the sword of King Arthur melee weapons have been in the game since it started but what exactly is a melee weapon what is the definition of it and I'm pretty sure everybody knows the answer to this question but real quick I want to be a bit of a YouTuber no no no not like that not like that I'm going to force you guys to do a little bit of engagement with my video I want you guys to go into the comment section and tell me your definition of a melee weapon don't worry I'll wait all right let me see what you guys typed up here wow chat these really are interesting but in fact all of you are wrong the correct answer if you were to ask every single game for the last 30 years is that melee weapons are actually an afterthought so sorry Chad you will not be going home with a million dollars but you you are still going home with all of the prizes you earned up to this point so enjoy your two pink hands full of lead shavings but yes the unfortunate truth is that most games don't really seem to pay very much attention to their melee mechanics which is really funny because they all seem to have one I can't tell if this is because game developers or a hive of subterranean mle men who all share Collective Consciousness or if this is just how the industry is working but it's a very strange phenomenon for so many games to share a similar mechanic or series of mechanics and for almost all of them to put so little effort into it like what is this current bad popular game jokes aside it is genuinely an odd phenomenon pretty much every single shooter I can think of has some kind of a melee function whether that be a weapon or an ability sometimes even an entire character that is dedicated just to meleeing but in very few of them could I genuinely say that the game puts in more than the bare minimum of effort for having it which doesn't really feel like how we should be making video games we should be Custom Tailoring our mechanics to the specific needs of each game and this doesn't seem to apply to the concept of melee out of all of the games that I think of there are maybe four that I can confidently say put in the effort to make their melees substantially good and yes one of them is Team Fortress 2 but how did we get here why is this the case and who the hell is this guy to figure this out I think we have to start off back in the '90s back when the FPS genre was first emerging but before we continue I want to take a couple of seconds to talk about our our sponsor War Thunder War Thunder is the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever made and is available for free on Xbox PC and Playstation but not the Dreamcast because the Dreamcast can't handle the stunning realism and detail of War Thunder vehicles and Maps play from a selection of 2500 different accurately depicted war machines from across history originating from 10 different major nations in pitched air Land and Sea battles with extremely detailed damage models and collision that is visible through a sick x-ray kill feed there are multiple game modes spanning over various time periods and real battles throughout history with different levels of realism to suit any kind of player even people like me who just want to use their plane like it's a mace join over 70 million players in War Thunder today using the link in the description the pinned comment or if you can prove that you're a true pirate I will send you a message in a bottle terms conditions May apply so that you can get the exclusive Eagle of Valor vehicle decorator 100,000 silver lions and 7 Days of premium account access for free for any new or returning players who haven't played in the last 6 months this is a limited time offer so don't delay join up in War Thunder today this all started when Jonathan Romero found the genie lamp and in this order wished for $16 a boat and the knowledge to make a fantastic video game and all of that's kind of [ __ ] up cuz he probably could have stopped War Doom was a path raising video game its influence need not be stated so I'm going to State it it created an entire genre and throughout the 9s the FPS genre would Sprout and Blossom and not a single [ __ ] game would decide that melee was worth their time now of course this was a different time video game companies back in the day didn't really have the same kind of resources that we expect of them now certain things had to be sacrificed because they were all too busy Bank rolling various hoaxes like plant Parenthood and Y2K and melee weapons were one of those places that suffered a lot of sacrifices melee weapons of the era share a very uniform design it's very common to see a melee weapon that is just for hitting people and that's kind of it it is almost always just a weapon where you run up and hit stuff and it's not even good at it almost all of them pretty much just hit stuff that's it it's honestly a little frustrating to talk about because I want there to be something to describe or something interesting going on with this entire era of video games but there just isn't no matter how many times I want to spin it and outside of a few examples like Duke Nukem and Unreal Tournament 99 they're not even good at it and here's the thing right just because something is weak doesn't mean that it's badly designed for example here's spy oh no that is the Mayan soul stealer mask spy is one of if not the weakest characters in all of Team Fortress he has let's say problems and if you were to put spy into a 1 V one with every other character even if the 1V one had some kind of advantageous positioning for him or something he would probably lose these 1 V ones a majority of the time but of course that doesn't matter because spy doesn't need to be strong his unique gameplay and unorth Ox design have captivated thousands