Dodging is an uncharted mechanic making it's way into TLoU, that's a game with a very contextual melee combat as well.
Point is, usually in a shooter, you don't have a fleshed out melee combat like DMCV, at most you have a slow clunky melee like Souls series and that's best case scenario, something like Remnant?. ND found a way with contextual animations and what not to make this clunky melee actions cooler and since they are good at animating and stuff it really shows the quality. It's not about taking control away from the player, it's more about making something very simple and clunky look better. You still can throw objects on enemies faces to stun them it's only lacking a CQC system like MGS with the 3 or 4 hits and the grab variations, but you get the best of that game for this context. Choke, hostage, throwing enemies to the floor, and hand to hand combat.
Hand to hand combat is better than in MGS's if you ask me, since enemies here can defend themselves and are not caught staggered in a combo if you start before them.
It would be cool to aim for the head with melee weapons and stuff, but that is something that nobody else is doing either. Regarding CQC and shooting mechanics this is not that much far away of something like MGSV.
Think about it, what can't you do in TLoU that you can in MGS combat wise, not movement:
Non fatal hostages?
Shooting while prone?
ledge grabs?
chaining CQC?
IDK if this things would fit or make TLoU have better combat.
I think this GDC talk by the developer for TLoU's melee system will be pretty eye opening to a lot of people about the issues with TLoU's gameplay.
If you watch it you'll see that he outright says that they
wanted to include more depth from a gameplay/user input point of view but they needed up scrapping it for 2 reasons:
1) They simply didn't have the ability as a team to do it. They tried to do too much, they wanted shooting, stealth, melee, crafting etc... and stretched too thin. They tried a few systems but could never get them to work right so scrapped them 4 months before release and had a total overhaul of the gameplay at that point. Whatever you opinions on the game, you have to admit that doing something like that isn't conducive to good final product.
2) And this is the important one. They actively wanted to
avoid complexity from a user input point of view. They juggled with ideas like I mentioned such as additional button combos, longer button presses, timing, strategy etc.. but they concluded that this would "terrible" because it add too much difficulty and complexity for the player to learn and remember these abilities so they scrapped them. And then he all but admits that he replaced this actual complexity with
apparent complexity in the form of contextual animations. So you get all the end feedback of doing complex moves etc.. without actually having to work for these moves through actual user control. He called this "good complexity".....
I mean it's good that they admitted they wanted to have more depth in the gameplay area and it was their own limitations that prevented them, so hopefully they've bridged that technical gap in TLoU2. But what's worrying is this notion that having difficult/complex gameplay system for the player to learn is to be actively avoided and instead dressed up with scripted animations. That's very worrying. And given that they've continued to go this way with the last 2 Uncharted games it's worrying that this might be a core development concept they don't want to move away from.
. Damn, this game is gonna be great. Can't wait.
