If you’ve played the Battlefield 1 beta — and let’s face it, who hasn’t? — then you might have noticed a significant change to the franchise’s melee system.
Over on the official Battlefield site, DICE details how the Battlefield 1 melee weapons and systems work, which means that the melee weapons aren’t just re-skins of the same thing. There are three Battlefield 1 melee weapon types: knives, clubs and bladed/specials. Each melee weapon type has three stats (speed, damage and rate at how easy it is to do a brutal takedown with said weapon).
Roughly speaking, there are three distinct melee weapon classes in Battlefield 1, each with their own pros and cons: knives, clubs, and bladed/specials. They primarily differ in three stats: the speed at which you can swing them, the damage they deal with each hit that connects, and how easy they are to perform a brutal takedown with.
World War I saw many trench raids where soldiers needed to stay relatively silent. The cramped spaces meant that there was not a whole lot of room to maneuver, so these operations typically saw great use of various melee weapons. While some carried small trench knives with knuckledusters, others fashioned crude battering weapons from anything that they could find. One example that we have implemented in Battlefield 1 is simply a heavy club, fitted with spikes to inflict maximum damage.
So while a knife, for example, deals a low amount of damage, it is by far the quickest to perform consecutive swings with, and it has a much bigger takedown zone than other melee weapon types. This means that if you go for a stealthy kill from behind, a knife will give you the biggest possible zone behind an enemy player from where a brutal takedown can be performed. Clubs are jacks of all trades: they deal medium damage at medium speed, and have a medium-sized takedown zone. The bladed/special melee weapons such as the hatchet, shovel, and pickaxe are the heaviest hitters, but also the slowest. They also have the smallest takedown zone.
You start the game having access to a simple club, shovel, and knife. But as you progress, you will have the ability to equip more embellished or specialized melee weapons. Some of them can even be used to cut barbed wire, destroy wooden barricades, or damage light vehicles.
In other BF1 news, DICE has confirmed that the game mode Conquest will revert back to how it was in past Battlefield games in how points were earned for each side. Speaking of game modes, check here for every map and game mode that will be available at launch this October 21.
[Source: Battlefield]