of psychopaths across the world and those boys are now out here grinding rrolling their lobbies the moment somebody starts to catch on and writing lengthy essays on why all pyro players need to be exiled to the Siberian steps and despite the fact that spy is typically mince meat the moment the enemy catches you he's like he's fun he might be weak but he's interesting and I would even argue what makes him so fun is how weak he is overcoming the downsides is part of the appeal for a lot of spy players and I guess you could say the same about we in other games but I imagine this is only for a fraction of Any Given player base and as a rule melee weapons from this era are just bad they're not bad and fun like spy is they're just bad now of course this was for a good reason many games make their fall back last ditch weapon particularly weak so that they can punish you for mismanaging your ammo which is a fair deal if you want to use your ammo or perhaps your waa rewards points poorly and want to spend them on let's say sandwiches instead of leveraging them in a custody battle then you have to be willing to accept the consequences the same goes for wasting your rockets on imps or whatever this is what I like to call a seat belt design it serves a functional purpose and that functional purpose does have a lot of validity making it so that players have to care about their ammo usage is a good idea but just like a seat belt you know it's there for a reason and we all get that but it doesn't make anything more fun and sadly fun was never really a consideration for this entire decade for almost every game melee weapons were there and they served their purpose and that was it but there was one game that I think laid down even if it didn't really understand it at the time the perfect foundation for good melee weapons and that game was of course Team Fortress Quake now you might think that tf1 and Team Fortress 2 are incredibly similar given that they're in the same series but you would be kind of wrong Team Fortress Quake is actually quite a bit different than Team Fortress 2 I think more so than most people realize until they play Team Fortress classic for example Team Fortress 1 has some really cool game modes that we just didn't get in the transition to Team Fortress 2 like steal from the small business and make propaganda on Twitter but one thing that is definitely very recognizable in Team Fortress 1 is the suite of melee weapons that came out with the game now many of us today think of Team Fortress as a Bastion of interesting and wacky weapon designs in Shooters especially in a post Call of Duty world where every single game has to have the same four mechanics none of which are actually fun and an Arsenal that looks like a grocery list of guns that have seen their most recent combat experience inside of a middle school but this wasn't always the case especially when it comes to melee weapons Team Fortress 1 and to an extent Team Fortress 2 on release were just about as bad as everybody else however Team Fortress 1 though I don't think it really understood this at the time laid down the foundation for a fantastic melee Arsenal that would be used by Team Fortress 2 and that's because it made two kinds of guns neither of which were guns it made the wrench and it made the knife the cosmic irony or perhaps Cosmic coincidence between this video's dichotomy being represented by spy and engineer two characters who are Rivals is not lost on me but what is lost on me is why exactly this one wall on upward has a back-facing texture that is somebody's censored penis not really sure why no one talks about that or why no one talks about these weapons in particular but wait a second like 8 seconds ago wasn't this a historical retelling of the evolution of melee design and you're right it is however even though this is the part of the video where I'm supposed to go into the 2000s and talk about all the great things that happened in the 2000s there were exceptionally few games from this era that really did anything spectacular with their melee weapons and frankly you can say the same thing about the 2010s and even the 2020s to a slightly lesser degree the best you get out of the 2000s is that like Melee more frequently became an ability that any weapon could use rather than a dedicated weapon and again outside of a few exceptions that's pretty much where we stand now there are games today that have melee attacks that would fit right at home next to doom and Quake more games these days on average are doing better than they were back then but not like as much as you would think and I think that all of the series that did do a good job can be looked at through the lens of these two weapons because the wrench and the knife hold within them the solution to the inherent problem with melee weapons which is that especially when they're designed like this they're not particularly fun and each of these two weapons does this in a unique way each representing two halves of the same solution like an apple the wrench does it very simply if using a melee weapon isn't fun then give the player something else to do or give them some other reason to use this weapon now obviously the wrench itself does this very narrow the wrench is of course a melee weapon you know it hits people but also it allows the engineer to build and upgrade his buildings and in Team Fortress 2 at least this is what has allowed the wrench to maintain some amount of relevancy compared to all of the other stock melee weapons many of which have otherwise fallen off now it's actually somewhat uncommon to see a quote unquote wrench style design in a lot of other games it's almost as hard to find as happiness is in North Dakota but there are some very notable games that utilize this design philosophy like for example CS which makes it so that you run the fastest when you have your knife out now you might be saying that's not CS2 you're right it is not CS2 the fist full of frags 10e anniversary just happened and people who play CS2 think that mud is a dipping sauce Jokes Aside however it is a really good way to make your melee weapon desirable making the knife the fastest way to move around means that it's always useful and the knife showcases another neat part of the design space of a weapon that has no range it has no range this inherently makes it so that adding secondary effects to these kinds of weapons is a cool idea they are simply not as useful as weapons with any amount of range this creates a very interesting design problem first off this act as a natural counterbalance meaning that it's usually not a very big deal if you give a weapon of this type a secondary effect and makes it so that coming up with a design that makes this weapon which is inherently worse than the rest of the Arsenal becomes something that players want to actively use a lot of the time is really challenging and leads to some very interesting results they're also just a very good fit for the role of a supportive or utility weapon I mean a melee weapon is not good at killing people to begin with so hey why not give them something else to do unfortunately I do lack a lot of good examples at least in multiplayer games for weapons that would fit this bill outside of Team Fortress 2 but honestly I don't really think that other examples even matter because in my opinion Team Fortress 2 is Far and Away the best one some of the coolest weapons in this game and frankly some of the coolest weapons in the entire genre reside within this category of design and look guys I know that the enormous says that he will awaken in 20 minutes but it's probably fine no matter which weapon in Team Fortress 2 you pick whether it be like the disciplinary action the amputator the candy cane all of them are better than the majority of weapons in any other game just because of how little attention most games pay by comparison to their melee weapons I think the best example out of the ones I listed here is probably the amputator the amputator as a melee weapon is not very good it's objectively worse to kill people with but it also gives the medic a game unique AOE healing ability tied to his taunt which is really cool really helpful if you're the only medic a team has so that you can heal multiple people or if you're a secondary medic it allows you to help the team Push by just giving them a place to rest and heal up and effects like this in my opinion are just cool you don't really need to describe what's cool about them frankly this is just a sweet thing to be able to do with a weapon [ __ ] that you probably weren't going to be doing much with anyway and once again unfortunately this is pretty much only A Team Fortress thing there are very few other games even single player ones that really do this with their melee weapons Doom Eternal and the other shittier Doom Eternal have the chainsaw which is kind of a melee weapon it's more like an ability but it's used not just to kill something but to get more ammo for your other guns but again this is relatively rare trust me if I'm ever dipping into the single player games that means I don't really have any examples off hand now of course we do have to think realistically here not every game needs to have this and game developers often have quite a lot on their plate they are rather busy throughout the entire week installing tiger traps and pits full of snakes in the office additionally in some games it's easy to say that doesn't make any sense to have weapons that aren't dealing damage or in fact to have melee weapons at all in a game like Call of Duty or one of the 80 billion games that are inspired directly by Call of Duty a game with extremely low time to kill where every single person is running around with a hit scan assault rifle it's difficult to see where melee weapons fit into that ecosystem these are games where every single weapon is designed to kill you just for being visible for like 2 seconds running around trying to stab somebody is obviously going to be rather difficult and I can understand that not every game needs to have Team Fortress style weapons it doesn't always fit into what every game is trying to do there's obviously no one siiz fits-all solution but I do think that in games that are a little bit faster a little bit more open things like Team Fortress or OverWatch or splitgate you know the kind of FPS game that's supposed to be fun melee weapons taking a more supportive role is a great idea and if we're going to go that far maybe we should also consider putting out that grease fire but wrench style weapons are only half of the solution the other half are knives now we all know what the knife does in Team Fortress classic and Team Fortress 2 it's what allows the Spy to get backstabs normally it's a very weak melee weapon dealing less damage than average but if you hit somebody in the spine they instantly die this is the entire design of spy as a character and that's pretty much all they had to do to make the knife fantastic all the knife really does from a design standpoint is give you a special effect on hitting somebody in the back combined with the general weakness of spy and they have made one of the most engaging characters in any FPS game ever the knife solution to the problem of melee weapons are boring is to make them fun knife style weapons typically do something whenever you either get a hit or get a kill or try to make it so that the act of using a melee weapon is fun in and of itself now Team Fortress 2 is littered with weapons that fit this bill the knife eylander the extinguisher the Gunslinger the market Gardener the partisans puncher the Boston Basher there's a bunch now luckily for the species Team Fortress 2 was not the only game to have figured this out because I don't know about you guys if it were I might finally snap while the style of game that facilitates melee weapons is not as popular as it once was there are at least a healthy number of games that realized that if you're going to have a melee weapon you might as well make the act of trying to hit people with it cool the most mainstream of all of the examples I have is probably Halo now despite the fact that Halo doesn't really look like much these days Halo was once one of the most mainstream series on the planet and certainly one of the greatest Front Runners of decent melee mechanics that the industry has ever had and hopefully one day maybe if Microsoft can find it in their heart to stop raking its back with a cheese grater Halo will be able to return to its former glory and master chief can once again Ascend to his throne at top the Mountain Dew cover Jokes Aside Halo shows how little you really have to do with your melee Mechanics for them to have a great impact on your game Halo's meleeing is not outrageously sophisticated or anything it's pretty much just an attack that everyone always has access to that does decent damage and which can get backstabs there's also some weapons that are better at melee attacking than others and this makes it an important part of any close-range engagement giving players a lot of opportunity to make cool plays and its availability and its Effectiveness just make it useful and this isn't even mentioning the dedicated melee weapons like the energy sword and the gravity hammer which can allow you to do a lot of cool stuff there's an entire sub game mode called Griff ball that was spawned just because the game has a gravity hammer and it's genuinely really fun and again this showcases how little a melee weapon really needs to be able to make your game a lot better Griff ball is a ton of fun and it only works because the gravity hammer is there and other games showcase this as well a game that I honest to God did not think had the capacity to be as fun as it has been is fortnite now fortnite is not perfect it does have a lot of issues like how they're constantly cycling out weapons whether or not they're good just because one crossover partner gave them a greater virgins blood tithe than another and also whenever they add weapons that are associated with a certain high value IP they very conveniently make some of them incredibly good like to the point where you can't ignore them or you're just going to to lose a lot but also fortnite reminds me of Team Fortress in a lot of ways it's a game where the developers don't seem afraid to just do stuff just because the stuff they want to do is cool and that results in a really fun game and one of the best things that fortnite does is its melee weapons and while I will say that fortnite puts in way more effort and succeeds way better than a lot of other games do at making wacky interesting melee weapons not all of them are necessarily good recently they had this weapon called the chain of Hades and that thing was a [ __ ] nightmare because its animations your character flying all over the [ __ ] screen like a monkey whenever you swung it but even with that gripe the chain of Hades was really cool you could use it to pull things towards you including your allies and your enemies or items or just use them to break parts of the map it was an incredibly useful weapon that had a lot of potential to make cool plays and recently it's been cycled out for the Nitro fists or whatever the [ __ ] these are called and these are also really [ __ ] cool it's too bad they're kind of overshadowed by the infinite health infinite ammo supercars that you literally cannot beat unless you also have a superar but hey nobody's perfect and stupid [ __ ] cars aside this is still a really fun weapon to use it lets you basically just fly and also do these really cool ground pound attacks while you're in the air and of course this isn't going to be the last of the cool melee weapons we see out of fortnite and even though it isn't quite as Extreme as this I still think that Team Fortress does this the best now when it comes to the combat oriented melee weapons these are either some of the best or some of the worst weapon designs in the entire game they go from letting you play an entirely different class to being incredibly uninspired and basically pointless typically either with an on hit or an onkill effect like the half zat tuichi or the Boston Basher a great example is the southern hospitality on hit the southern hospitality changes your opponent's client language to Arabic so that they can't read anything and also applies a bleed effect this is overall better than something like the shovel which doesn't have any effects primarily because it rewards you for engaging with the mechanics and it also has some greater implications like being able to better find spies because you made them bleed but still even though this is better than the basic this is not the best weapon design that Team Fortress 2 has and it showcases that just an on hit effect or even just an onkill effect is not really sufficient to make a good weapon design I think this is highlighted by the tribal men shiv a weapon that may as well just be a joke first off it's not even a tribal man's anything sniper bought it at a gas station secondly this weapon's entire point is that it deals bleed on hit just like the southern hospitality and obviously this means it's supposed to help you deal more damage except that situations where it ends up dealing more damage than stock are likely from an Effectiveness standpoint the absolute ceiling of this weapon is that it deals a little bit more damage than normal only to enemies that actually have enough health for that to matter and the design ceiling for this weapon is that when you hit somebody it applies like a a bleed and Deals a little bit more damage than normal like wow that is some riveting stuff right there and another thing that I don't think is as discussed is exactly what a bleed effect does for Sniper like all sniper really does with this kind of an effect is try to find spies but aside from that this bleed doesn't do anything for his character design for somebody like Scout for instance a weapon like the cleaver or the rap assassin is actually a much more interesting addition Scout's entire purpose as a character is to pressure the enemy and to pick off individuals if they get removed from the pack or are weakened the Scout gun's effective range is not that far so giving Scout a longer range initiation tool that applies this bleed effect which helps him to keep up the pressure makes way more sense for his character design whereas sniper doesn't really interact with these mechanics at all and they don't really do anything for him let alone the fact that if sniper is having to hit somebody in melee he's probably going to lose so at best this is just a really uninspired on hit effect it just comes across as kind of confused and of course while you could sit around and complain about the bad weapons which in fact makes up 27% of the YouTube TF2 economy you could also talk about the greater number of good ones that the game has here my friend that shuffling gamer can explain better the suffering now there are a lot of great examples you could choose for this the Boston Basher for instance is kind of both a combat melee weapon and a utility weapon sort of both a knife and a wrench because obviously it has this unhit effect that rewards you for hitting the enemy and the Boston basher in particular forces you to be accurate because it applies that bleed on you if you miss which is something I wish more weapons like the half zatu Ichi did but this on hit bleed is also what makes the Boston and Basher a utility weapon you can use it for some limited movement silliness but also to build Uber charge way faster making this a very multifaceted item though I have to say it's still a shame that my uncle got banned from Ruby Tuesdays for calling our waitress a [ __ ] but if you're going to talk about melee weapons in any form not even in just Team Fortress 2 you would be remiss without mentioning the one the greatest of all the melee weapons and possibly one of the greatest weapons ever put into an FPS game the market Gardener this is probably my favorite weapon out of any game might not seem like it cuz I don't really use it very much and I'm about as good at using the market Gardener as kareim Abdul Jabar is at not being good at basketball but from a design standpoint I genuinely think this weapon has very few if any equals it effectively throws away the entire design of your character literally all of the strengths that Soldier has like his overpowered as hell primary weapon or his ability to get onto and then hold really strong positions except for one sing single skill that being rocket jumping which it weaponizes it's a style of gameplay that I think appeals to all levels of skill and all levels of investment in the game try hards like it because of its competitive applications a skillful way to be able to take out valuable enemy targets or defend yourself and Casual players like it because it's [ __ ] stupid this to me epitomizes Team Fortress 2 it's silly and idiotic and it doesn't really make any sense and it's just there because it's cool but also it's done in a way that rewards skill and is interesting to use very few weapons in this game have the capacity to so drastically change your entire play style as this one and none of them do it as cool it is fantastic and I can only hope that more games in the future treat their melee weapons with the kind of consideration that games like fortnite and Team Fortress have these games prove in my opinion that when you treat your melee weapons like they have any value then they will reward you by making your game vastly more interesting than it once was and while there are a lot of games where a robust melee Arsenal doesn't necessarily make that much sense I also think that if Counter Strike can do it then other games can probably find a way to have a melee weapon work within their Eco system as well but these days unless you're playing one of the few exceptions you're lucky if hitting a melee attack is even rewarding let alone like you know cool so this may be a hope that we have to reserve for the future because I can at least personally confirm that there are some games that either just came out or are coming out yes the one you're thinking of which don't however that's pretty much all I have to say on the matter we should be giving melee a greater opportunity to succeed but yeah that's pretty much all I have to say on the matter thank you guys very much for watching and I will see you much sooner than the time between this video and the last one because there's some stuff we got to talk about as Team Fortress 2 players and before we go everyone I just wanted to say once again special thank you to War Thunder don't forget to use the code in the description or the pinned comment to join up and get your huge reward bundle and make sure to come out and try to shoot me as I'll be playing on the North American servers but watch out I'm pretty good but

Channel: Kaluka

Views: 184,157

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Id: NArb-D-M8aU

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024